S1E2 The New Recruit

THE BLURB: After a graduate class professor recruits John, he throws himself into a mystifying series of tests all seemingly designed to trip up his desire to become a spy for America. How exactly does an institution like the CIA train people to spy for it? Welcome to your first class! SHOW NOTES For more great podcasts like Dead Drop, please visit https://costardandtouchstone.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:23Speaker 01

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• 1:30Speaker 03

  This podcast, it's a Coster and Touchstone production.

• 1:39John Kiriakou?

  Hi, I'm John Kiriakou. Welcome to Dead Drop. Before we get down to business, a little housekeeping. First of all, I want to thank you for listening. The relationship between storyteller and storytelly is incredibly symbiotic. Where would we be without each other? It really is an honor having you at the other end of these sound waves. So, thank you. If you're enjoying the podcast, would you please do us the kindness of making that fact known? When you like, subscribe to, share, or comment on podcasts that please you, it really does help the podcast find more listeners. So if you wouldn't mind, we'd be incredibly appreciative.

• 2:22John Kiriakou?

  As I've said here, spies are human beings first and foremost. The kind of human being we are, good, bad, or indifferent, will usually dictate a lot of what we're like as spies. In our last episode, we left off at the moment of my recruitment into the CIA. I had written a psychological evaluation of my boss at the labor union where I worked, documenting and analyzing his racist, sociopathic behavior. My paper came back with an A grade and a note from my professor saying, "Please see me." So, I went to his tiny office, and there, he told me a secret. I was in a program called the Legislative Affairs Program, but my focus was on foreign policy analysis.

• 3:06John Kiriakou?

  And I was the only person in the program who did not work on Capitol Hill. I was also the youngest by at least six years. Everybody else was mid-career, looking to make that big jump to staff director or legislative director in some congressman's office or some senator's office. And I was just looking to start my adult life with a master's degree. All of my graduate school classes were in a building called the Hall of States Building on Capitol Hill. It's the same building that houses Fox News, NBC, MSNBC, One American Network,

• 3:47John Kiriakou?

  but on the top are classrooms, and down on the bottom are these little, teeny, tiny offices, no bigger than a cubicle. It was in one of those offices. And he laid it out. "My job is to find people who might fit into the CIA's culture. I believe that you would fit into the CIA's culture. Would you like to be a CIA officer?" If you don't run screaming from the room, they know they've got you. He had read me correctly, indeed. I was very intrigued. I later learned that's called breaking cover. Now, that's illegal today, but in 1988, it was commonplace.

• 4:32John Kiriakou?

  In 1993, Congress passed a law called the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. It created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and it said, "You can't have these old boy networks. Everybody has to have a level playing field. And so if you want to apply to the CIA, you write to them or call them and have them send you an application."

• 4:55John Kiriakou?

  You may or may not remember what a Rolodex is. A Rolodex, back in the days before computers, it was a, it was a collection of little cards, little like two by four cards or three by five, I suppose. And they were on a spool, and so you could write somebody's name and contact information on them. Because we didn't have cell phones, we didn't have computers. When he asked me if I was interested in pursuing this, and I said yes, he started going through his Rolodex, and I remember briefly seeing the name Oliver North Home, and it had a telephone number. I thought to myself, "Who is this guy? That he has Oliver North's home phone number." Oliver North, of course, had been a senior director at the National Security Council,

• 5:39John Kiriakou?

  who was in up to his neck in Iran-Contra and was as famous in the 1980s as anybody in Washington. He finally came to a number, he picks up the phone, he dials the number, and he says, "Bob, this is Jerry," and these were their real names, "I've got a good one for you. Do you have a couple of minutes?" And then he hung up the phone. He scribbles an address on a piece of paper that was in Roslin, Virginia, which is a very close-in neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia, one subway stop from George Washington University. He says, "Go to this address and ask for Bob." So I thanked him, I shook his hand, and I walked out. "Get on the subway, I'm there in 10 minutes."

• 6:22John Kiriakou?

  In my head, I'm thinking, "This is really happening." Now, Dr. Post was always clear. He couldn't wave magic wand and grant a CIA career upon me. He said, "It's up to you. You have to pass the tests. I can facilitate things, but it's up to you." And I said, "I understand. I'm gonna do my best." He changed the course of my life.

• 6:52John Kiriakou?

