S1E8 The James Bond Academy

THE BLURB: When John turned his back on being a deskbound analyst in favor of risking his neck out in the field, he knew he'd made the right decision. Blowing things up - including cars - and playing spy games made him incredibly happy. Who wouldn't be happy? In this episode, John takes you way behind the scenes at the CIA's "James Bond Academy" - an actual place (just not with that name) where the CIA trains its agents how to be the best spies they can be. 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.

• 1:06Speaker 01

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

• 1:17John Kiriakou?

  Welcome to Dead Drop: What Makes a Spy Tick. I'm John Kiriakou. In this episode, I'm going to revisit my visit to the James Bond Academy, my four months or so of intensive counterterrorism training. But before class begins, I want to thank you, as always, for listening. It means a lot. And if you could be just so kind as to like, review, comment, or share the podcast on whatever platform you listen to, I would appreciate it greatly. I told you in an earlier episode how I knew when I was nine years old that I wanted to be a spy. When I was nine, spies were very hip and cool. They went great places, they did exciting things, they had these bitchin' gadgets to play with. Who wouldn't want to be a part of that?

• 2:02John Kiriakou?

  If you had told me when I was nine years old that I would actually be a spy, I would get to go to great places, I would do exciting things and play with bitchin' gadgets, I think my head would have exploded. It's probably better that I found out by living it instead. And my CIA career did zig and zag in very unusual ways that put me in the right place at exactly the right time. My boss actually tried rather hard to dissuade me. Analysts and field agents tend to be different animals with different skill sets, different personalities. But when I turned away from sitting at a desk for the rest of my career, I knew that I had done the right thing. Counterterrorism training is damned hard.

• 2:47John Kiriakou?

  That's because the thing they're training you for is damned hard. And training people how to do it and how to do it right takes time.

• 2:57John Kiriakou?

  If you're a brand-new hire in the CIA, it's eighteen months. I was mid-career, so I didn't need all the CIA 101 things. And so my training was about four months or four and a half months. It was very, very intensive. After the introductory surveillance and surveillance detection, which they always do first, then you start the actual how-to-recruit-spies-to-steal-secrets operational training. That is very sophisticated, very complicated. They come up with a very detailed story that they want you to get out of a source. The source I'm gonna be recruiting is an instructor. The entire exercise, lasting months, is all play-acting.

• 3:41John Kiriakou?

  But it was exactly like real life in the end. I didn't realize it or appreciate it until I was already well-placed in Athens. They really knew what they were doing. On our very first day, we had a diplomatic cocktail party.

• 4:01John Kiriakou?

  What a James Bond way to begin. All shaken, not stirred. These training exercises were all in. The agency would rent a bunch of hotel rooms all around Northern Virginia. We rented hotel rooms all over the place and a meeting room where about two dozen or so people, every one of them CIA, were having an actual cocktail party, complete with alcohol. Some of the instructors in the room were playing targets, people we wanted to recruit. Others were playing civilians, who might get suspicious if we tried to recruit them. So I'm meeting and greeting. Everyone's interesting, but not quite interesting enough. And then this older guy sidles up to me. I say, "Hi, how are you? I'm John Kiriakou from the American Embassy."

• 4:46John Kiriakou?

  This guy says, "Hello, I am Raoul Sanchez from the Embassy of Cuba." "Okay, nice to meet you." Raoul Sanchez? I don't speak Spanish. And I don't really have an interest in Cuba. So I'm not really sure what I would do with this guy anyway. I move on. Glass of wine in my hand and I'm going, "Hi, how are you? I'm from the American Embassy. This guy is Cuban, this guy is Chinese, this guy is, I don't know what." And this guy says to me, "Quiero me fileticante." "Hi, my friend, how are you?" And I said, "Ah, esté llenas." "You're Greek." "No, I'm Cypriot." And this is all in Greek, completely in Greek, which I didn't expect. I said, "Are you a diplomat? Are you with the Cypriot Embassy?"

• 5:30John Kiriakou?

  And he said, "No, I'm a businessman. I have an import-export company that's based at the port." I said, "Oh, that's interesting," which it was not, but what are you gonna say? Plus, I'm not an idiot. I kinda concluded that because the guy is speaking to me in Greek, they meant for me to bump into him and he's gonna be the instructor that I'm gonna deal with. I said, "You..." Are so interesting, may I have the honor of inviting you to lunch? And he says, "I would love to have lunch." I said, "Great." We exchanged business cards. So I know my assignment is to schedule lunch with this guy. In the meantime, there's another guy, and he's kind of interesting. When he asked me what my familial background was, and I said Greek, he says, "Oh."

