S2E6 Use Your Words

THE BLURB: Already a succesful, best-selling author when the CIA put John in prison, he quickly realized that his writing - his words - were going to be his super power. John wasn't worried about his fellow prisoners; his training as a spy gave him advantages over them. But the prison authorities - corrupt to their marrow - did pose problems to John. Until they realized just how much of a super power John's writing was. Turns out, the pen is mightier than the sword and the corrupt federal prison system. SHOW NOTES For more great podcasts, please visit Costard & Touchstone costardandtouchstone.com. Your next favorite podcast is just a click away! 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.

• 0:00Alan Katz?

  It's Podcast, it's a Coster and Touchstone production.

• 0:04John Kiriakou?

  Have I always been a writer? Yes and no, I suppose. I wanted to be a writer from a young age. I wanted to be able to convey an interesting story. During my senior year of college, my best friend from college, Tom Fitzpatrick, and I took a creative writing course. I got a B, he got an A. We had to read our final submissions to the class, and his was laugh-out-loud funny. It was just so well-done, so well-thought-out. And mine wasn't. It was very average. I did write one horror short story that I thought was great. Frankly, the rest of the class thought it was great, and the teacher hated it so much,

• 0:49John Kiriakou?

  he made me redo the entire assignment. So, I got to thinking, maybe writing is just not for me. Well, I get hired by the CIA as an analyst, and all you do is write, all day, every day, just writing, writing, writing. And you're writing in a way that is so concise and so punchy. I remember my first boss specifically telling me that the president doesn't give a shit about your opinion. The president wants the facts in as few words as you can convey them, and a paragraph on what it means. That's it. And so, I very quickly learned the CIA writing style.

• 1:32John Kiriakou?

  So, everybody in the CIA writes in exactly the same style, so that when the president's daily brief is written, it looks like one person wrote it, when in fact, 50 people contributed to it on any given night. I have always been told that I was a good storyteller. When I left the CIA, a couple of my friends said that I should write a book and tell these stories. I wrote the first draft of the book that became The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror, my first book. I gave it to my then-wife, and I said, "I want you to read it, and I want you to be brutally honest." So, she reads it. Couple of days later, she says, "I hated it." "What? Really?" And she said, "Honey, I have listened to you tell these stories a thousand times.

• 2:17John Kiriakou?

  This reads like a dry government report. You should write it the way you tell it." Just those few sentences made me completely change my entire writing style. In practical terms, that meant that I immediately developed a very light, very conversational tone. I frequently joke that nobody's going to base a PhD dissertation on my writings. That actually has turned out to not be true. In one academic database, I've been cited more than 660 times in people's PhD dissertations, which is awesome. I'm

• 2:57John Kiriakou?

  very grateful for that. But my books are more geared for the wider community of readers. Well, that first book was published by Random House, which is one of the big five publishers, and it went to number five on the New York Times Bestsellers list. I was very, very proud. But really, before that book, and before my CIA writing, most of which remains classified, a journal, that was it. And it was only for myself. I was never published outside of classified channels until I went to Afghanistan as a private citizen in 2009. Paramount Studios

• 3:37John Kiriakou?

  hired me to rescue three child actors and their families who were under threat because of a movie that Paramount had made. I discreetly, quietly flew to Afghanistan. I arranged for exit visas for all 27 of them, and I got them out and resettled in Dubai. And when I got back home, a friend of mine said, you know, this was such an exciting story. You should write this up for the LA Times. Not just the fact that I got these kids out. It was more interesting that I had gone to Afghanistan as a private citizen, and things were not good in Afghanistan

• 4:18John Kiriakou?

  for us. This was the summer of 2007. The LA Times immediately took my op-ed and entitled it "The Other War We're Losing." Just that one 800-word op-ed opened doors for me that

• 4:34John Kiriakou?

