Below are ex-CIA Giraldi's words recounting how his long career led up to a difficult show-down with CIA leadership, and what happened next, as transcribed directly by ZeroHedge [emphasis ours].
After graduate school and following time in the US Army as an intelligence officer, I joined the CIA. I was an operations officer, which means a spy. I was sent to a lot of nice places to live in, starting with Rome. And then I was in Hamburg and then I was in Istanbul, and then Barcelona. After Barcelona I left the agency for a while and came back as a contractor after 9/11, and I was there for another three years.
How I got in trouble with the agency was... after I came back as a contractor I was sent to Afghanistan - this was after we had overrun it. It didn't take me long to figure out that we had replaced the Taliban
...mindless ferocity in a turban...by becoming worse than the Taliban.
And there was no evidence whatsoever coming from CIA analysts that [Osama] bin Laden [and the Afghan government] had actually been involved in 9/11,
| Seriously?? |
So a couple years later I was back at CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia and working with them on basic security issues. I had been a counterterrorism specialist and so I was working on different groups that they were considering to be 'over horizon' threats to the United States. This was a new concept, this threat. The tune that was being played in Washington was that 'we are threatened'.
Anyway, while I was doing this I was also talking to a number of my friends who were classmates [from prior schooling and training early in his career] who were analysts and they at this point were very senior analysts in the agency. And the United States meanwhile was preparing to attack Iraq because Iraq was 'a threat'.
And these friends of mine who were analysts saw all of the raw information that went into what the US government was seeing and they said, "you know this is all bullshit, this is all a lie - the intelligence that's coming in is fake. And this fake intelligence is being used to justify starting another war."
So anyway I got 'converted' and I started to be somewhat outspoken on the issue of why we should not be going into Iraq and we should leave this alone. And word of this got around [the agency].
So they called me in, they polygraphed me. They wanted to know who among all of my friends have similar views. I refused to cooperate and they said at that point, "well you failed your polygraph exam, we want to take away your security clearance."