• 6:14John Kiriakou?

  And then he says something in ancient Greek that he probably hadn't thought of since he was in graduate school. Ancient Greek is not a language that means anything to modern day Greeks. The letters are all the same, the words mean nothing, for the most part. I thought, "Okay, what am I supposed to do with this guy?" But we exchanged business cards. I said, "Oh, I'd love to continue our conversation over lunch." "Oh," he says, "I'd love to have lunch." So I thought, "Am I supposed to have two targets?" I guess, in real life, I might have 10 targets, who knows, 20 targets. It's very much like speed dating. You've got 30 seconds to assess the operational import, the operational attractiveness of these potential targets.

• 6:58John Kiriakou?

  The first guy, I take him to lunch. And he picks this Greek restaurant that I just hate in Alexandria, Virginia. It's been there for 50 years, the food is terrible, the service is equally terrible. And I thought to myself, "You're a Greek man, and this is the place you pick? This awful tourist restaurant?" Anyway, we go to lunch, we start talking, and he says that he has this import-export company at the port. Ever since he was a little kid, he's loved the sea, and he was in the merchant marines. And now he doesn't get to go to sea very often. Now it's all business, and for example, there's this ship coming in tomorrow,

• 7:41John Kiriakou?

  and it has a giant load of hydro dextrochloromethorphan, right? I don't know what the hell that is. Well, one of the things that they were teaching us was, "If there's something that's particularly good that's coming out of one of these meetings, excuse yourself, go to the restroom, and write yourself a note." This is before cell phones could do things like that. So I did, I went up, I went to the restroom, told him I wanted to wash my hands. Got up to the bathroom and wrote myself a note, I wrote the name of this chemical, whatever it was. So... We have a conversation, kids, he had grandchildren that were the same age as my children. I noticed that his hand was shaking.

• 8:22John Kiriakou?

  I didn't mean to stare, but I was looking at his hand and he said, "Ah, Parkinson's disease." And I said, "Oh, my father has Parkinson's disease. It runs in my family." And the rest of the conversation was about Parkinson's disease. The next day, I have lunch with the other guy. He wants to have lunch at the Congressional Country Club, which is this fancy schmancy country club in Bethesda, Maryland. I had thought that it was private until that day. And I actually called them and asked them, "Do I need to be a member? Do I need to pay some kind of fee?" They said, "No, we're public." So I met him there at the country club in the restaurant. When I got there, and I was right on time, you could set your watch to it, which is how I've gone through life, something my father instilled in all of us, timeliness.

• 9:05John Kiriakou?

  He had already been there, and he was clearly not on just his first drink. He starts speaking to me in ancient Greek again. And I said, "Wow, you really have a passion for ancient Greece, huh?" And he said, "Yeah, Plato, and I've read Homer's Iliad 20 times, and the Odyssey." And he said, "Well, what about Demosthenes and his contributions to oratory?" And I made a joke, I still remember the joke. I said, "What about mediocrities?" His attitude was, "Meh, good enough." And the guy just looked at me, like either he didn't get it, or he was offended. I thought it was funny, mediocrities. He drank and drank and drank through the entire lunch.

• 9:49John Kiriakou?

  Well, we had a rule at the agency. When you're on an operational training exercise, they'll pay for one drink. Everything else comes out of your pocket. It's generous that they'll pay for the one. Well, he had six, and then he gets up and he walks out? So I'm stuck with his six drinks. I had a Diet Coke, I still recall. These training days were very long because you have to go back to the, the exercise room and sit at a, a computer and write your operational cable and then print it and hand it to the instructor and then all the instructors gather around and they critique your writing and they critique what you did in the meeting and they critique what you're wearing and the whole thing. It's all very comprehensive. I had this very senior instructor. He had been the, uh, the director of Near East Operations. Sweet old guy. And

• 10:33John Kiriakou?