  I ended up getting hired into the office that Dr. Post created at the CIA, called LDA, Leadership Development Analysis, or later on, the Office of Leadership Analysis. He created a subgroup, a division, called the Political Psychology Division. Once I got hired, and I'm jumping ahead here, but once I got hired, my job was to be Saddam Hussein's intelligence community psychologist. I had to immerse myself in everything Saddam Hussein, so that if the White House called and said, "If we do A, what's Saddam Hussein gonna do?", I could say, "Oh, if you do A, he's gonna do B."

• 7:33Speaker 00

  That's really what it came to. You become the Saddam Whisperer.

• 7:38John Kiriakou?

  So I get on the subway, and I go to Roslyn, and I look at the address. It takes me to a completely nondescript office building that no longer exists. It has since been torn down, and a skyscraper has been built in its place. I went up to the sixth floor, and there was a security guard sitting in a chair next to the office that I had been instructed to go to. The guard says, "You here for Bob?", and I said, "Yes, I am." He said, "Ring the buzzer." So I ring the buzzer, and the door buzzes, and I go in. Well, I can only go into like a six-by-six-foot little entryway. And they did it for security reasons, because the interior door then had a spin lock that looked like it belonged on a bank vault. So I buzzed at that door.

• 8:23John Kiriakou?

  And a secretary, whom in my memory, looked to be 80 years old. She was probably 50. She opens the door a crack, and she says, "Are you here for Bob?" "Yes, I am." She says, "Come in." I go in. I sit down in a seat for a moment, and then this gigantic, 6'5", 350-pound, garrulous, happy, loud guy comes out. "John, how the hell are ya? I'm Bob."

• 8:54John Kiriakou?

  I've thought about this meeting for years. I don't know who Bob was. I don't know if his name was Bob. I mean, I always assumed that it was because Jerry said, "Bob, this is Jerry." I've come to the conclusion that Bob was the actual director of HR for the entire CIA. So this was an incredibly senior officer, reporting literally to the deputy director for administration. My recruiter, Dr. Post, I later learned, was one of the most highly decorated officers in the history of the CIA. Dr. Post had, he had a bachelor's degree in psychology from Yale. He had a master's degree in psychology from Yale.

• 9:36John Kiriakou?

  He had a PhD in psychology from Yale. A PhD in political science from Yale. And an MD from Harvard. Wrote a dozen books on the psychology of world leaders and the psychology of terrorists and was the go-to guy on how to thwart terrorist attacks using psychology. I later learned that what he saw in me, besides the fact that I was halfway intelligent, I was a good writer. That's something I've always been very proud of. I've written eight books. I'm working on my ninth. Writing has always come very easily to me. But another thing that he saw, and I'm not necessarily proud of this, I'm just saying

• 10:20John Kiriakou?

  it as an observation, was that I have what are called sociopathic tendencies. I'm not a sociopath. And he made that very clear when I blew the whistle. He called to congratulate me. He said, "You did the right thing." And I said, "Dr. Post, I've always feared that I'm a sociopath." He said, "You're not a sociopath. That's why you blew the whistle." Now, the difference between a sociopath and someone with sociopathic tendencies is that sociopaths don't have consciences. They're unable to feel guilt. They'll blow right through a polygraph exam because nothing weighs on them. They're impossible to control because they know that they're not going to get tripped up in a polygraph. Someone with sociopathic tendencies does have a conscience.

• 11:04John Kiriakou?

  That conscience does register in a polygraph exam, but they're still willing to work in moral, legal, and ethical gray areas. And I'll give you an example. There was one point in the hiring process where I was in a room with four other applicants, three men and a woman. And the instructor said, "Imagine that you are a CIA case officer, serving overseas, and you get a cable from headquarters telling you that headquarters really needs the latest Indonesian economic data. You've just met the Indonesian Second Secretary for Economic Affairs. Go." So everybody agreed. You go meet the guy, you invite him for a cup of coffee, you invite him for lunch,

• 11:48John Kiriakou?

  you have a great time, you invite him for dinner, you have a great time there, you introduce your wives, the wives hit it off, you spend some weekends together, you're spending plenty of money, you find out that he likes fishing, so you charter a boat, you go out deep sea fishing, he has a great time, he mentions to you that he's never been in a helicopter, so you buy everybody a helicopter tour of the capital city. You're having an awesome time. You do this for six months, and you come to the conclusion that he is not recruitable. You can't identify any vulnerabilities. So what do you do? Headquarters really needs the data. What do you do? One guy raises his hand, he said, "You have to double down.

