UK Column Radio

Deep State Gangsters - with Author and CIA Whistleblower Pedro Israel Orta

Pedro is a former CIA Analyst and Operations Officer. In a dedicated and extensive career, he has worked for the CIA in the comfort of safe desk jobs, in high-risk field operations, and in very dangerous war zone posts. When he saw and reported serious failures in CIA operations affecting the safety and professional performance of CIA colleagues and military operations, he blew the whistle. The result was not that he was praised for his diligence, but that he became the criminal. He was hounded, accused, undermined, and fired to protect the reputation of the CIA and its senior officers. Pedro’s own response was not to run, but to stand his ground, and he fought the system all the way to Congress. Read the write-up at: https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/deep-state-gangsters-with-author-and-cia-whistleblower-pedro-israel-orta

Duration:: 1h 48m
Broadcast on:: 05 Dec 2024
Audio Format:: other

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This is Pedro Israel Water, who's the author of The Broken Whistle, a deep state runner mock and Pedro is a former analyst and operations officer with the CIA and his book is a remarkable story as to what happened when ultimately he turned Whistle Blower and started to expose just some of the things that have been happening and he'd observed and experienced during his time with the CIA. So we'll just pop on screen the book very briefly so that people can see the cover there and I'm going to say I've spent hours reading this book. I found it absolutely fascinating and I've encouraged viewers to purchase a copy and to read what I've been able to read and I'm also going to put on upfront Pedro, your website. You've got a little bit here saying this website is hosted by Pedro, Israel Water, a CIA Whistle Blower, author of The Broken Whistle, an executive producer of deep state gangsters and then it goes on to say that you're an ordained minister preacher of righteousness and an award winning photographer. So without any more ado, Pedro, welcome to the U.K. column and thank you very much for agreeing to this interview today. Thank you Brian for being so gracious and host to me on your show today. Well, it's a pleasure. As I said, as I've just said to the audience, the book I found absolutely fascinating. It raised lots of questions for me and what I thought we'd do today is just get you to more or less take the audience through the sequence that you've followed in your book and you've got a fascinating background. Your family originally from Cuba and as you state that the family has experienced all the tough times in Cuba under a very oppressive regime and then you've worked your way up through a very interesting career in commercial companies which included groceries and threw into the flower market if I remember those sections correctly. But ultimately you've got the opportunity to move briefly through the military and then into the CIA. So welcome and tell the audience a bit about yourself and how you made that amazing journey from that sort of background in commercial world into the very interesting arena of the CIA. Thank you Brian. I certainly have a very diverse and interesting background and what I had to do because whistle blowers, a lot of times whistle blowers are aligned, disparaged, scum of the earth, trash, troubled employees, troubled persons. So I wanted to make sure that the reader would know that no, I was not a troubled employee and a troublemaker. But in fact, I had a very long distinguished work history prior to the CIA and in the CIA. So I start the book with basically the book, the main story there is how real whistle blowers like myself to treat it like yesterday's trash while fake whistle blowers like the Ukraine whistle blower are heralded as heroes. And that's very detailed in chapter one, the weaponized whistle blown. And that sets the stage so that the reader would know that real whistle blowers like myself really have no fair chance at all to make a mark and have what they disclose to be dealt with. And for that matter, the end result is just an insurmountable amount of reprisals. So we jump into basically the backstory, chapters two through 16 are essentially the backstory before we get to the real meat of the CIA whistle blower that got me into trouble. And I start off with my background being a Cuban American born and raised in Miami of immigrant Cubans who fled communist Cuba because of anti-crash Castro activities. I had a grand uncle thrown in prison for 20 years. My grandfather was thrown in prison, but he miraculously was able to get out. And that precipitated the immigration with his family, wife, daughter and three sons to Miami where I was born. And we knew firsthand the perils of a tyrannical form of government. And our family suffered much. They left Cuba and came to United States with nothing and without language, which made it very difficult for them to get a head start here in the United States. My father came at age 18, basically left behind his medical studies and never was able to study medicine. And in fleeing Cuba, you know, a lot of relatives were left behind. I recall, you know, many incidents growing up on the hardships my family encountered. My grandmother one day crying hysterically and it's like, "What's going on, grandma?" Her mother died in Cuba. She had not seen her mother more than a decade, I think it was maybe 15 years, and she couldn't go back to her mom's funeral, things like that. And the difficulties we had, you know, we were a family of modest income, you know, lower income, not poor, but certainly not well off. And that really hurt my ability to seek higher education. So I ended up working in the Miami business world, perishable commodities, groceries, fresh produce as a buyer, wholesale buyer, where we would sell to the grocery stores. Like, extremely competitive business on a product that had very low margins for error. So excellent was a must. Day in and day out, we had to perform. I mean, there was no cutting corners. This was either, you know, do it right or go out of business. I eventually did perishable flowers, fresh cut flowers, same thing. So I cut my teeth in work, almost 14 years, in a high stakes environment where excellence was demanded. And at the same time, in a culture of excellence, integrity, honor and respect, which was that old Cuban mindset, we would basically do business by a shake of a hand. A word was our bond. We would basically come to an agreement, shake hands, turn our backs, and keep our words on both ends. That's the environment I grew in. You know, in time, I was able to put myself through school at night, working full time during the daytime, going to school at night, graduating summa cum laude, which was a remarkable achievement considering that, I mean, I was basically, my life was basically working the day, school at night, weekends and nights, homework, writing papers, reading, the political science, international relations, just a lot of reading and writing, for that matter. And you know, that got the eyes of some CIA recruiters who came to the university, Florida International University, I interviewed with them, and that's how this all began. I entered the CIA as a graduate fellow, and from there on, it's a whole different story, and I'll turn it over to Brian so that I don't continue on for too long. No, that's fine, well, that was a fascinating part of your story and a great introduction to the book. And of course, I think it's true to say that the facts that your family were, of course, fluent in Spanish. This was those language skills was an additional attraction to you joining the CIA. Am I right with that? That is correct. So my language, Hispanic heritage, my work skills, my work history, I had the letters to prove it, you know, letters of accolades and awards, plus my grades, got the attention of the CIA recruiters, and they were officers, senior officers, I'm a safe director of intelligence, now known as director of analysis. So I came in as an analyst, working Central American political issues, and eventually what would happen here is, you know, this was July 2000, fast forward September 2000, 2001, 9/11 United States, precipitated some significant changes within the national security establishment, and that just opened the spigot for dollars in people to basically be employed at the CIA. That opened the door to convert my graduate fellowship into a full-time job as an analyst, and that basically led to getting my certifications as an analyst, so I was a bona fide career analyst at the CIA, fully trained, and my duties actually, despite being a graduate fellow, I was actually in charge of a significant account at the time, Central America, and the Caribbean on drug trafficking issues, because I would transfer over and work on drug trafficking issues, did that for almost three years, four years total as an analyst, again, winning accolades, exceptional performance award, writing presidents, daily briefs, doing plenty of briefings, and writing other products for senior executives in the government, and that's how it all began at the CIA, and from then on, you know, it's like after four years of sitting at a desk, it was just a significant amount of research, writing, networking as well, reaching out to other government agencies, looking for any possible source of information in order to be able to deliver results. So I wanted to try the operational field, and that opened the door with the Iraq War, you know, Iraq War, again, just another event that changed the landscape for U.S. national security, and they were needing plenty of officers out at Iraq to fight the war, and one thing led to another, it's a long story how I got to Iraq, and basically it's a story of just how broken bureaucracy can be within the U.S. government, the directorate of intelligence analysis wouldn't let me go to Iraq, and you know, eventually nine months later, I got out on a temporary duty assignment, and once there, the officers there realized my potential, my skills, and it's like, wait a moment, we really like this guy, there's a job he can definitely do, so they switched my duties, put me in charge of a department, and they wrote back to CIA headquarters and said, we need this person out here on a permanent change of station, so they actually arranged for me to remain in Iraq, and that led to a two-year tour in Iraq as a chief of a branch that did a significant amount of liaison work working with the U.S. military at high levels, colonels, generals on sensitive issues, some detainee issues outside of the rendition program, I had nothing to do with that, working more with high-value detainees like Saddam Hussein and his henchmen, and again, more accolades, more awards, I think I had four exceptional performance awards that I had highly praised by multiple chiefs of station, spending two years out there, I was able to work with like three chiefs of station, three deputy chief of stations, many senior leaders, and that continued to open doors for me, so that I would go back to CIA headquarters and obtain my operational officer certification, so that I can be a bona fide, certified