Mini Episode 4: Grave Concerns

THE BLURB: Both spying and the subject of this episode - cemeteries - piqued John's youthful curiosity at roughly the same age. Spying, of course, became John's vocation. But John's love for cemeteries - especially for the people buried in them - became a very happy ridealong. Working around the world for the CIA meant visiting cemeteries around the world. In this episode, we preview "GRAVE CONCERNS", a new podcast series that we'll begin dropping in March 2026 (that's soon)! The podcast is based on a brand new book John's written - "REMAINS OF THE DAY: The Definitive Guide to the Historic Cemeteries of Washington, DC" which also will drop in March 2026. As we hope you'll agree, graveyards should have no secrets! SHOW NOTES In this episode, John visits The Rock Creek Cemetery in northewest Washington, DC. Among the graves he'll visit: John Harlan Marshall, Alice Longworth, Arkady Nikolayevich Shevchenko and Gore Vidal. To pre-order "REMAINS OF THE DAY", please visit 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

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 0:32Speaker 01

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

• 0:36John Kiriakou?

  Hi, I'm John Kiriakou. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick. This mini-episode is another backdoor pilot for a brand-new podcast we have planned for March of 2026 called Grave Concerns, which is all about my lifelong, deep-down fascination with cemeteries and especially with the people buried in them. We're making Grave Concerns to accompany a book I'll be publishing in March of 2026 called Remains of the Day: A Definitive Guide to the Historic Cemeteries of Washington, DC. Shout-out to the people at Simon & Schuster. Remains of the Day is the first in a series of books I'm writing about my favorite cemeteries.

• 1:17John Kiriakou?

  Check out the show notes for ways to preorder a copy of the book, and even an autographed copy.

• 1:24John Kiriakou?

  I first started exploring cemeteries at the age of eight or nine in Newcastle, Pennsylvania. Actually, I wasn't necessarily exploring so much as I was looking for salamanders. I distinctly remember finding one under a rock. But I also remember that day at Oak Park Cemetery in Newcastle, stumbling upon the grave of somebody named Joseph B. Chambers. His marker was simple, and it indicated that he had died in my hometown in 1908. But what was fascinating to my eight-year-old mind was that he had won the Congressional Medal of Honor. I knew that only the bravest heroes in American history had won the Congressional Medal of Honor. The inscription on Chambers' marker read, "Capture of colors of First Virginia Infantry."

• 2:10John Kiriakou?

  Confederate States of America. When I got home, I mentioned to my mom what I had found. She said, "Oh, he's a hero. We should go to the library and see if we can find his story." What we found was that Chambers was a lowly private fighting in the Civil War as part of Company F of the 199th Pennsylvania Infantry called the Roundheads. On March 25th, 1865, just weeks before the end of the war, Chambers captured the Confederate battle flag in the Battle of Petersburg, Virginia. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor on July 27th, 1871, at the age of 38. He returned to the village of Eastbrook just outside of Newcastle, and he farmed there until he died quietly in 1908.

• 2:52John Kiriakou?

  I was fascinated by the story, but I was even more fascinated by what else was out there. My mom had mentioned that Chambers was just one person in a cemetery of about 30,000. What stories did those other people have? After all, everybody has a story. I became a regular in that cemetery, finding the graves of the wealthy families who had built the city in the late 19th century, the benefactors who funded the local hospital, the robber barons who owned the coal mines, the tin mill and the steel mills. It was all great fun, and it was also so peaceful. I began noticing the architecture, the symbolic carvings on gravestones, and peace and quiet

• 3:35John Kiriakou?

  that came with a stroll around the grounds. As a teenager, I made it a point to visit cemeteries everywhere I went if I had a spare hour. I moved to Washington DC to go to college the week after my 18th birthday in 1982, and the famed and hallowed Arlington National Cemetery was a mere two-stop subway ride away. I became a regular there too, witnessing the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns countless times.

• 4:09John Kiriakou?

  There are more Congressional Medal of Honor recipients in Arlington than you can shake a stick at. And besides the rows and rows of generals, admirals, bona fide war heroes, and Presidents John F. Kennedy and William Howard Taft, there are interesting graves that might be considered anomalies. The great boxer Joe Louis, for example. The actor Lee Marvin. Abner Doubleday, the purported inventor of baseball. Robert Todd Lincoln, the son of the martyred president. And numerous Supreme Court justices are among the nearly 500,000 people interred there. After college and graduate school, I was fortunate to secure a career with the Central Intelligence Agency, which allowed me to travel literally all around the world.

• 4:53John Kiriakou?