• 12:30John Kiriakou?

  Bring him in closer, spend more money on him. Keep going, keep doing what you're doing, maybe it's gonna take another six months." Another guy raises his hand. Maybe you get the wives involved, maybe the wives become even closer, you can work it through them. One or two other people had ideas. Finally, I raise my hand. You break into the embassy and you steal it. And the instructor says, "That's exactly what you do. You break into the embassy and steal it." Okay, look, a normal person is not going to advocate breaking into a foreign embassy and stealing classified documents, but someone with sociopathic tendencies will. It's a means to an end. And remember, we all believed deeply that we were the good guys.

• 13:15John Kiriakou?

  Most people actually can't color outside the lines. Their brains just won't allow them to do it. And that's why so many people wash out of the training. "Ah, this is not what I thought it was gonna be. I thought it was gonna be all shooting and car chases. They want me to betray friendships and they want me to lie to people." Mike Pompeo, who was the CIA director for a couple of years and then Secretary of State, famously said, wherever it was he said at the American Enterprise Institute, or the Brookings Institute, or whatever it was, that, you know, "We lie, we cheat, we steal, and then we go to work the next day and do it all over again." Yeah, that's the job. He got a chuckle out of it and a really bad Facebook meme, but the truth is, that's

• 13:57John Kiriakou?

  exactly what a CIA operations officer does every single day. For democracy, for the country, for the American people, to keep our country safe. Bob talked to me for five minutes, and he says, "You know what? I like you. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go to George Washington University Medical School Auditorium Saturday morning at 8 o'clock. Don't be late. You're gonna take some tests, alright?" And he puts out his hand, and I shook his hand, he slaps me on the back, and I walk out. And I thought, "I like that guy. I don't have any idea who he is, but I like him." So Saturday morning, my wife dropped me off at the George Washington University Medical School Auditorium. My wife knew almost nothing about what I was doing. My wife was a ballet teacher.

• 14:42John Kiriakou?

  It was traumatic enough that she had to move from Warren, Ohio, to Washington, DC. Moving to the big city was like a punch in the face. But now, I'm applying for a job that I really can't talk about. She knew I was applying for a job at the CIA, and that was it. That was the extent of what I was able to tell her. I honestly believe that she believed that eventually she could convince me to move back to Ohio and sell life insurance with her cousin Dean, which she would bring up with regularity. And I told her that I would rather cut my own throat than move back home. I said, "Look, my life is here, our life is here.

• 15:27John Kiriakou?

  It's gonna either remain here or take us overseas." She accepted that for a while, but not really, not really. I think that she secretly hoped the whole thing would just fall apart. She liked going to the little window at the back of the grocery store that doubled as the local post office and chat with the lady there. You know, living an ordinary life. Me, on the other hand, well, I wanted to be out in the world. Meeting with presidents and senators and kings and prime ministers.

• 15:58John Kiriakou?

  We were both Greek. We met at a Greek wedding and our parents pushed us into each other. She's great for you, he's great for you. You guys need to get married. When we got engaged, I was 22, too young, and so was she. And we had literally nothing in common, other than the fact that we were both Greek. That was it. She drops me off at the GW Medical School Auditorium. There were easily 250, 300 people there to take the tests in the auditorium. The proctors told us that there were three tests we were gonna have to take. The first one was a multiple choice current events test. It was laughably easy. I remember saying to friends afterwards, "You don't even have to read the paper.

• 16:43John Kiriakou?

  If you just happen to walk past a newspaper box and glance at the headline, you're gonna ace this thing." I remember actually one of the questions. It said, "Andreas Papandreou is the prime minister of..." A: Bangladesh, B: Russia, C: Canada, D: Greece. You've gotta be kidding me. And people are like scratching their heads. I see them erasing their answers. Come on, people. So I just blew right through that. The next test was a fold-out map of the world with none of the countries identified. I was always a map nut when I was a kid. You just had to write the names of all the countries on the map.

• 17:25John Kiriakou?