  I had never even fantasized about. This is before my book was published. As soon as the op ed is out, I get calls from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post and the Times of London and the Guardian. I guess I'm a writer all of a sudden. This was three and a half years after I left the CIA. I was working at Deloitte at the time. My book had come out and it was a big hit. I had written three op eds for the LA Times. I had written for the Wall Street Journal. I had written for the Guardian. I realized, hey, I can actually write for a broader audience. By the time I got to prison, I did know the power of my words and I knew that I had

• 5:16John Kiriakou?

  access to the public that other prisoners didn't have. Now, I sort of kept that in reserve once I got there. And then a couple of days before I left for prison, Jesslyn Radak, one of my attorneys, said to me that she had a mailing list of about 650 people who were interested in my case. She said, when you feel comfortable, write me a letter. I'll send it to these 650 people so that they can know that you're okay, you're adapting, everything's fine. Like a newsletter. I said, okay. It took me, I'm gonna say, five or six weeks. And I wrote this newsletter.

• 5:56John Kiriakou?

  Now, very arrogantly, I modeled it on Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. I called it Letter from Loretto. In the Letter from Loretto, I talked about daily life. But I inadvertently exposed two crimes that had been committed against me by the guards, one of which was a felony. And I just wrote the details and I sent it to Jesselyn. Jesselyn sent it to Jane Hampshire. Jane Hampshire was the proprietor of a now-defunct website called FireDogLake.com. FireDogLake was an alternative news site, slightly left of center, really terrific writers there, Kevin Gustalla in particular.

• 6:39John Kiriakou?

  I didn't know that Jane was friends with Arianna Huffington, the founder of the Huffington Post. So I sent the letter to Jesselyn. Jesselyn sent it to Jane. Jane published it on FireDogLake and then she sent it to Arianna. And Arianna put it as a banner headline on the Huffington Post. Within 24 hours, it went completely crazy. Viral, we would call it today. Within another 24 hours of it being published in The Huffington Post, I started getting calls at the prison. I mean, not me. The prison was getting calls from CNN, from Fox, ABC News, Time Magazine, The Week Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly,

• 7:21John Kiriakou?

  The New Yorker, even Playboy and The Economist. And they all wanted to interview me. And NPR.

• 7:30John Kiriakou?

  And I thought, you know what? This is gonna be my superpower.

• 7:36John Kiriakou?

  I'm John Kiriakou. Welcome to Dead Drop: What Makes a Spy Tick. This is episode six in our series, Doing Time Like a Spy. Before I get back to using my words to talk about prison, I want to use one word to express how we feel right now. That word is just wow. Really and truly wow. Our audience keeps growing by leaps and bounds, which is very gratifying. We'd have done all this hard work anyway, because we're storytellers doing what we do and what we like to do. But our work has gotten the reaction that it's gotten from so many people. Well, that's just what storytellers live for. If you promise to keep listening, we promise to keep storytelling. Maybe we shouldn't call writing, writing, since all good writing is actually

• 8:20John Kiriakou?

  the product of lots of rewriting. If we wanted to be accurate, we would cut to the end of the chase and just call it rewriting. Rewriting demands thinking on one's feet. While a prisoner's day is regulated down to the minute, there are still ample situations where thinking on one's feet is essential. As with writing, a prisoner needs to be poised at all times to make changes, quick changes. That includes knowing when to get the hell out of Dodge and live to fight another day. Rule number seven is don't be afraid to make a strategic retreat. There are some fights that you just can't win. So there's no harm in just retreating, regrouping, and then figuring out what Plan B is gonna be.

• 9:01John Kiriakou?

  When I published this letter from Loretto, everything changed for me. The guards emailed the letter to each other. One of the guards pulled me aside. She was one that I had just sort of ignored. She ignored me. I would see her in the hall. We wouldn't even acknowledge each other. She did her thing. I did my thing. She came right up to me and she said, "That wasn't me you were talking about swearing at you, right? No, you've been perfectly lovely to me." "Oh, thank God. Do you mind if I ask you who you were talking about?" "Sure." "It was Sarge. There was this horrible, horrible guard whose surname was S A R G E. Sarge, like the nickname for sergeant." I said in the letter,

• 9:45John Kiriakou?