operations officer, case officer, and do human operations where I would deploy back out into another country, which I call in the book, Armenia, to do basically covert action type duties, so if I can just come in there, just focus on Iraq at the moment, and it'd be helpful if you give us some dates here, so we're going to work through a chronology of time, so it'd be helpful if you said some dates, but you're in Iraq, you're working in some pretty dangerous environments, I think this is an important thing to talk to the audience about, your work environment, what the risks were, and the responsibilities that you had in your intelligence gave for the security of people who were there in a military or an exposed situation, but start off with the date, when was this exactly? Yeah, my time in Iraq began in July of 2004, a very critical time, a time in which there was basically the Sunni insurgency out on the west, and the Shiite uprisings within Saudi city. We were faced with dangers every single day, dangers as far as indirect fire, vehicles being shot at, rockets and motors being lobbed at us, or checkpoints prone to suicide bombers. Every single day, we dealt with something, whether it was a bomb that went off, a rocket that hit near us, rocket hit us actually, day in and day out. We had officers that were injured, we had coalition members obviously killed, even civilians. I remember one time I was in a meeting at the U.S. Embassy, and the meeting got called off because two rockets or motors hit the building, not far from where I was at, actually penetrated the building, day in and day out like that. Another instance of, you know, we're asleep, or, you know, just about beginning our day, and a rocket hit our compound and hit a generator, and that caused a significant explosion that rocked the entire compound. And day in and day out like that, you know, our travels, we would take a route from the airport to the downtown area, known as Route Irish. It was the world's deadliest road, about five, six, seven miles. You know, every time we would take that road, you know, the potential to encounter death was there. Suicide bombers and cars trying to explode next to us, you know, the rocket propelled grenades, small arms, fire, you name it. Eventually, you know, they shut that down, and we would only do helicopters. But even that, you know, prone to small arms, fire, two years ago. This is actually a war zone that you're in, and there are risks to the CIA personnel are working. You're also working, you're talking about working extremely long hours for an extended period of your deployment. So, what was it that you like? Our typical day would begin six, seven, eight in the morning, you know, depending on how late we were working each day. So let's say start at 8 a.m., you know, finish at 11 o'clock at night, on call 24/7, you know. Head back, try to get some sleep, get called in at two o'clock in the morning, go back to sleep at four, and wake up back, do it again, you know, every single day. We would work seven days a week, 80 plus hours a week, sometimes 90, sometimes 100. And we would go on for two, three, four months without a day off before they finally, you know, we were able to take what's known as arrest and relaxation break. When I first got to Iraq in July, 2004, I worked without a day off until I left in November of 2004. When I got back out there for my permanent change of station, I was out there in January. I did not take a break until May of 2005, and it was just nonstop. And every single day, you had to be on top of your game because, you know, decision-making was critical to preserve the lives, not just of the employees, our colleagues, but also assets and coalition partners or other government workers. It was a parallelist environment prone to, we had to protect ourselves from general petty office politics, for example. You know, personality differences, we had to throw them out the door. We needed to learn how to work together despite our differences. And back in that time, you know, this was the mid-2000s, 2004, 2006 when I was in Iraq. You know, we had a lot of astute senior managers that were very, very skilled. These were an older generation who had come into the CIA, 70s, 80s, maybe even early 90s. But for the most part, they were a professional cadre who had life experience, military experience, business experience, law enforcement experience. These were not novices who would come into the CIA with no prior life experience. Post 9/11, that would change. After 9/11, they just turned the speaker down to bring people in and they were bringing in fresh hires straight out of college with very little to no experiences whatsoever. So that would have a significant impact down the road. Yeah. Right. This is Pedro. This is, you're touching on this, really, this is a key thread, a V key thread through your book, that as you go out and into these environments, you start to see an experience, we'll call it a management style, which is often, or sometimes lacking, you meet very good experience people who are doing a good job, but you also come up against people who clearly are not able to function, perhaps, as well as they should. That's going on. Something I want to pin down is you've come through CIA training, you've done, how do I describe it, a desk job, a comfortable job, working with the CIA, you're then in an environment which is dangerous, it's on the front line, it's reinforcing what's happening with the troops, but at this, at that stage, your mind is completely focused on the job. You are there as an American doing a job which you thoroughly believe needs to be done to support America. You're working for an organization called the CIA that you believe in, the CIA is doing a good job. The meat of your situation is you've got trust in what America is doing and trust in the CIA. Is that correct? Yeah, that's an excellent point right there. What I found in Iraq is it was essentially a nation-building exercise of trying to turn a former dictatorship, tyrannical form of government, into a fully functioning democracy. Something that we did at the CIA in Iraq was geared towards establishing a legitimate democratic government where, I mean, the CIA did not stop a Shiite candidate from winning the premiership, the prime ministry in Iraq. I mean, we basically were there to have a security environment that would allow Iraqis to vote in a government, and that's what they did. And once they formed a new government, again, just provide a secure environment so that this new government can build a new democratic style of type of government in Iraq. So we were day in and day out working on collecting human intelligence to secure the environment, the operational environment. At the same time, deal with terrorists from the Sunnis who were trying to destabilize the new government. So the entire mission was a nation-building exercise. And people go into these type of jobs with honor and integrity seeking to do what is right. And for the most part, people didn't have any ulterior motives. We were civil servants. We followed our orders from the president on down the line to his senior cabinet. And we didn't have any significant issues of politicization as we have seen further down the road. It was truly a civil servant job to do what our government asked us to do in a perilous environment in order to try to build a new nation in a country that had been under a repressive form of government for decades. Right. Okay. Thank you for that. I think this is an important point because you're there working hard in a system that you absolutely believed in. But the story is starting because you are reflecting your words back to you. You encounter some people who don't have quite the gravitas of the more experienced team. They haven't got a military background or they haven't been working in the field before. And there's one or two incidents that you experience that just make you think a little bit about what's going on. Can you tell us anything more about what you actually saw in Iraq amongst your colleagues that made you think or made you a bit nervous? I mean, thankfully, we had such a strong management team that made a huge difference. You know, we were having problems as far as getting personnel to go out into war zones. So we did have some of the younger ones fresh out of college and just didn't have the experience. But you know, at the same time, some of the senior people that did go out couldn't handle a war zone. But the capabilities of our management team was so adept at understanding the dangers and the intricacies of what it takes to manage the war zone. I remember specifically a GS-15, which is a senior officer. He was put in a position as an acting chief of base. And this particular officer, you know, couldn't handle the indirect fire. I mean, the indirect fire can be very alarming. I mean, you're just working or you're sleeping and all of a sudden you hear a kaboom that rocks everything and just rattles you. And you have to go into action, you know, first and foremost priority is make sure everybody's fine and safe. And at the same time, get everybody the safety. Well, he couldn't handle the rocket attacks. So what this management team did was very simple. You deal with it. You fix it, all right? They called him back, put him in back that station in a position in which he could excel that he could do, that he could function. And they brought out somebody else to be the acting chief of base who could handle the environment. A very simple fix to a very simple problem. And the reality is that not everybody is cut out the same. Some people can handle war zones. Some people cannot. And even within a war zone, you do have flexibility as far as where to go and what to do. Now, that's probably the best example that I can give at the same time. Now, we were dealing with young people who needed to be mentored, led, guided. And we had senior managers that would take the time to ensure that these younger officers would be mentored appropriately and correctly to ensure that they would succeed. It was a very professional environment. And I learned a lot in Baghdad station as far as what to do and what not to do in a CIA station, in a war zone, and on personnel matters. It's just plain and simple. And this is quite a contrast to what would follow me after Iraq, which we can get into, but I'll turn that over to you. Well, I think it's a good point to a good place to do that. So you move from Iraq, eventually into a region or a country you describe as Kharmina, a country which you describe as very unstable and has been effectively at war for some time. So we've got civil unrest, war, and you effectively get a job in that environment. And this one is, yeah, so I think where some of the meat to the book starts. So tell us about Kharmina. Yeah, Kharmina is a fictitious name because I couldn't reveal the real name. And it's just a creative way to be able to do some storytelling so that the reader doesn't have to read over more redacted text since there's enough redacted text in Kharmina. So I deployed out to Kharmina in September of 2007. I had already received my operational tradecraft training. I was fully trained and I was chosen