  I remember having like momentary trouble with some of those West African countries. Sotomen Princeipe, Ghana, Upper Volta was becoming Burkina Faso at the time and whatever. I aced it. And then we got the third test. It was thousands of questions long. So you had to fill in an oval. Agree or disagree? I enjoy fixing car engines. Ah, disagree. I don't know anything about car. I can change my oil and that's about all I can change. Maybe, maybe a spark plug. I would like to conduct a symphony orchestra. Okay, why not? Sure. And about 300 questions in, it says, I like boxing.

• 18:08John Kiriakou?

  The honest to God's truth is, I just didn't have a position on boxing. But you have to say either agree or disagree. And I thought to myself, you know, I like this Tyson kid who just came out. If I'm flipping through the channels, these were the days when boxing was actually broadcast on TV. If I'm flipping through the channels and Mike Tyson is fighting, yes, okay. I'm gonna watch the Tyson fight. So I think I wrote yes. But then 565 questions later, it says, I like boxing. And I'm thinking, dang it, what did I say the first time? I, I don't remember. I think I said, yes, I think. And then a thousand questions later, it says, I like boxing.

• 18:53John Kiriakou?

  And I'm like, doggone it. Oh, I see what they're doing. They don't care about boxing. They're looking to see if I'm trying to beat the test to make it look like I'm consistent because I really want this job, right? Consistency is the key word. I was the first person to finish the three tests by 45 minutes. And it's because the first two were so easy for me. It very well may have been part of the point, just to see who was confident enough in his or her answers. So I got up and I handed my tests to the proctor. And he goes, are you kidding me? You're done already? And I said, yeah. He said, do you wanna, do you wanna take some time and take a, a second look at things? And I said, no, I don't.

• 19:36John Kiriakou?

  And he said, okay, thanks. And I handed it in. And I remember other people looking up like, that guy can't be finished already. And I walked out and I went to a payphone. I called my wife. She came and picked me up. She said, how'd you do? I said, I have no idea. I'm not sure what they want.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Adam Grant from Ted's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over a hundred dollars off your first year at camtasia pro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 20:30Speaker 00

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• 20:57John Kiriakou?

  Well, a few days later, Bob calls. You blew the door off those exams. It was incredible. Okay, listen, here's what I want you to do. I want you to go to this building in Vienna, Virginia. Here's the address. So there are some people there. They're going to need to talk to you. The next Tuesday at 10 o'clock, I drive to this equally nondescript, completely unmarked building in Vienna, Virginia. Just a normal two-story office building that you would drive by a million times and never pay any attention to. I ring the buzzer and a woman came and let me in. She says, welcome, please have a seat. Well, there are three people already sitting there on one side of a table. So I go to the other side of the table and I sit down and I said, good morning.

• 21:42John Kiriakou?

  They said, good morning. There's no reason for us to exchange names. That's irrelevant, one of them says. You should know that I'm a psychiatrist, my colleagues are respectively, a psychologist, and an anthropologist. I said, "Okay," having no idea what that's supposed to mean for me. And I'm just sitting there like smiling at them. "Okay, well now what?" And then one of them says, "Describe your relationship with your mother." "Oh, well, I have a close relationship with my mother. She was a terrific mother, very nurturing, loving. My parents," I said, "are deeply in love with each other. It's really a great house to have grown up in." And then the next one says, "Was your father the disciplinarian in the family?"

• 22:26John Kiriakou?

  And I remember smiling and saying, "No," I said, "my dad's, my dad's a big, strong guy, but he's a really soft-hearted guy. If he were to want to discipline us, he would be afraid of hurting us or making us cry. So no, he really wasn't the disciplinarian. When we would be bad, he would take off his belt, like he was gonna whip us with the belt, and he would just take the tip of the belt and kind of tap it on us, and then we would laugh. So, no, he wasn't the disciplinarian." And then one of them says, "Have you ever betrayed a friendship?" And I said, and I remember the way I said it, "Ooh, I hope not. I don't think so, but let me think about it for a second." And the psychiatrist said, "No, no, that's the response we were looking for." One of them said, "We're gonna need for you to go into the next room.

• 23:12John Kiriakou?

  There's someone in there who's gonna want to take your blood, your hair, and your piss." So I go into this next room, and there was a nurse in there. She literally pulled hairs out of my head with the roots. And then she took my blood, and I had to pee in a cup. And then I left, and I went home, and my wife excitedly said, "Well, how did it go?" I said, "I have no idea. I don't know what they wanted from me. These questions didn't make any sense." A week passes, and Bob calls, and he says, "Oh my God, you aced those tests. They loved you." I said, "Great, Bob, I don't know what they want me to say." He said, "Look, they want honest people, not perfect people, honest people. So just keep doing what you're doing."