  "You've heard that phrase, rode hard and put away wet? That was Sarge. She was an ugly, mean, foul-mouthed, tattoo-covered has-been. A woman in her late 40s, maybe 50, who had had so many men who used her and abused her and tossed her aside that she just hated the world." And I said in the letter, "She was the guard in my housing unit when I first arrived, and she just could not say my name. She would say Teriyaki, Kiriakou, Kirkaloo, whatever." I saw her in the hall one day. I was walking with Dave and she said, "Hey, you." And I turned and I looked at her. "Are you the motherfucker whose name I can't pronounce?"

• 10:29John Kiriakou?

  And I said, "Kiriakou." "How about if I just call you fuckface?" Dave says classy. I said, "White trash is more like it." She heard me. She raids my cell, throws all my stuff on the floor, pictures of my kids, walking all over them. I didn't realize that that was actually a crime for her to swear at me like that. It's not just a violation of Bureau of Prisons regulations. It's a crime. It's a misdemeanor, but it's a crime. The first time you do it, you get a verbal reprimand. The second time you do it, you get two weeks without pay. The third time you do it, you're fired." Well, I didn't report her to the prison authorities. I told everybody in the world what she did. She had done in the letter from Loretto.

• 11:13John Kiriakou?

  The other crime that I exposed was one that I've already discussed. It was when the two clowns in the lieutenant's office tried to get me to do harm to this Kurdish prisoner. And then tried to get the Kurdish prisoner to do harm to me. That's a felony. That is conspiracy to incite violence in a federal facility. I looked it up. That's two to five years in prison for doing something like that. It's impossible to prosecute because you have to convince the US attorney that this is a case worth taking up and nobody is going to prosecute a federal prison guard. Not unless he's smuggling in cell phones and drugs. Because they get prosecuted for that all the time. But for something like this, not a chance.

• 11:58Alan Katz?

  It's Alan, Dead Drops producer, and it's time for our October meeting of the Quince Fan Club. John, is there a piece or a couple of items in your closet or chest of drawers that your hand always finds first?

• 12:12John Kiriakou?

  Actually, Alan, there are a couple of Quince pieces in my growing collection. There is a sweater that I absolutely adore. It's actually the first Quince piece that I bought. It's cashmere and it is the softest, yet lightest cashmere sweater I've ever owned. And I just bought a pair of linen trousers. I'll tell you, when I go to the doctor, I always wear jeans. And then I get on the scale and the doctor's like, oh, you should lose three pounds. Well, my jeans are three pounds. And so I bought these linen trousers. I wore them to the doctor and he says, hey buddy, you lost a pound or two. The truth is, these linen trousers are light, they're beautiful, they're comfortable, and now they are my go to pants.

• 12:57Alan Katz?

  For me, it's my two 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters. I love how they feel. I love how they make me feel.

• 13:05John Kiriakou?

  And because they go with everything. They make getting dressed easy.

• 13:09Alan Katz?

  And being somewhat lazy that way, I think you and I both love the easy part, don't we?

• 13:15John Kiriakou?

  Quince focuses on high quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials like that 100% Mongolian cashmere we were talking about, or organic cotton and merino wool.

• 13:27Alan Katz?

  Everything is timeless and versatile. As we've said here, Quince makes classics, but without all the stodginess that often comes with them. And we haven't even mentioned how reasonable everything at Quince is priced.

• 13:39John Kiriakou?

  Their 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters start at just $60, giving you the softness and the quality you'd expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag.

• 13:50Alan Katz?

  Not to go all Game of Thrones, but winter is coming. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince is the perfect destination to find everyday clothing staples like premium down jackets and classic wool outerwear.

• 14:03John Kiriakou?

  All versatile layers designed to keep us warm and comfortable all season long, and always priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands.

• 14:12Alan Katz?

  Quince does that by working directly with ethical factories that cut out the middlemen, so you're paying for high quality, not brand markup.

• 14:20John Kiriakou?

  The ethical part is very important.

• 14:23Alan Katz?

  In these here times, it absolutely is.

• 14:26John Kiriakou?

  Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was dead drop. It's the best way to support the show.

• 14:51John Kiriakou?

