A former CIA Agent has revealed whether or not the intelligence service has the power to make people disappear without a trace.
Former CIA spy and whistleblower, John Kiriakou, sat down with LADbible to answer some tough questions about his time working for the federal government.
While we may never know for sure what goes on behind the scenes in places like the CIA or Area 51, former workers are perhaps our best chance of finding things out, with multiple staff coming out to complain earlier this year about the illness and even deaths they and their colleagues suffered after being exposed to a 'top secret' project at the mysterious facility.
Kiriakou wasn't shy about revealing some of the things we've perhaps always suspected about security services across the world, like the CIA and MI5, such as whether or not they truly listen to our phones.
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Although Instagram bosses have hit back at claims that they are spying on us to show us targeted ads, it seems as if the CIA is more than capable of that, as Kiriakou suggests that they have the power to listen to conversations through our phones, cameras and even smart TVs.
Another concern many people have, perhaps because of how commonly we see it in movies, is whether the CIA can truly make people disappear, whether it's killing them off, hiding them away or giving them a new identity for protection.
And it seems as if the Jason Bourne franchise wasn't too far off, given Kiriakou's response during the Honesty Box episode.
He said: "You bet they can. And they do all the time. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the CIA created, for example, an archipelago of secret prisons, and they would just disappear people.
"We would capture people in Al-Qaeda safe houses, for example, let's say in Pakistan or Afghanistan, and we would ship them off to these secret prisons. And when I say secret prisons, I mean in many cases they were so secret that even the presidents and prime ministers of the countries where the prisons were based didn't know that there were secret CIA prisons in their countries. So the CIA can make people disappear in that respect.
"They can kill people and just bury them in some crazy foreign land, and nobody would ever know. But if you're a CIA officer, or better yet, let's say you are a KGB officer and you wanna defect, the CIA will give you a completely new identity, more money than you can ever count, and you and your family can live happily ever after, you know, under the name John Smith and nobody would be the wiser."
So, if you never hear from John or I again, then we've probably been 'disappeared'.
James Moorhouse