(Zero Hedge)—In an eye-opening interview, former CIA officer turned whistleblower John Kiriakou pulled back the curtain on the agency’s most elite fighting units, revealing how the United States’ intelligence agencies transformed overnight into a lethal force dedicated to hunting down radical Islamic terrorists after the September 11th terror attacks.
Speaking with host Dalton Fischer, Kiriakou delivered a no-nonsense account of CIA’s most classified operators, the legendary Ground Branch warriors, Special Activities Division (SAD), and Counterterrorism Center (CTC), elite units filled with the U.S.’s finest Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, and Delta Force operators.
“These aren’t your typical government bureaucrats,” Kiriakou explained. “These are battle-tested heroes from our most elite military units, SEALs, Rangers, Delta Force, recruited because they have the skills and courage to do what others can’t.”
After 9/11, these elite soldiers were quickly brought into the CIA fold, many on loan from the military before becoming permanent assets in divisions like Global Services, Special Activities Division, and the hard-hitting Counterterrorism Center. Their mission? Simple and vital: eliminate threats to American lives and freedom (and whatever the fuck else the CIA has them doing).
“What they do is so classified that even though everybody in the office knows what they’re up to, nobody talks about it,” Kiriakou revealed, describing the iron-clad secrecy surrounding these operations. Their job, the former CIA officer explained without hesitation, is “to neutralize anybody who poses a threat to the United States, its citizens, or its installations.”
While praising the critical importance of eliminating high-value terrorist targets like Osama bin Laden to protect American families, Kiriakou didn’t shy away from addressing the tough questions about oversight and accountability.
“Mistakes happen in the fog of war,” Kiriakou acknowledged, referencing troubling cases where intelligence errors led to innocent people being detained. “We’re not lawless vigilantes. As American government officials, we’re bound by the Constitution. That’s what separates us from our enemies and makes America the beacon of freedom in the world.”
Kiriakou pinpointed the exact moment America’s intelligence community transformed into a fighting force.
“The day after 9/11,” Kiriakou told Fischer, vividly recalling the pivotal moment when Cofer Black, then head of the Counterterrorism Center, stood before his team and declared the new reality.
“Today, we’re at war, and we’re all going to have to fight. Not all of us are going to come home,” Black announced to a silent room, marking the beginning of the U.S.’s years-long campaign against al-Qaeda.
By Christmas 2001, Kiriakou explained that al-Qaeda’s core operations in Afghanistan was virtually destroyed, with only 25 active members remaining according to Senate intelligence.
Before 9/11, the Special Activities Division operated in the shadows within the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, conducting missions that were rarely discussed even within the agency itself. After the attacks, the Counterterrorism Center rapidly established its own special activities group, primarily composed of loaned military personnel focused on hunting down terrorists plotting against America.
The elite CIA units regularly undertake extraordinarily dangerous missions, including parachuting into hostile territory, conducting high-risk extractions in terrorist strongholds like Benghazi, Khartoum, and Karachi.
“It’s extremely dangerous work,” Kiriakou said, noting that many fallen heroes are honored with anonymous stars on the CIA’s Wall of Honor, their ultimate sacrifice known only to God and country.
The post-9/11 atmosphere at the Counterterrorism Center reflected America’s new war footing, with office areas nicknamed “Bin Laden Boulevard” and “Hezbollah Highway.”
Kiriakou also shed light on the Global Response Staff (GRS), elite security professionals whose job is literally to put their lives on the line for other Americans. Created to protect case officers operating in the world’s most dangerous locations. “Your job is to throw your body in front of the other guy so he doesn’t get killed,” he told Fischer.
Kiriakou is a former CIA officer who became a prominent whistleblower after exposing the agency’s use of torture in interrogations following 9/11. He served in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and was involved in the capture of high-value terrorist targets, including Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002. Kiriakou made headlines when he publicly confirmed the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques, becoming the first former CIA officer to openly discuss the agency’s torture program. His revelations led to his prosecution under the Espionage Act, and he served nearly two years in federal prison for allegedly revealing the identity of a covert CIA officer.
The 20-year war in Afghanistan stands as one of the U.S.’s most devastating foreign policy failures, costing taxpayers over $2 trillion and resulting in the deaths of 243,000 people across Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. While the U.S. achieved the initial mission of dismantling al-Qaeda and removing the Taliban government after 9/11, the mission tragically expanded into a nation-building disaster that squandered American blood and treasure. Over 2,400 American servicemembers made the ultimate sacrifice, all for a mission that ended in humiliating defeat when the Taliban reclaimed power in mere days following then-President Joe Biden’s catastrophic withdrawal in August 2021. The collapse exposed how two decades of military presence, billions spent training Afghan forces, and countless American lives lost failed to create the stable democracy our leaders promised, leaving many veterans asking whether their sacrifice was in vain.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.