... ‘we lied, we cheated, we stole’

In a rare moment of honesty, Mike Pompeo admitted to an audience that the CIA trains employees to “lie, cheat and steal.” While he seemed to find the whole thing funny, not everyone is amused, as RT found out.

The CIA often asks American citizens and international leaders to believe some extraordinarily high-stakes claims. From warning countries around the world not to invest in Huawei technology ‘compromised’ by Chinese state security funding to asserting that Moscow meddled in the elections and pushing Trump to expel Russian diplomats, it would seem that maintaining integrity and confidence would be a high priority for the intelligence agency.

According to former CIA director and current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, however, that notion is laughable.

“I was a CIA director, we lied, we cheated we stole… like, we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment,” Pompeo told an audience in College Station, Texas earlier this month amid self-amused chuckles.

While his audience seemed to get a rise out of the secretary’s comment, RT interviewed a few Americans who found it less funny and more disturbing. Predictably, that sentiment was shared by people from other parts of the world as well, who saw Pompeo’s claims about the “glorious American experiment” as little more than “bulls**t.”