  I said, "May I speak to you privately?" And he said, "Yeah, actually, I wanted to speak with you privately. Everything okay?" Well, you know, the instructor at lunch today, he had several very pointed complaints about your behavior, your attitude, my behavior and attitude. Yeah, he repeatedly tried to engage you in a conversation about Greece and you just weren't inviting. I said, "Correction. He tried to draw me into a conversation about ancient Greece, 500 B.C. in ancient Greek that I know nothing about and have no interest in." And he said, "Oh, that's not how it was presented to us." I said,

• 11:14John Kiriakou?

  "I frankly never met anybody who speaks ancient Greek before." That I copped an attitude? I was bored? I was dismissive? See, he said, "Well, what is it that you wanted to tell me about him?" He drank six or seven drinks. He was clearly intoxicated when he left. He got in the car and drove back to the training facility and was so drunk that I couldn't carry on a conversation about operational issues with him. And besides that, he stuck me with a bill and the bill was like 60 bucks and I didn't eat anything. Whoa, okay. I'm gonna take care of that. And then I never saw the guy again and they gave me my 60 bucks back.

• 11:57John Kiriakou?

  I wrote my cable and I said, he's got this hydrochlorodextro, you know, whatever shipment. Request headquarters guidance. I don't know what this is. I don't know what it does. I don't know why it's important or if it's important. Please advise, et cetera, et cetera. Sent me a cable. The instructor in the next room typed one out and this just came in from headquarters. And it's the precursor chemical to make cocaine. Okay, I got it now. So then we go to dinner. He's clearly not my target because he doesn't know how you make cocaine. He's just some old guy who owns an import export company. And I said, that was so interesting. What you told me the other day about this hydrochlorodextro whatever.

• 12:42John Kiriakou?

  What's that for? He said, I have no idea. The ship comes in, we unload it, the ship goes out and we just wait for the next ship. But there's a Turkish woman that is waiting for the shipment to come. She's very sweet. I said, isn't it weird? You're Cypriot and she's Turkish? And he said, no, no, it never comes up in conversation. Why? Do you want to meet her? And I said, I would love to meet her. Well, this is exactly what they wanted me to say. So I meet her. She's a Turkish American who speaks Turkish, but she's also a senior CIA officer. Her parents were Turkish immigrants. I meet with her and she's very nice and we have tea and we talk and she says that she fears for her safety. I said, really? Why? I work for my brother in this import export company.

• 13:26John Kiriakou?

  He imports all these things, but these shady characters come to pick it up. And why would you pick something up at two o'clock in the morning? Why wouldn't you pick it up at two o'clock in the afternoon? So I see what the exercise is. So to make a long story short, I recruit her. I intercept the shipment of dextrohydrochloromethorphan and I'm able to protect her from the bad drug dealers. This takes weeks and I'm wearing disguises and I'm doing surveillance detection routes. And I'm, sometimes I'm being followed and sometimes I'm not being followed. So all of the skills that they're teaching me, I'm using. There are other things, for example, for every meeting, to and from every meeting, you have to plan out a surveillance detection route.

• 14:11John Kiriakou?

  That takes hours! And back then, there was no such thing as Google Earth. There was no such thing as a GPS. We had these big map books, McNally map books, whatever they were called, and you have to make photocopies of the pages and tape them together. Some of them were like 6 feet by 4 feet, and you plot out in different color highlighters your first leg, your second leg, your third leg, your fourth leg, your three stops between each of the legs. You have to submit it to the instructors, they approve it, they disapprove it, they tell you why this is a good one, why this is a bad one, and then you have to go out and practice them.

• 14:53John Kiriakou?

  So you're not in some neighborhood you've never been in and you don't know that you can't make a left here, it's a no-left turn. Well, on your map, you have yourself making a left. Or, this road has been closed for 6 months because they're gonna repave it. So there's a lot of legwork that goes into something like this. For the first several weeks that I was in Athens, I would work my regular 8, 9, 10-hour day, and then I would just drive around the city just randomly, looking for a good route, looking for a good stop, looking for a pickup place, or a place I can bump somebody, or dead drop, or whatever. So, in the end, the Cypriot guy was an access agent. In the end, the Turkish woman was the actual target.

• 15:38John Kiriakou?

  I successfully elicited the intelligence from her, which I wrote in two forms, in the form of an intelligence report and in the form of an operational cable. To headquarters, I disrupted the shipment of cocaine precursor chemical, and I saved the day. They would introduce different things on different days. Like today, we're gonna do everything that we normally do, but in disguises. Or today, instead of your regular briefcase, you're gonna use this briefcase that we've invented that has secret compartments in it. Every day, it was something different, or it was a skill that they would add on top of the other skills. And then we did something very, very interesting. This was a real learning experience for me.

