S1E9 The Hothead

THE BLURB: The very things that made Athens a great counter-terrorism assignment also made it incredibly dangerous. John's intensive training was designed to make him paranoid. It succeeded. Not all threats were terrorism. Some were just local criminals being criminals. Still, living in Athens was mostly a joy. There was ample good food and culture. But the threat of violence was both persistent and pervasive. So was the paranoia. 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

  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 $100 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.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet, like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone, and including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage HMO and PPO organization where the Medicare contract enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:06Alan Katz?

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

• 1:18John Kiriakou?

  I'm John Kiriakou. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tip. Before we fade in on Athens, I want to thank you for listening to this podcast and for liking, subscribing to, commenting on, and sharing it. It makes a huge difference when you do that, and we really do appreciate it. Like spying, podcasting is first and foremost a people business. Okay, then, you ready for Athens? Good, because if you recall from last time, when my wife at the time, Joanne, and I, two kids in tow, arrived in Athens, Athens wasn't ready for us. What I mean is, the American Embassy in Athens wasn't ready for us. They hadn't found us a place to live.

• 1:59John Kiriakou?

  Now, if it had been just me, I'd have been happy in a guest house someplace. But as the State Department knew, it wasn't just me. It was my wife, plus a six-year-old, plus a three-year-old. We required a bit more organization. After a few nights in a hotel, they found us a small two-bedroom apartment that was too small for us and certainly couldn't handle our household effects once they arrived by ship. And so I ended up making an enemy of the embassy housing officer. Weeks would pass and I wouldn't hear from him. So one Saturday, I just went to a real estate office and I said, "I need to find a house. It's gotta have four bedrooms." And the guy found me a house with five bedrooms. I went into the housing office at the embassy and I said, "I found a house.

• 2:44John Kiriakou?

  Negotiate the contract." I knew what the budget was. This was well within the budget. It had a one-car garage, oil heat, five bedrooms on five levels. Each level was small, but it was a very tall house, very modern. I had to approach the real estate hunt with a real eye toward my counterterrorism training. This is something that the Mormon guy, it just would never have occurred to him. In fact, the first thing he said to me that first day was, "Well, there's a house that we have on Dileani Street." And I said, "Dileani Street? That's not the Nordin house, is it?" And he said, "Oh, yeah, do you know it?" "Yeah, I know that he was blown to a thousand pieces in front of it and they found his head

• 3:28John Kiriakou?

  on the roof of the next-door house. So, no, I'm not living in the Nordin murder house." Can you imagine? "Well, we don't have any other housing available right now." I said, "Well, let's go find something." And he just didn't bother, so I went and found something. This house was in the northern Athens suburb of Gephisia, which is halfway up the mountain, so it's about 10 degrees cooler than what it is in central Athens. The weather in Athens is very much like what it is in Charlotte, North Carolina. Mild winters, scorching summers. It's usually not as humid as it is in Charlotte, but man, it gets hot. And it's unusual to have snow.

• 4:11John Kiriakou?

  And when you do have snow, you're probably not going to get more than an inch or so. But it was more comfortable up there and it was very green, very pleasant. I, I loved this house for a couple of reasons. First of all, the architecture was very modern. No room was square. They were all in these odd perpendicular shapes. And then sort of stacked on top of one another. I really liked it. Every room had a balcony, but every balcony was facing in a different direction. I loved that too. It had a relatively small side yard, but it had five fruit trees, all producing fruit. So it had a, what had to be a 200-year-old olive tree, which I made very good use of.

• 4:54John Kiriakou?

  It had pears, plums, oranges, and lemons. And the plums were the best plums I've ever had in my life. Like I said, the olive tree in the garden produced amazing purple-colored olives. I mentioned to this guy at the embassy, "I've got this olive tree in my yard. It's producing like thousands of olives." He said, "Oh yeah, yeah. Most of us have olive trees. There's a thing you can do." He says, "Call this number. It's a company, an olive production company. They'll offer you one of two deals. You can pay them to come and harvest your olives. And you can press them into oil, you can have them brined and eat them. Or they'll take all of them and they'll give you 25% of everything that they press."