  I read last week in the New York Times that there are 15,998 crimes delineated in the US Code. 15,998 crimes. And we're talking felonies here. If they want to get you, they're going to get you. But if they don't want to bother you or interfere with your career, eh, they just pretend everything's fine. Or if you're someone that they just don't care to go after. Jane Hampshire told me a couple of weeks later that the letter from Loretto had more than 2 million views. Jake Tapper mentioned it on, he was still at ABC at the time, he mentioned it on World News Tonight. It was mentioned on CNN.

• 15:33John Kiriakou?

  And then Cenk Uygur at The Young Turks, when that was still a thing, actually devoted an entire episode of The Young Turks to reading the letter line by line by line. And I realized, this, this is what I'm going to do for the next Two years. This. It's going to keep me safe. Remember, I wasn't afraid of the prisoners. I can handle these clowns. It was the guards. It was the administrators who meant me harm. And they were the ones who could really put me in a bad position. This role was very important. Don't be afraid to make a strategic retreat. Because you can't confront the prison administration head on. You can't. You can't win that fight. You go to solitary.

• 16:18John Kiriakou?

  They take away your good behavior time. They take away your telephone. They take away your email. They take away your ability to buy anything in the commissary. They can really make life difficult. And so I never, ever confronted them head on. If I wanted to say something, I said it in my new series, Letters, Plural, From Loretto. For example, the warden pissed me off one day. I don't even remember what it was that he did. I happened to be walking past the bulletin board outside the cafeteria. There was a flyer that the warden had put up saying, "Help us celebrate the United Nations Day of the Child."

• 17:02John Kiriakou?

  In the visiting room, they're gonna have coloring books and crayons and the children can take pictures with... This is a prison with fully one-third of the prisoners being pedophiles. And you want the fucking pedophiles to celebrate the Day of the Child? I don't want the pedophiles in the visiting room looking at my children. So I wrote a letter about this. I said, "This is the warden that we have. So oblivious to the fact that we have 500 child sex offenders in this prison. He wants them to celebrate the Day of the Child with my children in the visiting room." So the warden canceled it. He saw me in the hall and he stopped me.

• 17:46John Kiriakou?

  He said, "Okay, you got me on that one." "Warden, with all due respect, what are you, fucking retarded?" That's what I said to him. And he says, "Watch it, you're on a line." "Actually, I think you're the one on the line. What if the Pittsburgh Post Gazette gets wind of this? The Day of the Child in a pedophile prison? Come on, man, you can do better than that." He and I never liked each other. We never respected each other. Later on, after I got out... My friend Mark Lanzalotti, just before he was released, was sent to a minimum security camp in New Jersey. The warden happened to be the warden there by then. And Mark mentioned me to him and he said, "That fucking Kiriakou, that guy caused me more trouble in two years than I had over the course of my entire career."

• 18:29John Kiriakou?

  "I brought crimes to light, crimes that his people were committing under color of law." "He knew about it and he did nothing to stop it." "He told me, 'If you write one more of these things, you're going straight to solitary.'" And I said, "I fucking dare you." "I did not give up my constitutional rights when I walked through these doors, and I will not let you take them away from me." "Go ahead and put me in solitary. It's gonna be on every newscast in America." "Go ahead." "I have gone nose to nose with Al Qaeda, with Hezbollah, with the Iranians, and I'm supposed to be afraid of you? Please, show me some respect." And then he just walked away. Pulled out my legal pad one day.

• 19:14John Kiriakou?

  I was sitting at my little makeshift desk in my cell. I was just sitting there with the legal pad in front of me. I had not written a single word on it yet. He happened to walk by and he looks at the pad and he says, "Oh shit." And I said, "Just gathering my thoughts, there's nothing he could do to stop me, nothing." He was convinced I was smuggling these out of the prison. This was actually quite funny to me. One of the friendly guards told me that, "The warden's gonna lock you up." I said, "For what?" "In solitary, he meant." I said, "For what? I haven't done anything." "You've got some kind of smuggling pipeline out of the building for these letters. He thinks it's through the Italians." "Smuggling pipeline? Don't make me laugh." And he said, "How are you getting them out?"

• 19:59John Kiriakou?