• 16:22John Kiriakou?

  They said, "Okay, bad news, people. Tomorrow's day is gonna begin at 4:00 a.m. at Dulles Airport." And I raised my hand and I said, "Dulles Airport is closed at 4:00 a.m." And he says, "Exactly." Okay, here we go. I have to get up at 2:30 in the morning, 'cause I live in Timbuktu, Gathersburg, Maryland at the time. It was like 45 miles I drive to Dulles Airport. And it's closed. It opens at 5:00. You can't get in. But they were there waiting for us with a couple of cops, or whatever it was before TSA was invented, FAA. And they let us in.

• 17:04John Kiriakou?

  And they said, "Today, we are going to do an exercise called the Hostile Border Crossing." "You have just flown into the Republic of Victoria, and the Republic of Victoria has very bad diplomatic relations with the United States. It's unusual for an American to fly to Victoria. They don't like us, and we don't like them, so let's go." Well, as I've said before, I'm not a complete and total idiot, so I know how to cross a border. I've crossed many borders. I've been to 72 countries. Rule number one: don't draw attention to yourself. So I go to the border,

• 17:45John Kiriakou?

  and these border guards, other instructors, are openly hostile. "Who are you?" "My name is John Kiriakou." "What are you doing here?" "Actually, I have a business meeting with one of your business leaders here in the Republic of Victoria." How long are you staying? Only a couple of days. I have a meeting tomorrow, so I'll be here tonight. Finish my meeting late tomorrow. I'll have dinner and leave the following morning. What is that in your pocket? That? That's a ballpoint pen. Let me see it. As soon as I pulled the pen out of my pocket, I said, oh, my God. It was a pen that I had picked up off my desk, and it said US government on it. And I thought afterwards, I wonder if they planted that on my desk. I just grabbed a pen like, ah, I might need a pen. Put the pen in my pocket.

• 18:29John Kiriakou?

  Didn't pay any attention to it. And he says, US government? And I said, ha, right. He said, it says US government on it. And I said, that's funny. I found it in the glove compartment of my rental car. I wonder if there was somebody from the US government that had the car before I did. And he winks at me. Like, excellent answer. And he says, pass. And he hands me my passport back. And I pass through. As I pass through, I happen to turn, and I see an open door. There's a room off to the side. There was one guy in our class who was like the class clown. He was this big, loud, always inappropriate,

• 19:13John Kiriakou?

  laughing, joking. And they had him stripped down to his underwear. He wasn't laughing then. So I passed through. And at the end of the exercise, of course, we had to wrap it up in an hour because the airport opens. They called all of us together. And one of the instructors pointed at him and said, don't draw attention to yourself.

• 19:37Speaker 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.

• 20:11Speaker 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.

• 20:44Alan Katz?

  I'm Alan Katz.

• 20:45Speaker 04

  And I'm GD Thundersen.

• 20:47Alan Katz?

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

• 20:53Speaker 04

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

• 20:57Alan Katz?

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

• 21:02Speaker 04

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

• 21:04Alan Katz?

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

• 21:08Speaker 04

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

• 21:14Alan Katz?

  Here's a sampling of what you'll hear.

• 21:18Alan Katz?

  A minister and then a stripper.

• 21:20Speaker 04

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

• 21:25Alan Katz?

  Groucho Marx was a huge, huge early influence.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  Hooray for Captain Spalding, the African explorer.

• 21:31Alan Katz?

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

• 21:37Speaker 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."

• 21:44Alan Katz?

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

• 21:48Speaker 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.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  That's what makes us laugh: A serious look at comedy.

• 22:04Alan Katz?

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

• 22:11John Kiriakou?

  I was serious. I answered all of the questions, but using only as few words as I needed to. I had a good response to the US government pen and they let me pass. The biggest difference between the Russian intelligence services and American intelligence services is that the Russians are far, far more patient than we are. We'll send a case officer out to a post for two years or three years if he asks for an extension. The Russians will send an illegal, they call them illegals, it's part of what's called the illegal program, deep cover person. They'll send them for 20 years, 25 years. They'll be in place, just waiting to be activated.

• 22:55John Kiriakou?