• 5:39John Kiriakou?

  I said, "Yeah, let's do that." So the whole two years I was in Athens, we used olive oil from the olives in our yard for all of our cooking. It was fantastic. I still think about that olive tree. And there was one day, Joanne was off on one of the islands, her ancestral island of Chios. I was there by myself. The plums were at peak. And these were odd little plums. They were the size of a shooter marble, you know, the big marbles? So you could just pop them in your mouth. The seed was little, teeny, tiny seed. You just spit it out. I think, and I'm not exaggerating, I think I ate 200 plums that day. I probably nearly went into diabetic shock, but man, those plums were good. Off my own tree. And then there was a tortoise that lived in the yard.

• 6:22John Kiriakou?

  It's called an Attic tortoise. They're all over Athens. And now, I never noticed them before, but now every time I go to Greece, I see them everywhere. But yeah, and he would eat the plums. I'd have to wrestle this guy for the plums. He liked them as much as I did. As I've mentioned, my marriage to Joanne was crumbling. She didn't want to be anywhere except Ohio, where she came from. But Athens, of course, was acceptable. And the house I found for us, that raised the experience even more for Joanne. She was thrilled being in that house. We were walking distance to any number of restaurants. We were walking distance to the grocery store. And then there was the sweet shop called Zajaro Plastio. They sell desserts and baklava and stuff like that. It was exactly what she wanted.

• 7:07John Kiriakou?

  And then in addition to that, two of her mother's three brothers lived a 10-minute drive away in Athens. And Joanne inherited her grandmother's 600-year-old stone house in Hios that was actually a part of the wall that surrounded the village that they built to protect themselves from the Turks. As things started off, she said, "I'd like to take the kids to the island on the weekends so they can get to know their cousins and learn to speak Greek." And I said, "That's a great idea. This is going to work out very well." It ended up becoming a serious problem. We'll get to the shit soon enough. But before we get there, let's celebrate being in Athens.

• 7:48John Kiriakou?

  A City will definitely cover an incredible detail in A Spy's Guide 2. That's the podcast we're working on that will approach travel from a spy's perspective.

• 8:00John Kiriakou?

  There's an old saying that there's no such thing as bad food in Athens. Let me tell you how true that is. I recruited a very sensitive source, who was a member of a terrorist group. He was so sensitive that it wasn't safe for us to meet in Athens. So when I met him, I had to meet him on the west coast of the country. Well, that's like a three-and-a-half-hour drive every time I want to meet him. And that's with John driving 105 miles an hour. We would do that because nobody knew him on the west coast. So I'd make a weekend out of it. There are a lot of vineyards out there. This would be my cover story. I'd take a tour of a vineyard, I'd go to a wine tasting, I'd go to a fancy restaurant and drink more wine.

• 8:44John Kiriakou?

  And then I'd buy a case and take it home with me. Outside the city of Corinth, there's modern Corinth and ancient Corinth. And there's the Corinth Canal, which I've always been fascinated by. Right outside Corinth, there's a truck stop. And it looks like any other truck stop you've ever been to in the United States or any other country. There are all these trucks lined up getting gas. And there's kind of a greasy spoon that you can get dinner in. Well, it's an old Greek tradition in every restaurant. They invite you to go into the kitchen to lift up the lids of the pots and see what they're making that day. It's offensive if they don't let you do that. Cyprus, they do that as well. You literally lift the lids off the pots.

• 9:26John Kiriakou?