  I always took advantage of a day off, or a weekend, to visit the local cemeteries and to find the graves of people I otherwise had only read about. I found the likes of Eva Peron, the former First Lady and President of Argentina. I tracked down the graves of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena, who were captured and executed in the midst of the fall of communism in that country. I found Shah Mohamad Reza Palavi, the Iranian dictator who died in exile in Cairo and was buried there. After much work, I even found four generations of the Greek royal family, none of whom were actually ethnically Greek, at the abandoned royal weekend home of Tatoi, north of Athens. It was a wreck.

• 5:35John Kiriakou?

  I've lived in Arlington, Virginia for most of my adult life. It's wonderful to be walking distance to Arlington National Cemetery, to be able to hear the 21-gun salutes every morning, beginning at 07:00, as heroes are being buried. It's even better to be a short drive or subway ride to some of the most beautiful cemeteries in the eastern United States. Washington is, of course, one of the most historically important places in the Western Hemisphere. But Arlington isn't the only place that hosts the graves of interesting and important people. Washington itself is worth exploring. To give you a taste of what grave concerns will be like, I want to tell you about several graves that you can find at the Rock Creek Cemetery, at Rock Creek Church Road and Webster

• 6:20John Kiriakou?

  Street, in northwest Washington, DC.

• 6:26John Kiriakou?

  Businessman and baking innovator Charles Corby is one of those names that very few people know, but whose innovation and brand are household words. Corby and his brother William in 1890 founded an independent bakery that made history by perfecting the process and inventing the machinery that allowed them to make perfectly uniform loaves of bread. Think about that. Consumers loved knowing exactly what they were going to get. Every loaf was exactly the same size, weight, shape, and taste. In 1899 and 1900, the brothers invented and patented machines that mixed and kneaded

• 7:07John Kiriakou?

  dough, and bakeries around the country soon bought them to make their loaves uniform too. They invented the mixer. The brothers pioneered the use of refrigeration for fermentation control. They opened an in-house laboratory to study yeast fermentation, and they developed an energy-efficient oven that allowed them to double their output of bread. They were also pioneers in the pasteurization of milk, the use of milk in bread instead of water, and in planning a delivery schedule that allowed them to deliver hot, fresh bread to every neighborhood in Washington just in time for dinner. By 1912, they owned the largest bakery in the city, filling an entire city block behind

• 7:49John Kiriakou?

  what is now Union Station, Washington's train station, and they produced 90,000 identical loaves of bread and 1,000 pounds of cake every day. The Colby brothers were also master advertisers. They became even more famous for producing something called "Corby's Mother's Bread", which they marketed as "pure as mother made it." That actually meant something in the 1890s. A common ad stated, quote, "We believe it is true that Corby's Mother's Bread has established the standard in bread, and we know it is equally true that we are bending every effort to maintain that standard. The best bread science and skill can bake." That's a tongue twister of an ad.

• 8:32John Kiriakou?

  Well, the brothers sold the business to the Continental Baking Company in 1925, and Charles died a year later of a heart attack. Continental continued to market and sell Corby's Mother's Bread, but they changed the name.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Here's how to help build strong bodies eight ways. Eat Wonder Bread.

• 8:56John Kiriakou?

  John Marshall Harlan is a bona fide American hero whom almost none of us know anything about. U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan is best known for his role as the lone dissenter in the notorious Plessy versus Ferguson decision of 1896, which declared as unconstitutional federal anti-discrimination laws. It upheld Southern segregation statutes, and it created the notorious separate but equal doctrine. It was because of Harlan's position in Plessy that he became known as the great dissenter, a nickname that he enjoyed.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  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.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to build Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 10:44John Kiriakou?

  Harlan was born into a well-to-do Kentucky slave-owning family. His father was a member of Congress. Harlan graduated from college with honors in 1852, joined his father's law practice, and entered Kentucky politics. A member of the Whig Party, like his father, he was named Adjutant General of Kentucky, a position that he held until 1859, which gave him statewide name recognition and familiarized him with many of Kentucky's leading political figures. When the Whig Party fell apart in the early 1850s, Harland joined the Know Nothing Party, even though he was uncomfortable with the party's official hatred of Catholics. In 1858, he was elected judge for Franklin County, Kentucky. He left the Know Nothing Party,

• 11:28John Kiriakou?

  and he joined something called the Kentucky Opposition Party. In the election of 1860, he supported a minor candidate for president. That was the Constitutional Union Party's John Bell. In the secession crisis that followed the election of Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860, Harland was instrumental in keeping Kentucky from joining the Confederacy. And when the Civil War began in April 1861, Harland joined the 10th Kentucky Infantry as a Colonel, and fought on behalf of the Union. He mustered out upon the death of his father in 1863, and then ran successfully for Attorney General of Kentucky as a member of the Union Party. He endorsed Democrat George McClellan in the race against Lincoln in 1864,