  "Legally." And I meant it, literally. They started opening all of my outgoing mail. I was the only prisoner in the prison who had both his incoming and outgoing mail read and inspected and photocopied and sent to the FBI. And I knew that thanks to the Freedom of Information Act. They can't do that with legal mail. So I would write and write and write and write, not just my book, but the letters from Loretto. I would send them to Jessalyn and I would write Attorney Jessalyn Radak, Esquire, Government Accountability Project, Washington DC. And then I would write legal mail, legal mail, at the bottom and on the back, legal mail. They can't touch legal mail, like a diplomatic pouch.

• 20:41John Kiriakou?

  I would walk to the mailroom, I'd say, "I've got some legal mail." I had the stamp on it and it goes straight into the bag. He's like, "How's he getting these out?" "What are you, stupid? How do you think I'm getting them out?" "Legally." And he didn't get the double entendre, because he was too stupid. One of my greatest supporters was my cousin Kip. Kip Reese. Kip lives in Pittsburgh, so it was a relatively quick, easy drive. It was about 40, 45 minutes to come to the prison. Kip's one of the sweetest guys you could possibly know. And he's very, very smart, very organized. He was a true believer in my cause. He helped me all the time, would come to the prison to visit me.

• 21:22John Kiriakou?

  One day, he came to the prison to visit me and he gave me, quite accidentally, some of the most important intelligence that I encountered there. He came to visit, I walk into the visiting room, I give him a big hug, we sit down and he says, "Hey, I just heard something that I think is very important." "What'd you hear?" He said, "When I came in, one of the guards said to the other guard, 'Who's he here to see?'" And the first guard said, "Kiriakou." And the second guard said, "Why is that son of a bitch not in solitary?" And the first guard said, "I asked the warden that." And the warden said, "It's because he's never mentioned any of us by name." If you mention one of the guards by name, that's potential targeting, right?

• 22:07John Kiriakou?

  Well, I never mentioned any of them by name just because I didn't want to give them the notoriety. And I said, "Oh, Kip, that is very valuable intelligence." I wrote about the blow-by-blow of every encounter I had with every guard, including one especially hostile lieutenant. And there was nothing they could do about it. Only because, just by blind luck, Kip had overheard these two guards talking.

• 22:39John Kiriakou?

  If you're enjoying Dead Drop, and of course, we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great granular story podcast from the Costard and Touchstone family. Just the Photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't. What it felt like being in all those dangerous places like war zones and natural disasters, doing his job, taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this. Just the Photographer will put you right there, on the ground, right next to David. Inside his head, in fact.

• 23:23John Kiriakou?

  It's a hell of a podcast, and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts, or at costardandtouchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at Costard and Touchstone, like The Donor, a DNA horror story, The Hall Closet, Sage Wellness Within, and the How Not to Make a Movie podcast. Who knows? Your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now, back to Dead Drop. So, rule number eight was never underestimate the power of rumor. I should add that all prisons run on rumor. They operate on rumor. I was trained in the use of rumor.

• 24:04John Kiriakou?

  You want to set the standard for what the story is going to be. The problem is, rumor goes to the extremes in prison. There were some days I just didn't want to go to the cafeteria. I just couldn't bear the thought of sitting for 45 more minutes with these crazy people. There was one guy in particular, I call him Bob Jones in the book, because he had an equally common name, like Bob Jones, John Smith, that kind of name. And this guy was a rumor monger extraordinaire. He was also a nut, and he was a conspiracy theorist. Everything was a conspiracy. Everything from the tax code, to the economy, to the moon landing was faked at some Hollywood store.

• 24:48John Kiriakou?