for this job by a senior officer who knew me very well and knew I had the capability to do this job. And he was correct. I was able to hit the ground running and begin to deliver results in this war zone. It truly was a war zone. A nation had been a war for decades. It was more of a paramilitary-type war with an insurgency, counterterrorism focus. And my job was to work with the locals, the host government, a particular group of those officers there and help them through basically providing intelligence advice. I was more of a... This was a very interesting job because on paper I was still a director of intelligence analyst, targeting analyst, but I was operationally certified to do operations officer work for the director of operations. The job was titled as a targeting officer, but the reality is that I was more of a covert action paramilitary advisor providing hands-on, not tactical training, but hands-on intelligence advice, intelligence analysis, intelligence perspectives, and other types of aid so that they could combat the terrorists in their country. And this required a significant amount of field deployments. But for this particular tour, I came from a station of excellence in Baghdad to a station that I named Potemkin Station in honor of Gregory Potemkin, the Minister of Interior for Russia that put up a facade that everything was going fine in the certain places he visited in Russia when it was not because this was a station and name only. We had a management team that had no war zone experience, that were more concerned about their reputations and how they can rise up the ranks. Their officers were basically mostly tools that they can use to get ahead in their careers. On top of that, we had young officers here who had no prior life experiences, no military experience, no war zone experience, that were just put in here. And it was just a complete just clown show, which is why I named the chief of station, the top officer, Mo, his deputy, Larry, in the number three curly in honor of the three stooges, because their own actions would reveal them to be stooges in action in this station, that significantly derailed morale and hurt the mission. The first year that I was there, we were still basically benefiting from the prior management team that got us all kinds of tools and capabilities, and we were very aggressive going out into the field, working with the locals to combat the terrorists. And we were basically changing the environment, turning this country around to be a safe country for its citizens. And ultimately, as I got into my second year, this all changed. Now, morale was out the door. Some of the more skilled officers had left. At the same time, they were not interested in basically combating the terrorist threat in this country. They were more interested in just playing petty office politics of patting their numbers for intelligence collection at the same time, trying to put their favorite people in certain positions. And here's where I had the first incident of essentially blowing the whistle, where there were some things going on within my job that I had to speak up and I did. And I mean, you're required by federal law. If you see something wrong to report it, you're a chain of command or inspector general or higher authorities in an agency. So as soon as I reported some things going on in this station, all of a sudden, I had a performance problem, mind you, I just got promoted, literally just freshly promoted, an excellent performance appraisal. And on top of that, six months had passed by, and if you were to compare my performance after that promotion, I was delivering two to three times more results. So I didn't have a performance problem. They were just playing a game with me. They were trying to chase me out of their station to replace me with somebody else. And they put me on a performance improvement plan and I start meeting the plan. Well, now they start shutting down my work to sabotage my ability to make this plan. And I still keep making the plan. When I continue to make the plan and their sabotage efforts does not stop me from meeting their plan, then, you know, the deputy chief of station who I called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, because any given day he could be either character, decides to basically have a confrontation with me where he can be calling what it is, a jackass and accuse me of being disrespectful and cause it as a action to literally shut me down and kick me out of his station. And you know, here's where, you know, we really get into some of the meat where now I become a bona fide whistleblower where I'm blowing the whistle to the inspector general for the CIA and for the Equal Employment Opportunity Office. And the inspector general wants nothing to do with this. They don't care. The Equal Employment Opportunity Office, the long story short, or else we can get down into the weeds, but the long story short here is that, you know, the Equal Employment Opportunity Office is supposed to come in and do like a crime scene investigative unit does. You have a crime, you have dead body, you have evidence, they're supposed to come in sweep, look for evidence, you know, fingerprints, you know, take photographs, you know, take testimony from everyone that potentially could provide testimony. Well the reality is Equal Employment came in eventually late. And instead of being that crime scene investigative unit, they were the unit that typically comes after and cleans up the crime scene and sanitizes it. So they came in basically to cover up the crime, clean up the crime, conceal the crime, and defraud me of basically my civil rights. And the reason why I had filed a complaint was very simple. I mean, it was a crime, you know, the law was violated and, you know, they were taking a third year extension away from me which would severely damage my career. It potentially had the potential to send me back to CIA quarters where I would literally sit and rot at a desk never to go back out to the field. On top of that, I also had personal reasons. I had a fiance and a child expected on the way, my first daughter. So I had more reasons why to fight to remain there for a third year, but nobody wanted to fix this problem other than cover it up. So they got their way, they chased me out and I found myself basically finding another job and through persistence, literally sheer persistence, trying to get ahead of the game. I had to find a job before they were right of performance appraisal because obviously they were going to trash me and if which they did, I mean, if you were to read the performance appraisal where I just got promoted and read the performance appraisal after I was promoted, you would sit there and go, what happened here? First of all, this guy did much more and his performance is worse. The reality is anybody could read through it and see it, thankfully down the road, people would. If we just add a bit in here, I think this is an important thing for the audience. This station was particularly dangerous. People had died. You were worried about kidnap. This was where you were having to deal with serious safety problems for individuals and at particular times due to a breakdown in the management structure of that. Can I call it a cell, that operation? People's lives were put at risk and you talk about ending up coming back on a plane with dead bodies. This was a serious environment in which some of your management colleagues or field operators were clearly not doing their job in a professional way. You talk about one individual who was womanizing and using prostitutes at one stage. You talk about operatives who were not completing the field reports that they should have been completing. You were there in this very dangerous environment. We had serious kidnapping threats, again, small arms, fire. I could go on and on. In some ways, I worked in so many perilous environments that I became immune to it and learned how to perform it and keep a level ahead and be focused on what I needed to do. I was working with people who had never worked in a war zone or for that matter really couldn't quite grasp the magnitude of what we were doing. They were so caught up with some of the petty stuff that was so mundane and just not even related that in their failure to grasp the gravity of the situation, they didn't realize that every single day that I or my colleagues went out into the field were putting their lives at risk. I wasn't working 80 hours a week in this particular field, but I was working seven days a week for the most part on call again 24/7. I was doing a significant amount of field deployments going out into some of these dangerous environments. The malaria infested zones, there was one particular operation in which we had a situation where I was in a small helicopter and it's like, "What's going on here? Why are you going up so high and so slow?" They said, "You see this hill down there? We need to make sure we're high enough off this hill because a week ago, some of the insurgents actually blew up a bomb upward that destroyed one of the helicopters. They told them, "Please, take your time. Go up as high as you need to go. Thank you. We appreciate that. Day in and day out." Right. What can I say? Against this background then, we're on this theme that proper management decisions in a professional attitude by all of the CIA team on station is vital to preserve the safety or protect the safety of not only the CIA operatives, but also the contractors or the military people in the field. But you saw that things were not going properly and you made effectively a complaint. What you're then describing is instead of your concerns being investigated, the team that came in appeared to want to close it down. They wanted to cover up what you were exposing. Is that the simple story? That is the simple story and this here leads to a pattern that not just myself but others have written about or told about where the authorities within the CIA that are supposed to look into these types of complaints. When I use the word complaint, it's more of a legal term because if you raise up an issue, you report a wrong doing. That's known as a complaint or a disclosure. The elements above equal employment opportunity, human resources, the inspector general, grievance officer or even senior managers for the most part, what we find is that they immediately go into defense mode to discredit the messenger, destroy the messenger and cover up the crime as if the crime never happened. They will denigrate the messenger and at the same time, pervert, twist what the managers have done wrong and they have done no wrong. You're just having an operational difference. You disagree with your senior manager but because your senior manager is above you, you have to agree with him so you're being insubordinate so therefore you have to get out of there. You do your time in this particular station, the next place that you're going to be posted is Afghanistan, how did you get out to Afghanistan? Persistence defined the job so that I wouldn't go back to CI headquarters and rot at a desk that allowed me to, at the time, this was now late 2009, early 2010. There was another surge in Afghanistan. They