  They have a big spoon and you can stir it and look to see and say, yeah, I'll have some of that. I'll have some of that and some of this. I really loved it. And so I go to this truck stop. Of course, it's all Greek food, but you expect very low quality, mass-produced Greek food. That food was as delicious as any Greek food my mother or grandmother made. I couldn't believe it. That's when I came to the realization, there really is no such thing as bad food here. It's incredible no matter where you go. You can spend a hundred dollars at a fancy restaurant, or you can spend 250 at the truck stop. It's gonna be delicious. Every reason to be happy, except... I will admit to you that my intensive counterterrorism training made me paranoid.

• 10:11John Kiriakou?

  And that was kind of the point of the training. They want you to be so paranoid that the bad guys are out to get you, that when the bad guys actually are out to get you, you're gonna see them and you're gonna be able to evade them or to defend yourself successfully. So Joanne was in paradise. And I'm obsessed with the idea of somebody trying to kill me on the way home from work. So I took things very, very seriously. I left at a different time every day. I took a different route every day. I never established a pattern. I had told Joanne as much as I could about 17 November, well in advance of going to Greece. I'm sure that she thought I was exaggerating. In the end, she really didn't care one way or the other. She knew she wasn't gonna be a target.

• 10:55John Kiriakou?

  17 November didn't care about that. She knew how well-trained I was. She knew that I was very heavily armed. I carried a 9mm in a tear-away fanny pack on my waist. I had three magazines with me. And I carried a Smith & Wesson Snupnose 38 on my ankle that had six rounds in it. Altogether, I had, I think it was 47 rounds, is what I was able to squeeze in. She wasn't concerned about the reasons why I had to be armed. She thought that we were all exaggerating the threat. And to tell you the truth, on my first day on the job, my boss presented me with a Smith & Wesson brand buck knife that I kept in my back pocket.

• 11:39John Kiriakou?

  His words, "Just in case things go to shit." It never left my back pocket. I still have it 27 years later. "Just in case things turn to shit." It's in my nightstand. So, we got there, and she was in her glory. She really was. We spent so many nights with her cousins and uncles and going out to restaurants. In hindsight, the very thing every spy wishes they had before they started a mission. I can see how so many of the things I really liked about my job were the very same things that were slowly undermining my marriage. I couldn't tell my wife the truth because, well, secrets. And because if I had told her the absolute truth,

• 12:24John Kiriakou?

  she would never have gone to Athens, and that wouldn't have helped our relationship either. As a result, she walked around oblivious to the threat, or thought I was exaggerating it. And every time she did that, I became a little more resentful. Our marriage was doomed. Perhaps sensing that on some level, I plunged even more deeply into the all-consuming daily grind of counterterrorism business.

• 12:48John Kiriakou?

  My day-to-day work was to recruit spies to steal secrets. I inherited a couple of agents, which was great. It gave me a start, but the rest was up to me, and I had to start from scratch. And like I said, it's one thing to recruit somebody that you meet at a diplomatic chit-chat session or a cocktail party. It's an entirely different thing to meet somebody who is going to be willing to infiltrate a terrorist group at risk to himself and to report back to you. The question really is where do you go looking for people like that? You go to a variety of different places. I have to be careful how I say this.

• 13:31John Kiriakou?

  There were certain neighborhoods in Athens where dangerous people hang out. Maybe they're anarchists, maybe they're just common criminals, maybe they're terrorists. Walking into a place like that as a 34-year-old Greek, unshaven, blue jeans... On my second or third day in the office, my chief took me to the Greek intelligence service to introduce me to the chief of that intelligence service. It was all very, very friendly. I was dressed in another terrific suit because I thought this is a formal occasion, he's a four-star general, I have to show respect. We all sat down, he's got a big smile on his face, I have a big smile on my face, he

• 14:13John Kiriakou?

  welcomes me back to Ipa Tridamas, our fatherland, and he says to me, "Boy, you look Greek." And I said, "Yeah, I am Greek, actually. Everybody's from Rhodes, so my blood is 100% Greek." And he said, "Yeah, well, I can tell that you're not Greek. Do you know how I can tell?" And I said, "I don't." He said, "No Greek would ever wear shoes like that. Those are American shoes." I took that to heart. I made a beeline for a shoe store. I bought all new shoes. And so when it came time to go into these communist neighborhoods or anarchist neighborhoods, I was dressed like a Greek. I was later told that I speak Greek with an Australian accent, and I don't know why that is.