  There's an absolutely wonderful Netflix series called The Americans that a friend of mine wrote, created, was the showrunner for, Joe Weisberg. Everything in that show was 100% true to life. It's about two Soviet KGB intelligence officers who pose as an American married couple living in Falls Church, Virginia, outside of Washington DC in the mid 1980s. Their cover is they own a travel agency at DuPont Circle in Washington, but really they're doing James Igor Bond kind of things. They penetrate the farm, at the Pentagon, at defense contractors, they're recruiting spies, recruiting Americans, doing hits, all kinds of stuff. I loved it.

• 23:40John Kiriakou?

  It was 100% true to life, 100%. I'll tell you, he and I worked together in the Counterterrorism Center. I ran into him one day and I said, "Hey Joe, how you doing?" And he said, "Hey, I resigned today." And I said, "What? You resigned? Why?" And he said, "This job just is not for me. I just don't have it in my gut to get somebody to commit espionage or treason. I can't do it. I just don't think I'll be good at it." I said, "Well, what are you gonna do?" Well, he says, "I'm single, I don't have any kids, there's nothing to tie me to Washington. I'm gonna go to Hollywood and find my fortune." I remember shaking his hand, telling him good luck, and I never saw him again.

• 24:21John Kiriakou?

  He came out with a book, a year or two later, a fiction book, a novel. So I bought it. It was heavily redacted, even though it was fiction, but I loved it. And I remember saying to my wife, "I didn't realize what a great writer he is. This book is fantastic." And then he creates the Americans. He won Emmys and then went on to other shows and wrote movies and he really made it in Hollywood. Now that we've learned how to recruit spies to steal secrets, we're gonna do other things. And the next thing we did was called Crash and Bang. You learn how to crash cars and how to blow shit up. This was literally the most fun I ever had at the CIA.

• 25:06John Kiriakou?

  I have lasting injuries from this class. I had to have my knee replaced because of this class. But I'll start at the beginning. On the very first day, I drive down to the farm. We're gonna start with the gun course. I'm in this class with about six people, all men. I happen to sit in the front row of seats. And there are three instructors. One of the instructors says, "Who in here doesn't own a gun?" And I put up my hand and I turned around to look at my colleagues and I'm the only one with my hand up. And he says, "You don't own a gun?" And I said, in part because I thought it would be funny, but it was 100% true. I said, "Truth be told, I've never actually touched a gun."

• 25:47John Kiriakou?

  And he says, "Oh, good grief. Okay, alright, you stand off to the side here. Everybody else, go with the other guys." And he hands me this toy gun made out of hard orange plastic in the shape of a Browning 9mm semi-automatic. And he says, "We're gonna start at the beginning. This is the trigger, this is the hammer." I said, "I know the parts of the gun. I've just never fired a gun." He said, "You're gonna stick with me for the first day." And I said, "That's cool." And he was a nice guy. He went over the parts of the gun, how to load the gun, how to unload the gun, and then how to take the gun apart to clean it, which is really, really important. And we ended up doing that blindfolded. They gave us these really heavy leather belts with holsters on them. And they gave us our guns.

• 26:32John Kiriakou?

  At first, they were Brownings. And we had to wear these things for every moment that we weren't either in bed or in the shower. It was actually kind of exciting to me to handle a gun because I thought, "Wow, this is gonna be some real James Bond shit that we're gonna start doing now. This is gonna be fun." And I was determined to be good at it. We would go out to the range. You shoot from seven meters. And then you shoot from 12 meters. And then you shoot from 25 meters. And you do that for day after day after day. To the point where I actually got a callus on my thumb just from loading the gun, loading the magazines. And then you do it at night. You'd be surprised how bad you are at shooting. I mean, you're hitting every bullseye.

• 27:15John Kiriakou?

  You're trying to hit the head, the face, and the neck, or the heart. At night, you're like at risk of shooting the guy standing next to you. That's how hard it is at night. It got very sophisticated rather quickly. We went into something called the Shooting House. You've seen this on TV where you go in, you look around the corner, you look up in the air. Somebody comes to the window, maybe it's a guy with a machine gun, or maybe it's a woman holding a baby. You have literally three quarters of a second before they shoot you with a paintball. If you miss one, you're dead, right? That's it, you're dead. And if you shoot the woman holding the baby, or shoot the little kid that pops up in the window to see what's going on out there, you're as good as dead. You might as well be dead.

• 28:00John Kiriakou?