• 12:12John Kiriakou?

  and lost reelection as Attorney General. Harland joined the Republican Party in 1868, and lost races for Governor of Kentucky in 1871, and again in 1875. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes nominated him to the US Supreme Court, where he remained for the next 34 years. Of the Plessy decision, Harland wrote that it would become "as infamous as the Court's earlier Dred Scott decision", and he was right. Harland's grandson, John Marshall Harland II, would later serve as a Supreme Court Justice from 1955 to 1971, having been appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

• 12:58John Kiriakou?

  Even more than 40 years after her death, Washingtonians still talk about Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the unconventional, acerbic, mean, liberated, and very influential socialite who ruled Washington high society for 75 years.

• 13:18John Kiriakou?

  A lifelong Republican, the eldest daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt reportedly hated her Democratic cousins Franklin and Eleanor so much that she said of FDR, “I would rather vote for Hitler than vote for him,” and mocking First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s distinctive tone and cadence to the glee of Washington Republicans. Longworth was still a teenager when her father became president upon the assassination of President William McKinley. Her antics while living in the White House were shocking, to the point of being newsworthy. She was one of the first women anywhere in America known to smoke cigarettes in public.

• 14:00John Kiriakou?

  Her embarrassed father soon banned all smoking at the White House, which simply caused Eleanor to begin smoking on the roof of the White House. She was one of those rare women who drove her own automobile. That was a head-turning spectacle in Washington. Newspapers across the country reported that when she danced the foxtrot in the White House’s East Room with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, people stood in shock. And she was frequently seen betting at local racetracks and sometimes wearing a boa constrictor around her neck. Near the end of her father’s term in office, the avowed atheist married Ohio Republican Congressman Nicholas Longworth. The couple’s mansion on Massachusetts Avenue in the city’s Dupont Circle neighborhood

• 14:42John Kiriakou?

  became the center of the Republican social universe. Alice preferred to remain in Washington while her husband returned to meet with and campaign among his constituents in Cincinnati. She hated Ohio, and she once called Ohioans “ignorant savages.” After her husband’s death in 1931, Longworth became even more important in Washington’s Republican circles. She refused a party offer to stand for election to her husband’s seat, preferring instead to host salons in her home for Republican members of Congress, diplomats, and visiting dignitaries. She worked hard to block the United States from entering the League of Nations, the predecessor

• 15:22John Kiriakou?

  organization of the United Nations, and she and her cousin Eleanor had dueling newspaper columns until it was clear she couldn’t compete with the former First Lady. Longworth's daughter Paulina, her only child, died by suicide in 1957, and Longworth became more and more reclusive in her decaying mansion. In 1960, the house was burglarized. In response, instead of having a burglar alarm installed, she planted and trained beds of poison ivy to grow up the walls of the house. Longworth died of emphysema, all alone, at the age of 96.

• 16:03John Kiriakou?

  Arkady Shevchenko was the highest-ranking Soviet official ever to defect to the West. A former top adviser to Soviet secretaries General Nikita Pushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, and to Soviet Foreign Minister Andriy Gromyko, he also served as under-secretary general of the United Nations in New York. Shevchenko said that in the early 1970s, he became disillusioned with behind-the-scenes Soviet attitudes about détente with the United States. The Soviets, he found, were cheating on the disarmament agreements that they had made with the West. He also came to disagree with communist economic planning, which he felt deprived Soviet citizens of basic economic freedoms.

• 16:46John Kiriakou?

  Having been exposed to Western culture throughout his diplomatic career, and wanting a new life for himself, Shevchenko decided to defect, and he reached out to the CIA in 1975. The CIA, however, convinced him that he would be far more valuable if he would remain in place and report back to them on what Soviet leaders were saying and doing, and what Soviet intentions were in arms negotiations. He immediately became the single most important spy that the CIA ever had in the Soviet power structure. In early 1978, Shevchenko realized that he was under surveillance, most likely KGB surveillance. And on March 31, 1978, he received a cable from Moscow

• 17:29John Kiriakou?

  ordering him to return immediately, ostensibly for consultations. He knew that this was a death sentence. He triggered a meeting with his CIA handler, and said that he had to defect. Shevchenko had never told his wife. Wife Leon Gina, that he was working with the CIA and that he had intended to defect. She knew nothing about it. After he called the CIA handler, he wrote his sleeping wife a note telling her all about his intentions. He thought that when she woke up, she could then decide whether to catch up with him or to return alone to the Soviet Union. When he called her at home the next day, a KGB officer answered the phone. She had called the intelligence service rather than meet her husband, and she soon returned to Moscow. Shevchenko was tried in absentia in

• 18:14John Kiriakou?

  the USSR and sentenced to death. He moved to Bethesda, Maryland, remarried, and wrote an international bestselling memoir called Breaking with Moscow. Shevchenko died of a heart attack at home in Bethesda.