seriously needed officers out there to do a counter-offensive to try to take back territory from the Taliban because the Taliban began to win the war in Afghanistan. More jobs, more people, more money was thrown into Afghanistan and I was able to apply for several jobs. I actually was offered two jobs and I chose to take the counterintelligence referent in Kandahar base, which is a significant base down south at the heart of the Taliban. We were literally in Mula Omar's compound where Mula Omar, the head of the Taliban, lived. So I go out there in early January 2010 at a critical time where we just had the coast suicide bomber on December 30 of 2009, killed seven CIA officers and injured half a dozen others. As a CIA referent, I had a critical role in protecting our base, protecting our officers from infiltration and the dangers of suicide bombers, of dirty assets who were out to kill us, so forth. So what was the experience then working in the base? It was tough, you were working these incredibly long hours again, but you were also in Afghanistan to also encounter what you clearly thought was mismanagement but dangerous management. There were things that were happening or not being done that were again putting people at risk who were on the front line. What did you observe happening? Well, in this particular case, this was a very unique posting, a unique job because now we're starting to get into a time frame where you're beginning to see the older officers being weaned out, retiring or moving on or moving up the chain where they're maybe not necessarily taking war zone deployments and you're seeing a younger set of officers coming in and beginning to be managers or for that matter, also younger officers who are finally gone up the pipeline and are getting out into the field but with very little experience. So it was kind of a mixed job. Thankfully, I did have some really good managers. My first and both chief of bases were outstanding. They were of the older generation where I began to see some of these differences where with the deputy chief of base. My first deputy chief of base was clearly someone who was a character and really made it a very difficult work environment that people were happy to see this person go, everybody. The second deputy chief of base had the gravitas, had the experience to do a really fine job. As far as the dangers, again, this was a perilous environment where day in and day out, our base was at risk of indirect fire attack, small arms fire, suicide bombers trying to penetrate our perimeter or checkpoints. So we had to basically be on guard every single day on top of our game and it was an environment where we worked seven days a week, 80 hours a week. We worked two, three, four months about a day off and it was a one year tour. I ended up getting out of there doing very well and I didn't blow the whistle there. I did run into one situation that I could have spoken up but I did not because at that point in time, there was really nothing I can do about it and decisions were already made that were made and our second chief of base was a little bit too aggressive and it was just his personality but the lies were being put at an increased danger for what would have been a marginal gain but thankfully no one was killed when I was there but in the future, perhaps some of those programs that were started may have led to a casualty. Ultimately, you can only speak up when something is really being done wrong and this was not particularly something that was extremely wrong. This would have been classified as an operational difference and I did differ in this particular operation but it was inappropriate for me to speak up so I didn't. Right, so if I've got this right, did you do two tours in Afghanistan? When does Kathy come on the scene? Oh, okay, yeah. Now, there is a second tour in Afghanistan and this is the one where all hell breaks loose and this is the one that is just a total complete mess. Absolutely. I can fast forward and get into that. Prior to that, I went back to CIA headquarters where I was put in a war zone position at CIA headquarters doing technical targeting, counterterrorism work where I would deploy out to the Middle East and do counterterrorism operations. I earned two exceptional performance awards. I received two nominations for collaboration awards. One was for the department wide that I was at the Information Operations Center and another one was for the entire director of operations. So I had proven myself, I had the experience that I was also at that time finally changed my career service from targeting analyst and director of intelligence to a targeting officer within the director of operations. This set me up to compete for a job as a deputy chief of base in a war zone, Afghanistan, that I cannot name. But it's quite obvious to the reader when they read basically the chapter. So I received all the training that a manager gets, basically the chief of station, deputy chief of station, chief of base, deputy chief of base seminar where you hear from all the senior leaders that the director, the deputy director of the CIA, inspector general, equal employment opportunity, human resources are a wide variety of senior leaders. I mean, they explicitly give us guidance on what to do, what not to do, what is right, what is wrong, personnel wise, you know, so forth. And for that matter, that isn't enough. Another part of the deployment was to meet individually and then collectively with every senior leader for the division, South Asia division before getting out to Afghanistan. So before I actually deployed to Afghanistan, I met with the chief of operations, deputy chief, you know, this senior leader, that senior leader. And they told me explicitly what they were expecting of me, what I was supposed to do, what I was not supposed to do. I was given explicit guidance to do something about the indirect fire attack, work with the military, get out of the base, the inter sanctuary, and go meet the military people and do something about indirect fire. At the same time, the intelligence personnel who wanted reports of intelligence is like, look, you know, there's opportunities to collect intelligence, right intelligence, but nothing's being done at that pace. You need to do something about this. Furthermore, you know, human resources, look, you know, personal issues will arise. And when they arise, they need to be dealt with swiftly. So point is, I was chosen for a job that was very well qualified to do that I had the experience. I had, you know, six plus years of war zone experiences, I had learned what to do, what not to do. I was trained, you know, by what I saw in Baghdad, what I saw in my prior Afghanistan tour, I learned what not to do based on what I saw in Potemkin station, Armenia, and all the managerial training. So I deployed to Afghanistan. And here is where I find myself in a war zone base, working for a chief of base who had no war zone experience, had just gotten out to the war zone after doing three years of Europe time, going around Europe, coffee shops, museums, you know, cafes, using the trains, you know, living the good life. But at the same time, you know, I mean, she was a very nice lady and never had a complaint against this lady. But she was a mother of three boys, one in college, two younger, one basically elementary school. And she couldn't really handle the family separation. It cost basically oppression and despondency, where she would begin to adopt sons in her own words to cope or cook to cope. And, you know, playing favorites over others, she couldn't handle the indirect fire. It would absolutely just rattle her, make her make just poor decisions. And in this environment, she basically turned this base into a social club on steroids, where we would not meeting our obligations of meeting with the military, exchanging information, getting intelligence, providing support to the main CIA station or for CIA headquarters or the other basis. Officers, you know, a spat was growing between a younger and older. The younger was her adopted son, who she catered everything towards him at the expense of the older officer. Our lives were being endangered, where she would send us out for yoga classes, for food, into environments prone to be hit by rockets. And one of those situations actually we drove through a spot where a rocket did impact like 10 minutes afterwards. And it was all unnecessary. I had to speak up. In this particular case, not knowing who to speak up to an opportunity came up to talk to the regional psychological officer to shrink. And I explained it to him. And he basically flat out Tommy, he can't handle it. And she's coping. And he wouldn't do anything about it. But he told me, you need to talk to the superior above her. So, you know, eventually, you know, as the situation continues to degrade, I spoke up to the superior above her, which is also my superior. He didn't want to hear it. It appears that he probably told her some things about it. So now the environment is somewhat poisoned against me. But on top of that, you know, she's getting worse and worse and worse and worse. And, you know, at one point in time, I finally had to speak up to her, knowing that she wouldn't get it or wouldn't understand. And that's exactly what happened. She got offended and did nothing about it. So the situation blows up one day between the younger and the older. It leads to an incident where now I really have to speak up and let her know, look, you caused this. And this is why she got more offended. Now she starts defending the younger and starts falsely accusing the older of drawing a weapon, which he never drew. So now I've got our superior above her trying to cook up allegations against the subordinate who never drew a weapon. And, you know, I'm putting a situation where I have to speak truth to power and let him know, no, you're wrong. I'm sorry. I'm here. This is what I've witnessed. This is what I've seen. This is really the way it is. This is the problem. And no, I'm not going to take punitive actions against the subordinate who did no wrong. So it leads to basically the chief of base having a spat where she just absolutely just went off the rails with me. And at that point, you know, I'm having to pull myself out on a, it's called a rest and relaxation break where I would take under a leave. I took my leave like three weeks early. But on my way out of Afghanistan, I relayed everything to the equal employment opportunity office because there were equal employment opportunity issues here. And I had basically a virtual teleconference call with the chief of station, the deputy chief of station and the chief of human resources, and we go over everything. And on top of that, the COS got the emails with all the information. His last words to me where go on, you leave, we will take care of this and we will get back to you. And one week into my leave, I got a phone call to go to CIA headquarters. And you know, a few days later, the day I'm supposed to go in to CIA headquarters for a meeting, equal employment opportunity officer calls me. I see him before the meeting at same day. And he doesn't want to hear anything about the EO issues. He begins to basically defend the