  I aced it every single time. I just have a very steady hand, and it only takes me half a second to see if it's a hostile or a civilian. It's all about just being steady. You remember, we talked about sociopathic tendencies. I'm in a situation like that, and my heart is not racing at all. One step at a time, one day at a time, you're gonna be fine. Then, we started doing it from a car. You're on this track. They disable your car remotely. They kill the engine remotely. And then, there's a beat-up van about 100 feet away, and the side door slides open,

• 28:43John Kiriakou?

  and there's a robot in there, and it starts firing at you. Now, it's firing blank. You're not. So, you're trained to bend over so you're out of sight of the robot. You take your seatbelt off, you crawl across the seat, and get out of the car on the passenger's side, remaining on your belly. You get a shot at the robot, and you disable the robot. It just so happened, I couldn't get a clear shot. And so, I shot out the windows of my own car. And I was able to hit the robot and I disabled the robot. And the instructors run out onto the range. "Damn it, Kiriakou! That was the last decent car we had." It was a Ford Taurus. I said, "I couldn't get a clear shot.

• 29:28John Kiriakou?

  You're the ones that taught us to do anything we need to do to get the clear shot." "You keep saying, 'Get off the X, get off the X.'" "Okay, well, I can't get off the X because you disabled my car. The way I can get off the X is to disable the robot, and the only way to do that is to shoot out my own windows." "I apologize, I shot out the windows." Then we went to the Remington Pump Action 12-gauge. I had never fired a rifle or a shotgun. The Remington only holds two cartridges. What if you need to fire three shots or five shots? There was this old timer who was one of the instructors. This guy had to be really close, I would say, to his 80th birthday.

• 30:09John Kiriakou?

  And he always had a cheek bulging with chew, tobacco. And he was a deep southerner. He says, "Okay, youngster, so you're the one who ain't never touched a gun before, huh? I said, "Yeah, I'm the one." "So you never fired a Remington Pump Action before?" I said, "Nope." He says, "You know why we use the Remington Pump Action?" "Actually, no, I don't." "Three reasons. Number one, you can use buckshot, which will kill anybody if they're trying to break into your house. Number two, they're easy to load, fire, and clean. What's number three?" I said, "I don't have the foggiest idea." And he cocks it. He says, "It makes that bitchin' sound." I still laugh when I think about it.

• 30:54John Kiriakou?

  They've got these steel plates about the size of a pie plate, and you have to hit them. We weren't using buckshot, but we weren't using birdshot either. It was something in the middle, enough to make the pie plate fall back, which indicates that you hit it. So I go

• 31:11John Kiriakou?

  Hit them both. Now, let's go to 12 meters, okay?

• 31:18John Kiriakou?

  Hit them both. Okay, you can't do it from 25. I did them both. He says, okay, okay, smart guy. Now we're gonna do three at a time. I said, well, how do you load it? How do you load the third? And he shows me that you keep one cartridge in between your two fingers on your left hand. And then you go cha cha boom, cha cha boom. And then when it opens with your two fingers, you just move your two fingers over the barrel, load it, and then do cha cha again. I was like, okay, I can do that. So I did three, then I did four. Never missed. He pulled me aside after dinner and he said, this is gonna sound crazy, but I think you could be a competitive skeet shooter.

• 32:03John Kiriakou?

  And that is how I became a competitive skeet shooter. And I was darn good at it. There are shooting clubs all around the Washington area. And I did it as far away as Warm Springs, Virginia, on the border with West Virginia. And I didn't miss. It was so much fun. Clay pigeons and all kinds of stuff. I was just good at it. Then we started doing exercises at night. The farm is an absolutely enormous facility. It's, it's well over a thousand acres. It's got driving tracks and you're driving through the woods. It has mockups of little towns or villages. It's got everything. There might be 50 analysts there and you would never encounter them. They would never encounter you.

• 32:47John Kiriakou?

  Unless you all end up in the officers' club afterwards, drinking yourselves silly, which we did most nights. There are dormitories, but because we had weapons, we got our own rooms. The analysts had to share rooms. The ops guys got their own rooms. Which I enjoyed very much. We would do these exercises where you're in a car and you're driving down some country road and there's a van broken down on the side. Is it just a van broken down? Or is it an IED? Or is it a car bomb? Cause it can be any of those things. And then you come to a stop and you're looking at the van and you don't see anybody around. You're sitting there idling, trying to assess, what is it? You don't see anybody around, the van's not running.