• 23:56John Kiriakou?

  "Next up," he says, "the dreaded polygraph." I am telling you, I sweated this out for weeks, to the point where I went into what we used to call the Yellow Pages, back of the phone book, and I looked up private polygraphers. So at least I could get an idea of what it felt like to be strapped to a chair. I was afraid of failing the polygraph only because I was nervous, not because I was being untruthful. It is not only possible to fail a polygraph because of nerves, it's actually quite common. So I went back to Dr. Post. I said, "Dr. Post, everything is going great, but I have the polygraph next, and I'm a nervous wreck." He said, "Okay, I'm gonna get you through it. So here's what you do. They're gonna sit you in a chair.

• 24:40John Kiriakou?

  The polygrapher is sitting about a foot and a half behind you, so you can't see him. And then they're gonna put sensors on your ankles, around your belly, around your chest, blood pressure cuffs on an arm, and on your fingertips. Here's how you get through it. By being completely honest, by answering each question only with yes or no, answering that question quickly, and by God, don't think about what it might feel like to steal something worth more than $50 when they say, "Have you ever stolen anything worth more than $50?" And he said, "Here's the trick that's gonna win the day for you. You're gonna be in a small room. The walls are all painted white, but invariably, there's gonna be a speck on the wall.

• 25:25John Kiriakou?

  Maybe it's a pinhole, or a nail hole, or a scuff mark. But I want you to zero in, like a laser, on that speck. And when they ask you the question, answer immediately, 'Have you ever stolen anything worth more than $50?' 'No,' and just look at the speck." He said, "I had a friend from Harvard Medical School, who I thought would be an absolutely fantastic CIA psychiatrist. And they asked him, 'Have you ever stolen anything worth more than $50?' And he sat there and pondered it. What would it feel like to steal something, knowing that stealing is wrong? Well, needless to say, he failed that polygraph in 30 minutes. And they never called him again. Don't be that guy."

• 26:11John Kiriakou?

  Be honest and focus on the spec. That's it. Just answer the question. A couple of weeks later, I go in for the polygraph. I didn't realize it at the time, but I really lucked out with the polygrapher that I got. Rather than a grizzled gnarly old man, who I got three years later for my first re-poly, I got a young black woman in her, I'd say, late twenties. She was so respectful and so soft spoken. And she knew I had never taken a polygraph exam before, so she explained to me what she was gonna do. And it was exactly what Dr. Post had told me was going to happen. I'm hooked up to the machine and my heart is absolutely racing.

• 26:56John Kiriakou?

  She says very softly, "I'm going to unhook you for a moment because I'm afraid you may have a stroke. So I want you to just relax. You're not having any problem." She said, "I want you to pass. Just keep that in mind, okay? Take a deep breath and here we go." Sure enough, I see a spec on the wall right in front of me. And I thought, "God bless Jerry Post." So I'm looking at the spec. There's a pre-interview. So they say, "Have you ever stolen anything worth more than $50?" You say, "No." "Have you ever stolen anything worth more than $20?" "No." "Have you ever stolen anything?" I said, "No."

• 27:37John Kiriakou?

  I mean, the only thing I ever stole in my life, I was six, I took a toy pistol from a neighbor's house. I went over to play with a kid there. When I went home, my mom is like, "Where'd you get that?" I said, "It's Brian's." And we walked back to Brian's house and gave it back to him. That's literally the only thing I had ever stolen in my life, and I was six years old. So what they say in the polygraph is, "Other than what we've talked about, have you ever stolen anything?" Have you ever had sex with a man? No. Have you ever had sex with a boy? As in, childhood experimentation? No. In the pre-interview, how much money do you normally spend a month on your credit cards? And mind you, this is the eighties, so these numbers would be inflated now. But I said, "I never spend more than $500 a month, and I pay it all off."

• 28:22John Kiriakou?