chief of base saying there was nothing wrong with that base until you showed up. So clearly, I had a biased interlocutor that was in cover up mode. There goes the cover and cleanup crew. So I go into this meeting with the superiors for the particular office and division for Afghanistan. And they flat out, tell me, you're not going back to Afghanistan. They wouldn't tell me why. They told me I can apply for any job I want. When I raise up a couple of jobs in Afghanistan, nope, those jobs are not available for you. You're not going back to Afghanistan. They wouldn't tell me anything. And this gets into really the real meat of what is the CIA, a deep state run amok as far as trampling the rights of whistleblowers, covering up crimes through basically criminal obstructions of justice, violation of civil rights and so forth. Good job. Thank you for that. I just want to add a little bit to that story. I think if I remember correctly, you also described that there was another young woman on that particular base who was going out at night for some sort of personal liaison with somebody, which was you felt in breach of rules. It was clearly something that was dangerous because nobody knew exactly who she was having the liaison with. And you brought that to the attention of the base officer, but that was similarly suppressed. Do I remember that correctly? That is correct. I was a small base. A few number of persons there. One of the ladies there had a critical position, chief of support. And this person was basically the countrywide officer dealing with medical evacuations to get medical support in this country for CIA officers or officers working with the CIA. And we worked in a small little sanctuary of a big, huge military base. And her priority was to be on call 24/7 to deal with any of these medical emergencies. Well, we had surveillance cameras to see what's going on in our compound. And the older officer who was a communicator, communications officer, we had a communications office, staff by two, the younger one and the older one, 12 hour shifts at a am a PM, a PM at a am. Every night or a lot of nights, this lady would get on her vehicle, 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock and drive off somewhere to another side of the base to do who knows what. So she was away. But more importantly, you know, we were dealing with dangers in this particular entire sanctuary, perimeters that were prone to breach, potential kidnapping, small arms fire and the indirect fire attacks as far as rockets impacting. And a lot of the places that she would drive were prone to all those potential threats and particularly the indirect fire attack. So, you know, in this environment, you know, I had already blown the whistle. I didn't want to hear it. So I did not. But ultimately, at the end, when I brought it up to the chief of base, she actually had the audacity to accuse me of trying to slander and defame this younger lady accusing her of having an extra marital affair. And it's like, you know, no, that's not the point. The point is she has duties here and she's putting herself in danger and potentially putting other lives on danger. And in fact, one time, she barely made it back to handle a medical emergency because she was gone away from her post. Right. So in military terms, albeit many years ago, I was military and this, this would be an absolute offense because you have a place of duty, you should be in your place of duty. And if you're wandering off into an unsafe area at night, I think we're just stressed for maybe the UK audience that when you're talking about these bases, these American bases, they're actually substantial bases. They got a extended perimeter and it's simply not possible to ensure 100% safety at all times around that perimeter. And this is this is why for you to see her going out alone at night to an unannounced location, put herself at risk, but also potentially put the security detail at risk because they would ultimately be the ones tasked to save her should something untoward happen. That is fair to say. Absolutely. I mean, large sprawling base. And, you know, because of the terrain and some constraints, you weren't able to go very fast. You had to go very slow. It could take 20 minutes to get to the other side of the base. You know, 20 minutes is a long time when you're dealing with areas prone to indirect fire attack. And, you know, one of the things about the indirect fire attack that I haven't talked about is, you know, we actually went out and did some scouting, some security officials and I. And what we determined was that the biggest danger was not necessarily a rocket impacting exactly over you on top of you or right near you, but these rockets would come in at shallow angles. So what would happen here is you would have a back blast at a shallow angle that could go out hundreds of meters. So you literally could be 200 meters away from the actual rocket impact and the shrapnel could kill you at 200 meters away. Yeah. So, I mean, it was a serious and significant danger and it had to be mitigated by not being reckless with moves that were not necessary. And in this particular base, at one point in time, the dangers were so significant that the greater military base, although a CIA officers in the CIA base, we don't follow military rules, that general in charge of the entire compound had issued an order, do not, under any circumstances, get out and make unnecessary moves if you don't have to because there's no reason for you to put your life or your colleagues life in danger for nonsense. And our nonsense was yoga classes and food, not mission essential. We're now, as you say, into the heart of it, because you've made some complaints about what you see as a failure of CIA management in other locations. You've made these complaints as a result of what you've seen on this base. And then this is when the precious, well, two things happen. One is you expect somebody to investigate and to start to take some proper administrative action. You expect that to happen. That doesn't happen. But what does start to happen is you experience pressure, you experience trying to apply for new jobs within the CIA, your refuse jobs. I think at one point, you say that you were refused a total of 30 jobs. So you get the strong impression that you're a marked man. And also you start to be questioned in a very aggressive way as to why you did what you did. You find the pressure comes on you for making a report to do with failures, whistle blowing, rather than the CIA machinery starting to correct the problems that you've identified. Yeah, this is where it gets very interesting. Chapter, basically, you know, this is what I named it, a fight with the devil round one, a fight with the devil round two, a fight with the devil round three. Before we even get to that, I call it the pit of hell CIA headquarters, chapter 18. I am basically pitted against the entire bureaucracy that's hell bent on destroying me, destroying my allegations. I could get down into the weeds and give a lot of details and I'll try to give you the essence of what needs to be stated. The point here is that, you know, there are mechanisms in place that employees by law are directed to use so they don't leak to the press. Because if you become a leaker to the press and you leak classified information, now you can get prosecuted for leaking. So you're forced to use mechanisms in place internally to handle allegations of wrongdoing, allegations of reprisals, allegations of civil rights violations. And these channels are basically again, EEO, the Equal Employment Opportunity Office, the Inspector General. I mean, but you also have some lesser elements that are able to help like the grievance officer in human resources. Well, what I found was that at first, no one wanted to hear anything, nothing. So I'm literally forced to reach out to the Director of National Intelligence, the Equal Employment Office there, who direct me to a grievance officer at CIA, who when I talk to him, he washes his hands. He says, you need to talk to EEO. Mind you, I just spoke to EEO and they wanted nothing to do with this. I actually had a follow up call with the EEO officer after I was kicked out of Afghanistan and I actually met with him in person later that day. So I met with him twice and I spoke to him a third time. EEO wanted nothing to do with this, despite the fact that there were two EEO issues here. The harassment against the older officer, it's basically an age discriminatory issue. And I as a manager, if a manager witnesses an EEO issue, the agency is at fault and held liable. If a manager sees it and does nothing, or if a manager sees it speaks up and nothing is done, over prices are taken against a manager. In this particular case, it was all three of those. So we had EEO trying to cover this up, grievance officer wants nothing to do, bounces it back to EEO. And by this time, there were also whistleblower reprisal issues protected by a presidential policy directive, which has to force an effect of a presidential executive order, which has to force an effect of United States statute code law. And in this particular case, this is a bomb. Is this a logo? Is this a bomb initiative? President Obama issued the presidential directive policy 19 to protect whistleblowers in the intelligence community for blowing the whistle through the appropriate channel. So it was an Obama initiative backed by clapper and endorsed by clapper. And there's a lot of bureaucracy involved here. Ultimately, Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, certified to President Obama that all the agencies had implemented policies and procedures and standards to adjudicate alleged violations, you know, reprisals against whistleblowers. So by law, I was protected. And I use this mechanism reporting mechanism of reporting the reprisals to the Inspector General, but the Inspector General wants nothing to do with it. So I basically go into CIA with an entrenched bureaucracy that has no desire to do anything. And my low bar for resolution was just let me find a follow on job. And by the way, you have all these jobs you're advertising, you know, I'm qualified to do these. I have all the training and certification to immediately deploy. There was one particular job that clearly I was qualified to do. I had the language Spanish. I had experience having done a similar job with excellence. You know, I had all the training required. Some of the people who had filled that job in the past had a lot less qualifications that I had. And, you know, they wouldn't allow me to take this job. I applied for it. They re advertise it. I apply for it. They re advertise it. I meet with officers who are the hiring officers for this job. And they wouldn't give me the job. And ultimately, what happens is, you know, EEO, you know, eventually is forced to try to do something. But they're not helping me at all. They're not letting me see documents I need to see. They're not helping me to track down documents. You know, they're not really seeking to correct any of these issues. The attitude was that Pedro Israel or the was screwed up. You know, he was a terrible manager, creator, hostile working environment. So he got