• 33:28John Kiriakou?

  And as you're sitting there, somebody opens your driver's side door, which you forgot to lock and puts a gun against your head and says, congratulations, you've just been kidnapped. Damn it. That's how I learned the hard way to keep my door locked. And the first thing I do, still, every time I get in the car, I put my seatbelt on, I lock the door, and then I start the car, in that order. So you learn the hard way. Then we would do things like pit maneuvers, which was just fascinating. Pit maneuver is, there's a car ahead of you, he's speeding away, you're trying to get to him, you can't get him to stop, so you hit him

• 34:10John Kiriakou?

  right at his rear wheel. And if you hit him just perfectly at the rear wheel, his car will spin out and stall, and that's how you get him. But then, if you know how to do a pit maneuver, you have to learn how to stay out of a pit maneuver, if somebody's trying to do it to you. You keep a completely unreliable speed. You go 50, 30, 60, 30, 75, 25. He'll hit you a couple of times. He'll hit you behind the rear wheel, he'll hit you in front of the rear wheel. It won't make you spin out, it'll just be like you've been in a minor fender bender. I injured myself pretty severely in one of these exercises. One of the things they taught us was when to crash through a roadblock and when to not crash through a roadblock.

• 34:54John Kiriakou?

  The first thing that they teach you is, the weight of the car is, of course, at the engine, right? So if there are two cars, and the fronts of the cars are touching each other and blocking the road, you want to hit the trunk of the car, because that's the light part of the car, and it'll flip the car out of your way, and you can take off and avoid being assassinated. If the car is in a V, with the bottom of the V pointing toward you, and you can't hit the rear of either side, maybe there are trees, maybe there are concrete Jersey barriers, you learn very quickly how to go 60 miles an hour in reverse, and then spin it around, put it in, drive as quickly as possible, and take off. I can't tell you how many transmissions we completely ruined. They had a fleet of cars just for us to wreck.

• 35:39John Kiriakou?

  Beaters that they bought from the junkyard or for some auction for $250. We were going through cars like crazy. So they gave me this beater car and I had to crash through a roadblock. I'm about 100 feet away. I see the roadblock there. These guys dressed as irregular militia. The guy's got his hand up telling me to halt and I just gas it. And I'm going straight for him. He jumps out of the way and I smash the rear of the car and I get through the roadblock. But because this car was a beater piece of junk, my seat became detached from the floor of the car and I smashed my knees against the dashboard. Then you gotta go to the hospital emergency room and I ended up wearing a knee brace

• 36:21John Kiriakou?

  for months after that, but it ended up leading to a condition called spontaneous osteonecrosis. It killed my knee joint to the point where in an MRI, my knee looked like a sponge with a thousand little holes in it. The doctor said, "You must have been in a serious car accident." I said, "Yeah, actually I was. It was a long time ago." And he said, "That's what spontaneous osteonecrosis is. It'll take 10 or 20 years." I said, "Yeah, actually it's been 16 years." He says, "That knee's gotta come out right now." And so I've got a titanium knee now and a nasty wicked scar to prove it. Other than that, this was the best training course I ever had in my life. The graduation ceremony was so much fun.

• 37:05John Kiriakou?

  We all wore complete disguises to the graduation ceremony and that's how we took our graduation picture, all in disguises. It was hilarious. I still have the pictures. You get a nice little certificate that of course is classified, so you can't display it anywhere. It stays in your personnel file that you are a graduate of the operations course accelerated. Oh, I was very proud, like, wow, I'm actually a spy now. I'm a spy and I have the certificate to prove it.

• 37:33Speaker 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.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:40John Kiriakou?

  It opened my eyes in so many ways. Listen, I've been out of the CIA for 21 years, and I still have my head on a swivel looking at the side view mirrors and the rear view mirror to make sure I'm not under surveillance. That training changed my life. And it wasn't quite over yet. There's still one more course that I needed to take, and it was called the BOM course. The CIA has another facility in a different state, and you have to fly to get there. So they flew us down on this private jet the CIA used to own. In an ill-advised period of cost cutting, we actually donated it to the FBI, so it's theirs now. We borrow it. Anyway, we flew down on the plane. A van picks us up and takes us to, we just called it the base.

• 39:23John Kiriakou?