  And so, most of these questions were related to lifestyle. In fact, I learned later, they call it the lifestyle polygraph. Later on in your career, it's the counterintelligence polygraph. They care about the vulnerability. When you're an applicant, the vulnerabilities are, are you secretly gay? Are you deeply in debt? Are you a drug addict? Are you addicted to gambling? That's what they're worried about. I finished in about 45 minutes. And she said, "I'm going to show my supervisor the little heartbeat thing on this long, long piece of paper that's like 100 feet long, and I'll be right back." So I knew what they were doing, and they were just looking to see how I would react. There's a two-way mirror, so I just sat there.

• 29:07John Kiriakou?

  And then she came back in about 10 minutes later, and she said, "You're reacting to one of the questions." And I remember thinking to myself, "God, please don't let it be the gay question." Because how in blazes am I gonna explain this to my wife and to my friends? Right? And I said, "Well, what am I reacting to? I've never even tried weed. I never drank to excess. I don't do drugs. I don't steal. I don't whore around. I don't gamble. I don't do anything." So she said, "You're reacting to the question about credit card debt." And I said, "Are you kidding me?" I said, "Let's do it again." So she hooked me back up, and she asked me the credit card question. "Do you ever find yourself unable to pay your credit cards?" "No." And I passed. A week later, sure enough, Bob calls.

• 29:52John Kiriakou?

  "Buddy, you're in, and there are already three offices fighting over you." And I said, "You're kidding me!" "Here's the next step. In two weeks, I want you to come in, in your best suit and tie, and you're gonna have three interviews that are gonna change the course of the rest of your life."

• 30:12Speaker 00

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• 31:09John Kiriakou?

  So I said, "What are the offices that are interested in me?" He said, "Two in the Directorate of Intelligence and one in the Directorate of Operations." In the Directorate of Intelligence, the North Korea Political Analysis Branch. So in the Directorate of Intelligence, one of them was the North Korea Political Analysis Branch. I could find North Korea on a map. I knew that Kim Il-sung was the dictator back in those days, the grandfather of the current one. And that's the extent of my knowledge of North Korea. The other was to be the Iraq Analyst in the Office of Leadership Analysis, which Dr. Post had created. And then the third was to be an Operations Officer, also called a Case Officer, also called a Category B Officer, Cat B Officer,

• 31:54John Kiriakou?

  in the Office of Near Eastern Operations. I blew that interview in the first 10 seconds. They said, "How does the prospect of spending the rest of your adult life in the Middle East sound to you?" And I said, "It sounds awesome, but my wife would either leave me or kill herself." And they cut me immediately. "Okay, thanks for coming in." I was like, "Oh, shit. Thanks for your time." Hate to say, I meant it. I'm already pushing the envelope because she doesn't like this CIA idea in the first place. But then to say, "Honey, great news. We're moving to Yemen." Yeah, that wasn't gonna work. They did me a favor. So then I went to North Korea and they were like, "What do you know about North Korea?"

• 32:39John Kiriakou?

  And I said, "Literally, nothing." "I'm willing to learn." "I understand how important it is to American foreign policy, "but I wouldn't come in here with any kind of expertise." Then I went to the Office of Leadership Analysis. "What do you know about the Middle East?" I said, "I know a lot about the Middle East." "I studied Islam under Said Hussein Nasr, "one of the greatest thinkers in modern times on Islamic theology." "I studied Middle Eastern politics under Bernie Reich, "who not only was one of the most important writers on contemporary Middle Eastern politics, "he was also at George Washington University." Bernie was so highly respected that he was actually called into the State Department at one point in 1982 to help head off a coup in Saudi Arabia. "And I know a lot about Iraq," I said.

• 33:25John Kiriakou?

  And I got a letter in the mail a couple of weeks later, saying, I still have it, saying, "Congratulations. "The organization with which you have been interviewing hereby offers you the following position." Instead of the SEAL of the CIA, it just says "Office of Personnel" at the top. There's no indication at all that this letter came from the CIA. I negotiated a start date, which was January the 7th. It was really January the 6th, but that was a Sunday, 1990. Again, wearing my very best suit, I went into the CIA auditorium to start the onboarding process. That Langley, just outside what's called the old headquarters building, OHB, is a domed theater. That's the CIA's event space.

• 34:09John Kiriakou?

  That's where all the new hires were brought to onboard. As funny as it might sound, and maybe as silly as it might sound, being a junior junior, the junior-most employee, I had to park out in the north 40, literally a third of a mile, a half a mile away. And I would walk all the way around the compound so that I could come in the front door of the old building and walk across the seal that's in the floor and see the statue of Patrick Henry and to read "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free", that's on a plaque, and to pass the Wall of Honor, which honors all of the CIA employees killed in the line of duty, 40% of whom are undercover even in death.