• 14:56John Kiriakou?

  I think that I speak Greek with an American accent, even when I try to cover it. And another thing too, and I've noticed this about myself, my American-accented Greek has become more American the older I've gotten. I don't know why. I would go to these cafes in these really grim parts of town, just trying to fit in and be seen as somebody like, "Oh yeah, I recognize that guy. He comes a couple of times a week." That never really worked for me in terms of identifying a target. We had this thing at the CIA I've mentioned before called the asset acquisition cycle. Spot, assess, develop, recruit.

• 15:39John Kiriakou?

  So I'm looking to spot somebody who might be interesting. I assess their access to information that I want. I develop them by developing a relationship and then I go in for the recruitment. That can take a year, even two years if it's a particularly sensitive target. It can take 10 minutes if you're willing to do what's called a cold pitch, where you just knock on the door, "I'm with the CIA. I know who you are. I want you to work for me and I have lots of money to give you." That almost never worked, almost. What I started doing, and this was the analyst in me, I started going back through these files, thousands of pages of files.

• 16:22John Kiriakou?

  I became such an expert on 17 November that the ambassador would ask me to brief visiting dignitaries in a classified briefing on 17 November. I was the go-to guy for the station chief to brief visiting generals, cabinet members, whoever needed a classified briefing. One of the things that I was looking for specifically, and I found in these files, I was looking for people who the Greeks had arrested at one point or another in the previous 25 years. I didn't even care if they had talked to the cops. I cared whether or not they had gone mute. So if the cops arrest some Greek and they say, "What's your name?" And he doesn't even respond to that.

• 17:07John Kiriakou?

  And he's in jail for the three days that they're allowed to hold him and he never speaks a word, I'm not interested in him. But there was one guy who stood out that the Greeks had told us 25 years earlier, "Eh, we arrested this punk." Because if they didn't talk to Greeks, they're not going to talk to a CIA guy. I found one Greek. He was a communist. He was a street thug, just a punk, a petty criminal, drug addict. And the Greeks had arrested him in the seventies. And when they took him in, they said, "What's your name?" He said, "Fuck you." "What's your name?" "Suck my dick." "What's your name?" "I fuck your mother." That kind of thing. He's actually responding. He's not responding with the answers that they're looking for, but at least he's willing to be engaged.

• 17:52John Kiriakou?

  And so that's how I made my first recruitment. I found his number. I found a coffee shop that he frequented. And I started going there. And I went there a half a dozen times before I finally saw him. I drank my coffee silently. He drank his coffee silently. And finally, he got up and walked out. I said to the waiter, "Who was that guy?" And he said, "Oh, that's George. He comes in here all the time." I said, "You have his number?" And the guy says, "What are you, a cop?" And I said, "Not me. I'm not a cop." And the waiter walked away. So I motioned for my bill. He comes. My bill was like $2, or the equivalent of $2. I handed him back the bill with a 50. I said, "Keep the change if you can remember his phone number."

• 18:37John Kiriakou?

  When he came back with my receipt, it had the phone number written on the back of it. This was a heavily communist neighborhood. This was a neighborhood that didn't like cops, or anybody that looked like a cop, or anybody that reminded them of a cop. They hated anybody in official authority. They would have reacted the same way to somebody from the Ministry of Housing, or whatever. They just hated authority. But he gave me the number. I think he thought I was gay, and I was interested in the guy. And frankly, I didn't care what he thought, so long as I got the number. Of course, I run back to the office and I've got the number in my hand.

• 19:21John Kiriakou?