kicked out of the face because he deserved it. And, you know, I was blacklisted, black gold. And ultimately, I end up having to take a what's known as a rotational assignment is called a joint duty assignment, where I'm loaned out to another government agency. And I land in the office of inspector general for the intelligence community. Now, now is when now the inspector general for the central intelligence agency is like, Oh, I think we know, you know, you may have a reprisal case. You know, you know, do you want to open our investigation? I tell you, yes, please, I've been telling you for months, open an investigation. Well, even after that, they still try to shut it down. Yeah. And it isn't until I'm working for the office of inspector general for the intelligence community that eventually what happens is the CIA IG, reportedly begins to work a case. But, you know, that's a whole longer story. And I'll turn it over back to you. Well, let me just bring in a couple of things, which I think important for the audience to understand is that while you're now being, it's almost like a world pool that's sucking you in, you've tried to do the right thing. You're being closed down. You're being prevented from getting proper promotional jobs within the CIA. So you're clearly being targeted by the CIA because you've raised these concerns and you've created with ripples. But you've also in this considerable period, you've had problems with your health, which you attribute to, I think, anti-malarial drugs in, was it Iraq or Afghanistan? But you've experienced some quite big problems with your health, which you're having to, you've had to deal with as well. And you've also, because of the break in your career progression, you've been placed in jobs where you're not able to move up the career ladder to earn more money. And this, in turn, has put pressure on your family life. So you've also started to get some family pressures coming to the four. Just tell us a bit about your health and the drugs that you were taking. Yeah, this is a lot to process and go over. And the point is, when you work in war zones, or you work 80 hours a week, seven days a week, 40 hours about sleep, you work in a war zone full of toxins, environmental hazards, Iraq taking showers with chlorine infested water in the Middle East, taking showers with water infested with E. coli. You know, food was a serious issue in some of these places, a lack of quality nutrition. I'm one of these tours in my second, my first one in Afghanistan, I ended up having a really bad urinary tract infection requiring me to take siprofloxin. I ended up having to take siprofloxin for six weeks, and unknown to me, unknown to many people. It does have a black box, black box warning by the federal drug administration, where, you know, fluoroquinolones can be toxic to your body. They're actually a hybrid man-made, man-infused antibiotic that uses fluoride, a neurotoxin. So apparently, over exposure to fluoroquinolones, siprofloxin, caused them serious damage to tendons in my body throughout, you know, multiple tendons' shoulders, for example. The elbow on our nerve, you know, and you know, it caused issues, you know, I've had multiple surgeries to deal with some of these tendon issues. And, you know, the environmental toxins in Iraq, you know, hurt me with thyroid function. So, you know, a lower thyroid function in my body requires me to take medication. So, you know, and then, you know, I have to say this, I would rather go out to a war zone and be awakened by rockets landing around me that have to deal with the bureaucratic, berating, and bullying that I dealt with at CIA headquarters from basically March 2015 through July 2015. That destroyed my health in terms of my cortisol level through the roof, hormone imbalances left and right, sleep disrupted, stress galore, you know, I was basically in dire straits physically. And on top of that, financially, I was in a single-income household with a foreign national who had become a U.S. citizen with a young daughter who needed special needs education, you know, living in the most expensive part of the United States, Northern Virginia. And, you know, not really being able to meet the needs of my family, which would cause some serious hardships on my family, my daughter. And ultimately, you know, it would lead to me getting some holistic-type medical care, breaking free from that, you know, environment that was so toxic, which is how I landed in the office of Inspector General for the intelligence community. But, you know, that's basically a, that's considered like a death sentence for your career to be an Inspector General. You didn't get a lot of sympathy from the CIA for those medical problems that you suffered. What they did start to offer you, and this to me reading the book is a continuous thing. They keep offering you psychiatric help. So it seems to me that as you pressed your case, as you produced more evidence, one of the responses from the CIA was to suggest that it could be helpful to you to have some form of psychiatric intervention. Exactly. I mean, this is just a continuation of the reprisals in another form and another fashion. Now you have a psychiatric problem. You need psychiatric help. And all by the way, really, you're taking steroids and you're on steroids for taking hormone replacement therapy, which is what a medical doctor told me I needed to do. Instead, the CIA psychologist answered was, you should be taking psychiatric drugs. I found that the entire bureaucracy was hell bent on covering it up and just basically calling you a complaint in the problem, despite the fact that not only did they cause a problem, it made the problem worse. Okay. So Pedro, you're caught up in this whirlwind. You're trying to get your case dealt with properly through the CIA. You'll be put under a lot of pressure. They're messing you around with jobs. They're clearly not investigating. There's almost a whispering campaign. So you discover when you do try and apply for a job that somebody's been there before you and your name is already dirtied and therefore people are saying, well, we'd like to employ you. But so you don't get moved into these new jobs. What when did the critical point happen when you decided that you couldn't just fight through the CIA that you had to look for a legal remedy and you thought about getting your own attorney to deal with this? Yeah. There's a couple of facets of this journey. In 2015, I did find unemployment attorney and it was just an employment attorney. It wasn't an attorney really adept in dealing with national security whistleblower issues. So through the help of this attorney, eventually what would happen here is because presidential policy directive mandated that CIA, the intelligence community members, follow certain standards, policies and procedures on allegations of reprisals for blowing the whistle. There are certain timeframes needed to be followed. Those timeframes are very straightforward. I mean, it's codified in law. If I allege reprisal to an IG, the IG has two weeks. Get back to me and let me know if there are potential issues of reprisal. And if there is a reprisal, they have to start an investigation. And I believe it's 240 days. They have 240 days to conclude their investigation. Now, in that 240 days, you know, I believe it's every 60 days, they're supposed to communicate and provide the complaining. An update is what is going on. If they're going to need more than 240 days, they're supposed to ask permission from the complaint, hey, you know, we're taking more than 240 days. What do you want us to do here? You know, there has to be that communication. And on top of that, according to the standards, policies and procedures, when they do that investigation, they're supposed to give a report to the complaint. So the complaint can verify if all the material facts have been properly vetted and investigated, if all the witnesses have been appropriately contacted in the interview. The CIA broke every single one of those rules. It's like if it just wrap it up a piece of paper, throw it in the garbage. That's a civil rights law violation. That is a violation of the law as well, conspiracy to obstruct, you know, civil rights. And you can name multiple laws there. So the attorney filed a lawsuit under the Administrative Procedure Act to compel the CIA to do this investigation. That was in December 2016. By this time, I was in the Office of Inspector General, and you're right. I had applied for several CIA jobs. There was one job that I was extremely well qualified to do. You know, I had worked for, you know, that same information operation center, you know, in a country I had worked up before, clearly qualified to do this job. And you know, I was probably the leading candidate for the job. The managers went way out of their way to interview me. And they were very happy with my answers in the interview. And it took them for weeks to get back to me. And I know how this particular information operation center works. It is they'll pick up the phone. They'll call officers left and right. They'll properly vet a candidate, you know. And it was quite obvious there was a whisper campaign, you know, they probably called the chief of base in Afghanistan who just totally trashed me. And I don't say it obviously didn't mean to the job. Yeah. So your attorney was now trying to pressurize the CIA machinery to produce a response. But one of the things that they did to that attorney was that they said, well, we can't really deal with you because you're not security cleared. So when you were trying to use your attorney, he was being stalled and blocked by this so-called security clearance from the CIA. Well, this gets very interesting. There are two attorneys in this entire saga. The first attorney was actually bullied and threatened to have them disbarred, accusing them of having classified information or having them sign over and over and over again, non-disclosure and secrecy agreements as threatening them to take action against them. So my first attorney was basically neutered, which they became ineffective. And this led to I trying to get another attorney. And the second attorney is where we get into the Office of General Counsel, the CIA, absolutely just using horrific methods of denying me my rights to counsel, you know, obstructing the process to get an attorney, you know, accusing, you know, hanging up on the attorney when he would call. And the issue here is because I was a CIA officer undercover where I was on paper, I didn't work for the CIA. I could not openly go out to this attorney. I had to have somebody go out to him without disclosing my identity, and I couldn't go directly and disclose my identity or tell him anything about my case. Unless the CIA granted this attorney a limited security agreement approval, limited security approval, LSA, that would allow me a right to retain this attorney. So it's a long story because ultimately what happens here is I am denied the right to counsel. And in this process, the reprisals against me begin to increase as I begin to blow the whistle at higher levels. And at the same time, you know, the whisper campaign to deny me jobs just explodes and gets