  Studio and the earth was flat and was surrounded by the ice walls and the Masons and quote unquote, the Jews were running everything. I couldn't listen to this anymore. But the guy began focusing on me because I had been in the CIA. And of course, the CIA is working with the Jews and the Freemasons and the Bilderberg people and the Trilateral Commission and the lizard people and the space aliens doing all these things. I started to think, this is getting dangerous for me. I have enough problems with these Aryans who think I'm an FBI agent. A lot of them did think I was an FBI agent. There

• 25:32John Kiriakou?

  was one in particular who was hostile. I've never told anybody this, and I don't know why it still bothers me after all these years, but he didn't want to directly challenge me. He didn't want to fight me, for example, probably thought I was some kind of Kung-Fu master or something from my CIA days. So what he would do is, as I was walking around the track, he would cut right in front of me and he would fart very loudly, like right at me, a foot and a half away from me. It was just so incredibly disrespectful. If he had done that indoors, it would have been a fight. Now, I had to ask myself, is this worth decking this guy over? No, clearly, it's not worth it. But it showed such incredible

• 26:16John Kiriakou?

  disrespect. The only reason he stopped was he happened to be walking with another Aryan one day, and the other Aryan came up to me and said, is it true that you were a hitman for the CIA? I was ready for the question. I was surprised, frankly, that nobody had asked me up to that point. I gave him my very well thought out response. I said, listen, it was wartime, and we all did things we weren't proud of. I didn't say yes, I didn't say no. It scared the farter to the point where he just backed off and stayed backed off for the rest of the time that I was there. Bob Jones, this fucking guy. Another thing I learned from the Italians. If they ever

• 26:59John Kiriakou?

  say, you believe this fucking guy, you're gonna have problems. This asshole, every day, it's the Trilateral Commission and the Shangri-La Conference and the Bilderbergs and Bob Gates and, or not Bob Gates, Bill Gates.

• 27:15Alan Katz?

  He's a petty annoyance.

• 27:16John Kiriakou?

  Yeah, he's a petty annoyance. Yeah, a petty annoyance. He didn't live in my housing unit, so I didn't have to deal with him all the time, just at meals. He was a petty annoyance. If it had been out in the real world, I wouldn't have paid the guy five seconds of thought. But because we're there, together, all the time, or at least at every meal, I just couldn't stand it anymore. So I thought, okay, how am I gonna fuck this guy up? The problem is, is that he sat at the Aryan table, where I sat. So I couldn't accuse him of being a pedophile. Or could I? So I went to the law library. My second year there, I was at the law library pretty much every single day. Go to the law library, and I look him up.

• 28:01John Kiriakou?

  Of course, there are 150 people with his name in the law library archives. I find a case from the 1970s from Ohio, where a guy with the same name beat and raped a male prison guard. So I printed it, and then I carefully cut out the paragraphs. And then, over the course of the next few days, I created what looked like legitimate court papers, saying that it was this Bob Jones who had done this in Ohio in the 70s, continued to lead a life of crime, turned to meth in the 90s, and then got arrested again, and then turned to meth again, and got arrested a third time.

• 28:42John Kiriakou?

  And this was just a continuation of a life of crime that began when he raped a prison guard, a male prison guard. I went to the shock collars, and I said, "This fucking guy. I just got a tip that there was more to this guy than meets the eye, so I went and checked it out. And look what's on the prison law library computer system." Well, the white shock collars, there were two of them. One is like, "Nooo. Is he old enough to have done this in the 70s? He would have been like 20 years old." Yeah, he did it. And the other one's like, "He fucking did it, man. He's a pedophile." "Not a pedophile. He's a homo. We can't have homos at the Aryan table. We'd all be laughing stocks."

• 29:21John Kiriakou?

  So they banished him to the pedophile rat table, which was also, I guess, the gay table. Who knows? He had no idea what happened. No idea what had befallen him. But I thought, "I gotta silence this guy before he does me some real damage." The power of rumors is very, very strong. One of the things that I learned very early on in prison, like within the first few days, was that information is the most important currency. To know what is really going on bestows upon you power. Oh yeah, information was far more important than Max and Stamps. Max and Stamps might get you a seat at the poker table. Max and Stamps

• 30:05John Kiriakou?

  might get you an extra set of underwear or socks, but information gave you power. That was far more important. In the next episode, you'll hear even more of the words that flowed from me at Loretto. Turns out that the pen is mightier than the sword and a shit ton of corruption. Again, we thank you for listening and for liking, rating, reviewing, and commenting on the podcast and on our words. It really means a lot to us. Until next time, I'm John Kiriakou. Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costard and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kiriakou, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.