  Everybody starts to applaud. How'd you do that? But I got the number. I came up with this plan. I was just gonna call and say, hi, I'm a Greek Australian and I own an apartment. Athens had just had an earthquake. A lot of people had cracked walls and cracked floor tiles and whatever. I said, I heard you do some tile work. I need somebody to replace some tile. And he said, yeah, I do some tile work. It's probably good for, you know, the equivalent of 500 bucks. Why don't we meet at this other coffee shop Saturday morning? And he said, okay. One thing led to the other. And to make a long story short, he took the 500 bucks and I got a Snickers bar. And what I mean by I got a Snickers bar.

• 20:06John Kiriakou?

  My boss had this habit in the staff meeting. Whenever somebody would make a recruitment, he would announce the recruitment. Everybody would applaud and he would toss you a Snickers bar. That was my first Snickers bar. I was so excited about that recruitment. I actually sent a classified email to one of my instructors from the farm. And I said, just made my first recruitment. It was exactly like it was in training. That was the best training I ever had in my life. And then I actually cut and pasted the recruitment announcement cable that I had to send into headquarters, saying, yeah, he agreed. And I sent it to my colleagues who had been in the training course with me. I was the first one of the dozen or so of us that actually made a recruitment.

• 20:50John Kiriakou?

  But then that became something that we did, that anytime somebody made a recruitment, we let everybody know in an email and everybody would send hugs and applause back.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  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 ...efficiency. Get over a hundred dollars off your first year at CamtasiaPro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet, like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone, and including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at GetHumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO, and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 22:11Alan Katz?

  I'm Alan Katz.

• 22:12Speaker 04

  And I'm GD Finderson.

• 22:14Alan Katz?

  In our new podcast, What Makes Us Laugh: A Serious Look at Comedy, we're going to do exactly that.

• 22:20Speaker 04

  Take a serious look at the things that make us laugh, both personally and culturally.

• 22:24Alan Katz?

  We'll talk about the whole discovery process, how we found our comedy inspirations.

• 22:29Speaker 04

  And how they inspired us to create comedy of our own.

• 22:31Alan Katz?

  Favorite movies, favorite TV shows, favorite stand-ups.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  And our favorite audiences. But more importantly, we'll explore why our favorites are our favorites and what that means about us.

• 22:41Alan Katz?

  Here's a sampling of what you'll hear. You were a minister and then a stripper.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  You had to pay for school somehow. I'm so damaged, I don't know why I'm not depressed.

• 22:52Alan Katz?

  Groucho Marx was a huge, huge early influence.

• 22:56Speaker 04

  However, Captain Spalding, the African explorer.

• 22:58Alan Katz?

  If you can't laugh at yourself, that's probably the tell that you don't have a sense of humor.

• 23:04Speaker 04

  My mother punished us, as soon as she closed the door, my brother looked at me and goes, "Make me laugh, I'mma punch you in the face."

• 23:11Alan Katz?

  The comedian is the person whose bullshit meter is cranked to 11.

• 23:15Speaker 04

  I was 14 years old. It was the first time I ever literally fell into the aisle laughing, onto a guy who had fallen out of his chair laughing from the other side of the aisle.

• 23:28Speaker 04

  That's what makes us laugh, a serious look at comedy.

• 23:30Alan Katz?

  Find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costardandtouchstone.com.

• 23:38John Kiriakou?

  On my very first day, I had been in the embassy for an hour. One of my new colleagues came up to me and said, are you the new guy? I said, yes. He said, well, we've got a walk-in. He's all yours. A walk-in is somebody who literally walks in to an American embassy and tells whoever happens to be manning the front gate, I have information that I need to pass to a CIA officer. They're never sent directly to a CIA officer. They're first sent to a State Department security officer. And the security officer debriefs them, takes photocopies of whatever they happen to have in their pockets, including their identification, and then refers him or her to whoever happens

• 24:22John Kiriakou?

  to have walk-in duty that day. We change by the day, or by the week, or whoever's available, or whatever. So this guy, he was a young guy in his late twenties, and he claimed to be a member of a very well-known Arab terrorist group. He said that he had been directed by a foreign embassy, an embassy of a country that is a first-tier enemy of the United States. He had been instructed to blow up the American embassy, but he was having second thoughts. He didn't want to do it. He didn't want the blood on his hands, and he wanted to expose the plot to a CIA officer. I didn't believe a word he said. I believed he was from the terrorist group and had been directed by the embassy.