worse. Right. And again, correct me if I've got this wrong, but it's within this period that also the political situation has got quite volatile because there's information coming to the surface around the Hillary Clinton emails. And this is creating a lot of debate at Congress level as to the actions of the security services and the fact that the security services might not be telling the truth on all occasions. Yeah, there are a lot of issues at stake here. Particularly when I was working for the office of Inspector General for the intelligence community, you are correct. This was the pivotal time where the Inspector General for the intelligence community was looking at the Hillary Clinton email problem. And the Inspector General himself for the intelligence community actually became a whistle-blower blowing the whistle to Director of National Intelligence Clapper. And for that matter, the oversight of the policies in Congress like Senator Feinstein and other senators. And he was shut down. He was silenced. They didn't want to hear it. They didn't want to hear the allegations of Hillary Clinton having done wrongs. And this caused a situation where essentially, he basically retired early, but before he retired, he took a lot of time off as Inspector General. And that allowed the environment to change within the Inspector General, where we had a principal deputy come in, a new officer come in to be like the acting IG. And ultimately, the deputy IG got fed up of all the nonsense. And he decided to bail, which caused the general counsel for the Inspector General for the intelligence community, Jeanette Macmilliam, to become the acting deputy IG. And in this environment of Wayne Stone, the acting IG and Jeanette Macmilliam, the deputy acting IG, while we as a team in the Inspector General worked on an evaluation to review the implementation of reprisal protections, they did not like what we found. They wanted to shut it down. They wanted us to change our findings. Originally, Jeanette Macmilliam wanted to find a report that basically said, yeah, there are protections and protections are being implemented. We as a team basically said, that's not what we found. We can't budge. This is exactly what we have. And ultimately, what happens here is they accuse me of having an independence issue and tainting the report, which it was impossible to do, because we had a work plan that had very clear data, testimony. And the work plan was actually approved by them. So, I mean, I couldn't tainting this report, even if I wanted to, because it was a team effort. And we were continually basically brainstorming and bringing our conclusions and our findings to ensure that we were hitting the mark correctly. So, I got kicked out of the ICIG, sent back to the CIA for this round two and three with the devils. And the IG's actually launched a counter investigation against me claiming that I had an independence issue. And it's just, here's where it really gets very, very ugly, dirty, and absolutely just shocking. Right. So, you were, I'd use the term scapegoat, you were being used as a scapegoat to help derail the investigation that the IG department was carrying out. You end up being almost blacklisted within the organization. But from this point on, it seems to me that the movement towards getting you out of the CIA starts to accelerate. So, you've got trouble with your jobs, you've been put under pressure. And then eventually, you are being questioned on a security issue, which means that you're actually taken to a particular location with men. I think you described them as 18/11. So, they're armed officers. And they think they're going to interrogate you. But you managed to deflect some of this. So, it's getting more and more sinister what is happening to you, or from a simple start that you started to point out failures in the field, or within field offices, which were putting people at rest. When did the armed officers appear in the equation? Yeah. This is really, I mean, you can't make this stuff up. I mean, this stuff basically could be made into a movie script, enemy of the state, essentially. So, yeah, I'm basically sent out of the inspector general, you know, blackball, blacklisted whisper campaign at the CIA. My reprisal complaint with the CIA, not investigated, going nowhere. You know, at the same time, you know, I begin to see my applications being tampered with, you know. Yeah, I couldn't believe it. I'm looking at applications. This is what I filed, and this is what they submitted, you know, document tampering. So, I begin to do intelligence, community, whistleblower protection act disclosures to the acting IG on everything that I witness at the CIA. And, you know, my disclosures do not get processed. They get suppressed. They don't respond back to me. You know, in this timeframe, an investigation is opened against me. Now, I've got the Department of Treasury IG out there running around, trying to determine whether I had an independence issue, whether I infiltrated the ICIG. You know, and miraculously, within 80 days or so, they're able to do a complete investigation, and I'm the last person they talked to. Meanwhile, my reprisal investigation and allegations are outstanding, like by 500, 700 days or even more, whatever it is. So, I'm called to a meeting downtown DC, where, you know, basically, it's like, you know, we need to talk to you, the Department of Treasury IG. I get there, you know, and it's like, I'm hoping finally, and I'm making some traction here on my reprisal allegations, and I've got an IG looking at it, because it's not unusual to have an external IG to conduct a reprisal investigation when there are conflicts of interest. The Department of Homeland Security actually did an investigation about reprisal against CIA officers in their own IG, because of the conflict of interest with the CIA IG. So, the CIA IG was corrupt to the core, with their own officers in charge. The IG and deputy IG haven't taken reprisal against their own whistleblowers. So, the CIA IG had no authority, no basis, no legitimacy to do any reprisal investigations. So, I was hoping the situation here is, the Department of Treasury was investigating. I get there, and I'm in the room, and, you know, the both of them got, you know, their weapons, you know, like, you know, clearly, if they have a weapon, they're considered a law enforcement officer, the career track, 1811. So, you know, now I've got a serious problem, okay? What are they going to ask me about? So, the first thing the senior officer does, do you know why you're here? And I go, yeah, you know, I'm here because of my reprisal allegations, and hopefully you folks are going to do an investigation. And he turns around and says, no, we're here because we need to investigate for your actions in the IG of, you know, potential independence issues. At that point in time, I completely just shut him down with the law, presidential policy directive 19, explaining that the letter of the law states, your investigation of me now constitutes an act of reprisal for I blowing the whistle on the broken reprisal protection process. So, you know, this guy didn't expect me to push back so hard. So, the meeting ended, and this began now a serious problem where now with an investigation against me is when I begin to try to retain another attorney that is absolutely just stopped, you know, through illegal tactics. And it just continues to escalate, and escalate, and escalate, I began to blow the whistle, you know, to Congress. No, sorry, you, you, you move straight on to it. I was about to say to Congress, and you've said, so you're expanding it, you're now putting formal information directly in front of Congress, in front of senators. Yeah, what happens here is, because my intelligence community was a blower protection act disclosure, we're not processed through the ICIG. And the attorney had filed a lawsuit earlier. My attorney had sent a copy of the lawsuit to the relevant respective oversight authorities, the Senate Select Committee of Intelligence, and the House Permanent Select Committee of Intelligence. So, two Democratic senators, typically it's been the Democrats who come up and help whistle blowers, responded and wanted to get information. So, the Office of Congressional Affairs for the CIA immediately turned on threatening me to take punitive actions against me, including potential termination or security clearance revocation, which will lead to termination for having direct contact with Congress. And I explained to him, wait a moment here. My attorney is talking to Congress, and yeah, we do need to talk to Congress. We've got this list of documents we need to get to Congress. So, the CIA tells me, Office of Congressional Affairs, we don't pass all those materials to Congress. So, I have no idea to this date what Congress got or didn't get. But Congress did get something. So, now Congress is aware of these serious reprisals against me for what happened in Afghanistan, the counter investigation. And more importantly, the fact that, you know, every element that the CIA equal employment, the IG, human resources, grievance, you know, they're basically just a criminal cleanup crew to deny a complaint, you know, they're right as a whistleblower. And it just continues to escalate because, you know, I'm putting a situation where I'm going nowhere, more job denials. I'm about to be basically putting a job I don't want or having to take a job that is well beyond inferior to my capabilities, you know, a career death sentence. And in this environment, you know, I end up essentially reaching out to director Mike Pompeo through his number three, Brian Bulatow, the chief operations officer. And they washed your hands of this and says, hey, you know, we got to stay out of this. We got to let the CIA do its job. Mind you, it's the corrupt CIA IG. We're just bringing in here. We've also got going on in the background that the other whistleblowing cases are coming to prominence in the media in the states. You're seeing them. The intelligence agencies are certainly seeing them. The wider public are seeing some of it through mainstream media. So this isn't just one example. You're the, you're the focus of what's happening here. There were other whistleblower cases that were also prominent because of the reprisals that the CIA had taken against the individuals. Absolutely. I mean, we're dealing in a critical time period where other whistleblowers had come out publicly and would continue to come out publicly. There were two specific CIA whistleblowers who came out of the office of inspector general for the CIA. They had alleged reprisals against the inspector general himself, David Buckley, and the deputy Christopher Sharply, who upon David Buckley's resignation, he actually, he was fired, told to leave that under Christopher Sharply is acting, you know, you know, we're having Andrew Bekich, Jonathan Backlan, making disclosures to Congress. Thankfully, when I was at the ICIG under Charles McCullough, the IG and Daniel Meyer at the head of the whistleblower office, those two men have to be credit with being pro whistleblower and helping whistleblowers out. They were able to see to it that the Department of Homeland