• 34:52John Kiriakou?

  I have chills thinking about it. All these years later, that's how important it was to me. I made it. But the funny thing is, they told me on that very first day, "You're gonna have to start telling people that that CIA thing didn't work out for you, and you decided to go to the State Department instead." My wife knew that I worked at the CIA and had no idea what I was doing there. That created a problem that became so big that it cost me my marriage. Not right away. She was willing to sort of play the game with me. But I'd go home at the end of a day, and she'd say, "How was work?" I'd say, "Great. What'd you do?" "Nothing." "Well, who'd you see?" "No one."

• 35:37John Kiriakou?

  "Nothing? You just sat there?" "I wrote a lot." "About what?" "The news." And I'd say, "How was your day?" That was it. That's all I could tell her. Now, when I was sitting in that auditorium that first day, it was revelatory to me. There was a man on my left and a woman on my right. We were all the same age. And we were friends all through my 15 years at the CIA. This sort of encapsulates what the CIA is. The woman on my right was a recent graduate of the Falls Church, Virginia Academy of Beauty. She did makeup and hair and whatever. And they made her a master disguise maker. She and I did an operation together. 10 years later, she was brilliant. We both won awards for it.

• 36:20John Kiriakou?

  I got a medal where the Director of Disguises flew out to Athens to give me a medal for this operation I did because of her genius. The guy on my left, I said, "So, so what do you do? What'd they hire you for?" He said, "Oh, I draw a cartoon for the college newspaper at Georgetown." I said, "You're a cartoonist?" And he said, "Yeah." I said, "That's cool. What are you gonna do here?" They made him into a master forger. 10 years later, he and I worked on a case together in which he forged something. I can't tell you what it is, but I was holding it up, and I was holding up an actual one. And I was like, "Dude," I say, "you are freaking brilliant." And he said, "Who'd have thought, right?"

• 37:04John Kiriakou?

  And I said, "Yeah, for all of us. Who'd have thought?" I was in a conversation once, we were getting ready to attack Iraq in 2003. All the usual cast of characters are there. I was there because I was the deputy director's executive assistant by then. And there's this guy that I didn't recognize. It was his turn to brief the director. And the director, George Tennant, didn't recognize him and said, "Who are you?" And he said, "I'm your meteorologist." "You're my meteorologist?" "Yes, sir." And George was kind of a rough, crude guy, and he said, "What the fuck are you talking about?" "Well, sir, I have bachelor's and master's degrees in meteorology from Penn State University, which is acknowledged as the best meteorology school in America. And what are you here to tell me?

• 37:47John Kiriakou?

  The skies are gonna be clear in Baghdad tomorrow, and there's no chance of a sandstorm." And I was like, "Holy shit." "We can do everything here." "Everything."

• 37:59John Kiriakou?

  In time, of course, I would learn how extensive everything could be. Ah, but we have so much story yet to tell before we get there. On the next episode of Dead Drop, we'll get into the training process. How does an institution train a person to spy? It turns out, the training process is really the vetting process, continued, albeit in a different form. Those above are always looking for weaknesses in those below, and for reasons to call them before they get out into the field. But the training process also delivers small, sustained doses of all the James Bond and John le Carré espionage experience that made us want to be spies to begin with.

• 38:44John Kiriakou?

  So there's that. What I hope you'll begin to appreciate is how spies aren't so much built as they are layered. Like I said, we have so much more story to tell. With that in mind, I want to update you on our upcoming release schedule. As we hope you appreciate, this podcast is, above all, a labor of love. Like all labors of love, they take time, if you want to do them the right way. Our ultimate goal is to put episodes out on a weekly basis for as long as we have a story to tell. But for now, in order to make every episode the best we possibly can, we're going to release new episodes every two weeks. That's even more reason to follow us and to subscribe.

• 39:27John Kiriakou?

  That way, you'll know exactly when new episodes drop. Even better, tell your friends, if they're really your friends. They'll remind you that we're coming.

• 39:37John Kiriakou?

  Until then, thanks again for listening. It really does mean a lot. I'm John Kiriakou. Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costart and Touchstone produce the podcast and John Kiriakou, Alan Katz and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.

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