• 25:06John Kiriakou?

  But there are several different kinds of walk-ins. First of all, 95% of walk-ins are crazy people. 95%. The CIA has actually done studies on it. 95% of them want you to stop beaming waves at their heads, or stop communicating with them through the filling that they have in their molar, or why are you MK-ultrying them and injecting them while they're sleeping with LSD, or whatever. They're all nuts. But the remaining 5% are a mattering of probes, which is what I believe this guy was, where they're actually sent in by an enemy embassy just to see how far inside the building they can get.

• 25:52John Kiriakou?

  Is it inside the hardline? The hardline is the the heavily armored door that we have. How many of the Marines are carrying weapons? Is the glass bulletproof or bombproof? Where are the security cameras? They're scouting so that if they decide to launch a terrorist attack against an American embassy, they can identify the weak point. They're going to hire somebody who has a good memory and can remember all these details and who has good observational skills. And somebody who's a good liar, who can spin a cover story and stick with the cover story. I went down, I actually put on a disguise and went downstairs, hid my badge because it had my picture on it,

• 26:36John Kiriakou?

  introduced myself to the guy with a made up name. And I said, what can I do for you? And he told me this, what I believe to be cover story that he had been sent to blow up the embassy, but was having second thoughts. And I said, when are you supposed to carry out this attack? He said, in the next two or three weeks. I said, OK, let's meet tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM in front of the Marriott Hotel. I'll drive by and pick you up. Come alone and we'll have a conversation. And he agreed and he walked out. I didn't want to have that conversation then and there in the embassy because I wanted to draw this guy out. I wanted to see if I could prove or disprove anything that he was telling me about himself.

• 27:18John Kiriakou?

  And frankly, I didn't want him to spend any more time in the embassy for him to be able to identify any possible weaknesses in our security. Get out, we'll talk about this tomorrow in front of the Marriott. Neutral space. He walked out. I wrote a cable to headquarters. I told them what had happened, what we were planning to do. Introduced myself to everybody else on the team and made plans for the next day. The next day, we got together at the embassy, got out early, and it wasn't just, you know, me in the car. It was our security officer driving, my boss in the passenger seat, me

• 27:58John Kiriakou?

  in the backseat. We're all heavily armed, all wearing bulletproof vests. But we also had two guys in the car behind us and another one of my colleagues on a motorcycle behind him. You don't really know what to expect when you're in a situation like this. The training is that you've got to frisk this guy as soon as you encounter him. The whole operation may be just to draw you out, to put a bullet in your head. He was standing there in front of the Marriott. He only saw our car, of course, and I got out of the car. I opened the door for him, but before I did, I said, I have to pat you down. He said, of course. I expected it. I patted him down. Nothing. He gets in the backseat.

• 28:41John Kiriakou?

  I go around to the other side. I get back in the backseat. So we just start driving. He claimed to not speak any English. He claimed to only speak Arabic. And so the entire conversation was in Arabic. And then I would translate for my boss. Occasionally, my boss would have a question, which I would then translate into Arabic for the guy. But I did most of the talking. And he would answer. He told me the same story. He was very light on detail, which told me immediately that the whole thing's made up. I was pretty confident pretty quickly that he was a probe. And I should add that of the remaining 5%, some are what we call intelligence peddlers, meaning they actually do have a little nugget of

• 29:25John Kiriakou?

  information. And they come to us and they say, I want money. And you give them $100 or $150. But then they go to the British Embassy, and the French Embassy, and the Russian Embassy, and the Chinese Embassy, and that's a month's salary, selling the same information. And then the remaining 1% are the real McCoy.