Security, IG, would do an investigation on the reprisals against Andrew Bekich. And those results would come out a year or two later. But in this process, publicly, it became available that the CIA IG was corrupt as hell itself in terms of taking reprisals against their own whistleblowers. And on top of that, you know, we had found out that they didn't want to implement a reprisal protections. They didn't know what standard to use. They weren't using the correct standards. They weren't following the time standards. If you don't follow the standards and you don't follow the time, you will never substantiate a reprisal. It's like trying to do a murder investigation a year, two or three after the murder happened and the crime scene has been completely sanitized. A murder did take place, but you can't find evidence of murder because you didn't do a timely investigation. That's the CIA IG in terms of doing reprisal investigations. And that's against the law. And that does raises the issue of potential civil right law violations. And also, you can call it criminal obstructions of justice. So with these whistleblowers in time, what would happen here is, as I begin to make disclosures to Congress, I escalated basically after going to Mike Pompeo, Brian Bulatow, I went to the DNI himself, Daniel Cote, his deputy, Susan Gordon, I continued to make disclosures to Congress, as best as I can internally. Don't know what the CIA passed. You know, eventually it turns out that the IG for the inspector, the inspector general for the intelligence community, that that entire office is also corrupt at the high level. They literally take reprisals against Daniel Meyer, the head whistleblower office gentleman, and he goes public with his case. So you have a total complete uproar in Washington, DC, numerous press reports. And you know, the bottom line is, you've got people alleging reprisals for blowing the whistle on the broken whistle, which is how I get my title, the broken whistle, because I was not alone blowing the whistle on the broken whistle. And ultimately, you know, like all of us that I, you know, hey, we were fired, wrongly terminated, never seen our cases properly adjudicated. And in my case, they got very creative. Now what they did was is they falsely accused me of being a threat to the workforce. So I begin to get investigated by the CIA office of security. I have two investigators from the threat management unit question me. And you know, that was the most productive conversation I had in my entire two plus years of dealing with this matter. They actually had the audacity to tell me, look, you're not a threat to the workforce. What can we do to help you? Well, unfortunately, they pulled the Michael Flynn on me like the FBI did. Whatever I told those investigators, when they went up the chain of command, got totally flipped around. Because now I had the director of security sending an emissary, one of his deputies, a high level deputy security official up in the chain of command. And they have a frank conversation with me, basically telling me, be happy you have a job as in we can take the job away from you. You're being too vocal at trying to deal with these issues. And I told them, well, it's not that I'm being too vocal. I say you folks are being just too, you know, you're being a bunch of bullies, trying to shut down a legitimate complaint that I made it very easy to fix. And you've got some serious problems here. So, you know, that leads to even more escalation, you know, in this process of time, the office of general counsel is completely obstructing my ability to get an attorney. I'm getting nowhere. They're shutting it down. I can't get a new attorney. You know, they escalated. So I reached out to this deputy director said, look, you know, if the director of security sent you to pass me a message, this is important to him. I want to meet with the director of security personally to go over these issues with him, because if he thinks this is so important, it demands that we meet face to face and discuss it. Well, they didn't like my tactic. So now what they did was is they sent the personnel security director to basically threaten me to take my clearance and my job and fire me if I would refuse to sign basically a letter of warning. And the letter of warning was basically that I had to shut up, season desist from any of my complaints as far as, you know, allegations of reprisals against me and all these violations of law pertaining to adjudicating alleged reprisals. When I refused to comply with the letter of warning, this is where he does this wonderful stunt of putting surveillance on me. I literally got surveilled at my house one evening. And, you know, the next day, I was denied entry into a building where I have to turn in my badge and leave and I'm immediately put an administrative leave with pay while I'm an administrative limbo only to find out basically a month later that I'm being put through the personnel evaluation board to basically strip me of my clearance and fire me as a CIA officer. Right, Pedro, I'm watching the clock a little bit here because we've extended the interview, which I'm really happy with because you're talking some fascinating things. But I think we must see whether we can bring this little section to a close. I'm going to say to you straight away, I'd love to have a part two with you to discuss the implications as to what's happened to you because I think there are a number of things. And it's affecting the system in America, but I would also say we see similar things happening here in the UK. So if this interview is watched by American viewers, please do don't assume that because it's a bit doing the asking questions that I regard what's happening as being a unique American problem. I think we've got equivalent problem underway here in UK, but we can speak about that. But just to bring this little bit to a close, you ultimately end up losing your job with the CIA. You're initially not being paid, but then there's a formal ending to it. Your services aren't required. You've also attempted to get your case heard in court, but your court case is dismissed. But one of the, I can't remember the name of the organization. You describe a particular unit or organization that you approach, and they say they can't deal with you because you're not employed, but you did also try and approach them when you were employed, and they didn't do anything to help you then. Just give us that little bit because I'm going to use the word wonderful, and I don't mean that in a demeaning way, but my goodness, if you're going to mess somebody around, this is a brilliant way of doing it. What was that organization that did that to you? The Office of Inspector General for the Intelligence Community that failed to process my disclosures that I requested to be passed to Congress in April, May of 2017. And when I followed up in July of 2017, when I reached out to them again in, I believe it was April, May, June of 2018. They asked me to refile my Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act disclosures. Mind you, I had already processed them once, asked about them a second time. So now we're talking about a third time. So I refile my Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act disclosures as an outsider. So these are sanitized, but they lead you to the documents internally, or to the allegations internally that the IG had received. So I reprocessed these allegations in early 2019. I was terminated September 2018, but my appeals did not actually come in. The last appeal I received a response in mid January of 2019. So my official termination really comes in January of 2019. That really should be considered the legal date of termination. So I've filed these allegations again in February, March of 2019. Immediately, I'm talking about immediately, like within days, I get a letterhead response to the Office of Inspector General for the Intelligence Community, and they have the audacity to tell me, "Well, you've been fired, you're no longer an employee of the Intelligence Community." So you have no standing at all to file an Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act disclosure. Basically, go screw yourself, go pound sand, bye. So, I mean, what more can I say about that? You know, while I'm employed, they don't process them. While I'm employed, I follow up, they don't respond. While I'm employed, I ask again, and they say, refile them. When I finally file them, and I'm no longer employed, they basically tell me, "You can't file them." So the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act process is completely just broken and flawed, and it would be a factor where we saw later on in 2019, where it was weaponized against President Trump. And this is where we get into in chapter one of my book, where real whistleblowers, like myself, who try to use the system, are completely ignored, crushed, and destroyed, while those who can't be used for political expediency are held as heroes. And this has serious implications for the rule of law in our society. I mean, if our government is a government of thugs and criminals, what right do they have to govern us? And for that matter, you know, how can we combat this discovery? We have no choice but to elect people like Donald Trump, and appoint people like Tulsi Gabbard, John Radcliffe, Matt Gaetz, who are going to come in and get rid of this criminal organization inside our government. I mean, sadly, you know, people may disagree politically on who Trump is and who he picks, but we cannot continue down the road of a tyrannical government within the United States of America, because we're going to become basically just another tyrannical government like Stalin's, Hitler's, Lenin's, Castro's, and Maduro's, and so forth. Pedro, we must end there, unfortunately, because my goodness, there's a lot more to talk about, but I'm going to say thank you very much for joining us and taking us through what you've had to endure. It's an incredible story because it starts with something so black and white, so simple, I think, it's to do with safety of individuals, but because you quite rightly did not back down, the thing got bigger and bigger. So I'm going to say thank you very much for sharing that with us today. I'll ask you now, would you come back and do a part two with me to talk about the follow-up in a bit more detail? I've got some questions I'd like to ask you about how you see the organization and American society, and I think there's some interesting points we could cover. Absolutely, Brian, I'll be delighted to come back. I mean, there's a lot more. I mean, there's things that not even covered in this interview, and the implications are significant. At the end of the day, the bottom line is, again, we're supposed to be a government of the people, for the people, by the people, and government is there to do good to the people, not there for its own good, and I would be delighted to come back. Okay, thank you very much, but thank you for the interview today. It's been really excellent. Thank you, Pedro. Brian C. Crest here. When you have a busy schedule, it's important to maximize your downtime. 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