  It's a week-long course, and they start with the basics. There's a little bit of chemistry, so we're going to go over the basics again. And we start off with the most basic weapon, which is the Molotov cocktail. Coke bottle, Pepsi bottle. You fill it with gasoline, roll up a rag. You stick the rag in to act as a wick. You light the wick, and you just heave it at the wall. And when it hits the wall, it breaks, igniting the gasoline, and it makes a gigantic fireball that lasts about two seconds. We've all seen Molotov cocktails on TV. But then we got serious. The next day, they introduced us to detonators. I had never seen a detonator before. Yeah, I'd seen pictures of them. You see them on TV, but you hold one in your hands and you're like,

• 40:08John Kiriakou?

  this thing is so small. How much damage could this really do? Oh, it'll blow off both your hands and probably at least one of your eyes. Just the detonator. So what we did is with det cord, detonation cord, we attached the detonator to det cord. We put it about 100 feet away. We'd go into a bunker. There was a bunker where only just at right there at ceiling level was above ground. It had really thick bulletproof glass. So 95% of your body is underground. Just your eyes are above ground and then you can watch the explosion. The detonator does far more damage than you might think. The purpose of the detonator is to set off the rest of the bomb. The rest of the whatever the explosive is that you happen to be using. It's in most cases commercially, it's TNT, but it can be anything.

• 40:53John Kiriakou?

  So then we start on the third day with anfo ammonium nitrate. This is the bomb that Timothy McVeigh used in Oklahoma City to take down the Murrah Building, the federal building. I was surprised at how easy it was to make that bomb. It's just fertilizer and diesel fuel. It's as simple as that. In fact, for my final exam, I made an ammonium nitrate bomb. It was a paper grocery bag and I filled it about two thirds of the way with fertilizer that you would buy at Home Depot. And then with a wooden spoon, I very slowly mixed in diesel fuel that you can buy at any gas station. The fertilizer that I used was commercial fertilizer.

• 41:38John Kiriakou?

  So it's ammonium nitrate, ammonia, nitrogen and diesel fuel. It's as simple as that. The way they taught me, you have to mix it with a wooden spoon very slowly. All the little fertilizer pellets absorb some of the diesel fuel. Again, this is just in a paper grocery store bag. And then I stuck a detonator in. I ran det cord out of it. And for my final exam, I put it under a van. Then I hit the

• 42:08John Kiriakou?

  They found the transmission 300 yards away in the woods. That's what a massive explosion it was. So much fun. I know it sounds silly, but really what all of us wanted to do was just push the button, blow shit up. The sound of the explosion is deafening for all of these bombs. And I said to one of the instructors, surely there are people living around here. And he said, yeah, and they bitch all the time because they're constantly blowing things up, big things. In addition to the ammonium nitrate bomb, we did sticks of dynamite and all different kinds of things. At the end, you just chose which bomb you wanted to build and then you got to blow a car or van up. We all passed. We all did well.

• 42:52John Kiriakou?

  Blowing things up is fun. Not blowing things up is nerve wracking. But the hard part was learning how to defuse them. They made things safe by just not attaching a detonator. So there was nothing to cause the explosion to occur in the first place. You know how on TV it's, do I cut the red wire? Do I cut the green wire? What did they teach me? What about that black wire? I never saw a black wire before. That's not it at all. That's just in the movies. But there's, there's a science to it. You can't risk a spark or static electricity or an errant signal from a garage door opener or whatever. I mean, it's, it's really dangerous, but they taught us how to do it. And I came out of that thing a week later.

• 43:37Speaker 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 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.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:42John Kiriakou?

  You're really feeling smart. I felt transformed by this training. And I only took two other classes over the course of the next year or two. I took Advanced Counterterrorism Driving, which was out west in the desert, going over sand dunes and breaking the axle of the car and that kind of thing. And then I was one of only a dozen officers in the entire CIA who was chosen to take a six-week course called Advanced Counterterrorism Operations. And I took that course and finished it just in time for 9/11.

• 45:18John Kiriakou?

  But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before we get to 9/11, I have to finish my tour in Athens, where some of my counterterrorism training would absolutely come in handy. Next time, we'll return to Athens, where things were about to heat up hotter than they already were. That's in my work and unfortunately, at home. As always, thanks for listening. Please don't forget to like, subscribe, review, or comment. It really does help. Until next time, I'm John Kiriakou.

• 45:49John Kiriakou?

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

• 46:07Alan Katz?

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