• 29:43John Kiriakou?

  The nuclear scientist, the three-star general who took the day off. Somebody really great, who you would never encounter in your day-to-day life. So you have to treat everybody equally, just in case it's that one out of the hundred that's gonna make your career. We're driving all over Athens. He didn't know that we had a car behind us and a motorcycle behind him. I was not recording it. But I'm really good with detail, really good, and I have a fantastic memory. And so I'm gonna be able to write this as soon as I get back to the embassy. Well, the car behind us was not right behind us. It's not, you know, an episode of Kojak where you're six feet off the car you're supposed to be surveilling.

• 30:26John Kiriakou?

  Our car was a block back, and our car saw that the enemy embassy had their guys in a car, and they were right behind us. So we've got surveillance, and counter-surveillance, and counter-counter-surveillance, because the guy in the motorcycle is looking for the possibility of a second car from the enemy embassy. There was no second car, but there were three guys in the surveillance car. Of course, they were all armed. You have to assume that they are. Why wouldn't they be? They'd be idiots if they weren't. And so we are driving all over Athens. It's called a "rolling meeting." He's telling me the same story over and over again, but without the detail necessary

• 31:11John Kiriakou?

  to convince me that the story is true. I'm asking him to tell the story over and over again, because I'm trying to get him to trip up on some of the details. I ended up catching him on something that was important. He initially had introduced himself the day earlier as Mohammed Abdullah. Well, there are about half a billion people out there named Mohammed Abdullah. But then in the car, he slipped and called himself Abdullah Mohammed. I was confident this was all bullshit. But it was dangerous. My boss in the front seat was becoming increasingly frustrated with the fact that the guy just would not hand over detail. Because there was no detail, because the whole thing was made up. Finally, my boss turns in the front seat. Pulls out a gun, puts it right against the guy's cheek.

• 31:56John Kiriakou?

  And the security officer pulls the car over and he says, get the fuck out right now. In English. And the walk-in says, in English. So this is how it ends, huh? And I said, get the fuck out of the car. He gets out and we drive away. Well, the car behind us and the motorcycle behind him followed the guy's car. The bad guy car picked him up and drove directly back to their embassy without so much as bothering to look in the rearview mirror. So that was my first experience with a walk-in. It was my first experience with a probe. And it was my first experience with an enemy who meant to kill me.

• 32:35Speaker 00

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• 33:41John Kiriakou?

  After we had been in Athens for two months, we rented this house. We had to move all of our belongings from the apartment to the house. I had gone to one of the big Greek box stores. I bought a 50-inch TV, which was huge for back then, 1998. It was sitting on the backseat of my car. was driving immediately in front of me and she had the kids in her car and boxes of stuff. We're gonna make three round trips between the apartment and the house. She calls me from her car and she says, are you seeing this motorcycle that's on me? And I said, I am. I'm not sure what to make of it. We end up stopping at a light. The guy looks at me and I look at him and he looks at the TV.

• 34:25John Kiriakou?

  And then the light turns green, Joanne pulls away, I pull away, and the guy falls in behind me. I'm still on the phone with her and I said, I think he's on me now. I'm not sure what to make of this, but I am just out of training, I'm paranoid, and I'm heavily armed. I said, I'm gonna slow down, you get ahead of me and take off. Run a red light if you have to, just go ahead and take off, I'm gonna try to shake him. She does that, she takes off, and sure enough, he's on me. So I speed up, he speeds up. I slow down, he slows down. I'm still on the phone with her, but I can't see her anymore. Because she had gotten so far ahead, and I said, I'm gonna try to hit him with the car. Because I'm thinking, this has to be 17 November.

• 35:09John Kiriakou?