• 18:30John Kiriakou?

  I'm Gore Vidal. Prolific author, social critic, essayist, public intellectual, and occasional political figure Gore Vidal was as well-known for his stinging wit and patrician manner as he was for his famous quarrels with other intellectuals and his public self-loathing.

• 18:49Speaker 04

  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.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  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.

• 19:56John Kiriakou?

  Vidal was born into an upper-class family and was the grandson of a US senator. He attended the finest prep schools in America, including Sidwell Friends, the St. Albans School, and Phillips Exeter Academy. But he enlisted in the military soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, rather than to go on to college. Upon his return home at the end of the war, Vidal began writing. His first novel, A Military Story Called "Willy-Wa," was a success, and his third book, The City and the Pillar, caused a nationwide controversy with his dispassionate telling of a young man coming to terms with his own homosexuality. That book was dedicated to J.T. Decades later, Vidal told an interviewer that J.T.

• 20:41John Kiriakou?

  was his childhood best friend, James Trimble, who was killed in the Battle of Iwo Jima. Vidal said that J.T. was the only man he had ever loved. Critics attacked Vidal for the book, and one New York Times critic refused to review it or to permit others to review any of Vidal's future books. An editor at E.P. Dutton reportedly told him at the time, quote, "You will never be forgiven for this book. Twenty years from now, you'll still be attacked for it," unquote. But it made Vidal an early champion of gay rights, even if he denied for the rest of his life that he was actually gay. Throughout the 1950s, Vidal published books under the pseudonym Edgar Box, before going

• 21:25John Kiriakou?

  back to his real name in the 1960s. He wrote dozens more books through the 1980s, all the while writing well-received screenplays and television scripts and occasionally acting in Italian films. Vidal was nominated for an Emmy Award for an episode of the television series Dress Gray, and he won the coveted Edgar Allan Poe Award for an episode of the series Suspense. Vidal was also a co-writer on the wildly successful film Ben-Hur. His work continued to mature as he aged, and he turned more and more to essays and nonfiction. Even his enemies like literary critic Martin Amis said of Vidal,

• 22:05John Kiriakou?

  “Essays are what he’s good at. He’s learned, funny, and exceptionally clear sighted. Even his blind spots are illuminating.” Vidal won a prestigious National Book Award in 1993 for his nonfiction anthology, The United States: Essays, 1952 to 1992. Vidal also was interested in politics and despite his wealth, considered himself to be a Democrat, although he was more tied to liberal ideology than to the party itself. He ran for Congress in 1960 from New York’s 29th District and he lost to the Republican incumbent. He had been endorsed by Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward, all of whom campaigned on his behalf.

• 22:48John Kiriakou?

  By the year 2000, Vidal had begun taking more strident public positions against US involvement in foreign wars. He frequently criticized the Bush family in interviews, and he endorsed Congressman Dennis Kucinich for President in 2004. Vidal liked to keep his private life private. He was reported to have had an affair with the French Cuban essayist Anais Nin, which he denied, until his love letters to her were found and published just before his death. He also claimed to have had affairs with actress Diana Lynn, with whom he may have fathered a daughter, with actor Fred Astaire, actor Dennis Hopper, and he was briefly engaged to Joanne Woodward before she married Paul Newman. Vidal’s only lasting relationship, however, was with Howard Austin, who was his partner

• 23:30John Kiriakou?

  for 53 years, until Austin died in 2003. Vidal died at his home in Hollywood, California, after developing the neurological disorder Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. He was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery because he wanted to be near Austin and his old friend JT. That’s just a sample from one of DC’s cemeteries. There are 11 more, and I haven’t included Arlington because, well, it’s in Arlington, Virginia, not in Washington DC. As I hope you’ve seen, well, heard in this case, there’s a lot of storytelling here. The second cemetery book will be all about the mafia graves of New York City. We’ll cover that book and those graves also in grave concerns.

• 24:13John Kiriakou?

  As always, thanks for listening, I really mean that. Don’t forget to like, review, subscribe, or share the podcast. It makes a huge difference and we really do appreciate it. Until next time, I’m John Kiriakou.

• 24:30John 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.

• 24:46Speaker 01

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

• 24:52Speaker 04

  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.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to build Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.