  I swear to try to hit him, but he's skilled on this motorcycle. And I'm just missing him. He was absolutely still trying to follow me. He didn't care that I was trying to hit him. We get to a point, it was right in front of the biggest hospital in the country. It's a major intersection, it's like 10 lanes, red lights, and it's jammed with traffic. And I'm stuck, I'm stuck in the traffic. He gets off the motorcycle and he's coming over to me. I put the car in park, I open my door, I pull the gun, and I'm pointing the gun at him. He says to me in Greek, I'm not afraid of your gun, and he goes to grab it. I never kept the gun with just the security on. I was always afraid that, God forbid, one of my kids should find the gun or whatever.

• 35:55John Kiriakou?

  So I never kept a round chamber. So I pull the slide back to chamber around. He runs back to the motorcycle. I jump back in the car and I see him go for a gun. And I thought, shit, this guy has his own gun. So this has to be a terrorist. I hit the motorcycle and I disable it. I happened to catch a glimpse of several people in the cars around us, mouths wide open, agog at what's happening, on a major thoroughfare with hundreds of people around. We both have guns. We're both pointing guns at each other. I take off and I hit him. He gets around, but he misses me.

• 36:39John Kiriakou?

  I said to Joanne, "He just fired a shot at me." I said, "Call the embassy." She calls the embassy. They dispatch a security team. They were there practically before I was. The State Department security guys show up. The Wacken Hut security guys show up. The CIA security guys show up. The Greek police come to the house. An investigation begins. The State Department has to send a cable back to Maine State. I have to send a cable back to CIA. I've only been in Athens for two months and already I've got this? They determined that this was an attempted carjacking. It turned out that the license plate on the motorcycle was stolen. And that was kind of the deciding factor in their conclusion that this was a carjacking.

• 37:24John Kiriakou?

  He saw Joanne with all these boxes and thought, "Huh, that Honda Civic has some stuff in it." But then he saw my BMW with a 50-inch TV on the backseat and thought, "Aha, that BMW is a BMW and it's got a 50-inch TV on the backseat." He had no idea I was in the CIA. He had no idea I had a weapon on me. No idea that the car was armored. Just a common criminal. We were taught in training, if you're gonna pull a gun, be prepared to use it because it's the same amount of paperwork whether you fire the thing or you don't. My God, there was paperwork. Oh, my God. While no one at the embassy in Athens second-guessed me,

• 38:09John Kiriakou?

  plenty of people back in Washington sure did. They asked, "Could John have avoided this? Could he have not pulled the gun?" And some began to ask aloud, "Is John a hothead?"

• 38:22John Kiriakou?

  I would argue that the carjacking reinforced the operational paranoia that my counterterrorism training had instilled in me. If I had ever doubted it before, now I was sure safety was an illusion. As I walked her, drove around Athens in the attempted carjackings aftermath, I was convinced that I could be shot and killed at any time, on any day, at any place. My worries were exacerbated by the fact that 17 November, this phantom organization obsessing us was so good, that not only had we never caught any of them, we had never even successfully identified any of them. We had no idea who they were. That meant they could be living

• 39:05John Kiriakou?

  next to us, working next to us, standing six feet away from us in the grocery store, preparing to kill us, and we'd be oblivious. In time, the paranoia became kind of routine and quotidian. As comforting as routines and quotidia can be in the spy business, they're just a trap. The same applies to marriage. The routine and quotidian can become unexpected traps. In the next episode, the very high highs and the incredibly low lows of being in Athens. There was a presidential visit, that assassination attempt I keep talking about, and the very worst day of my life up until then, when I discovered my wife Joanne was having an affair. And things are only just starting to heat up.

• 39:50John Kiriakou?

  That's next time on Dead Drop: What Makes This Spy Tick? Thanks for listening. I'm John Kiriakou.

• 39:58John Kiriakou?

  Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costart and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kiriakou, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.

• 40:19Alan Katz?

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

• 40:25Speaker 00

  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 $100 off your first year at camtasiapro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 40:59Speaker 01

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