S1E12 The Grind

THE BLURB: Back in America, John settles in to a year or so "in the penalty box" because of what happened in Athens. John's divorce from Joanne gets complicated by Joanne's brinksmanship. But John does what he must to keep himself in his sons' life. Despite all the Life complications, John scores a small succuss at work. Whatever joy that produces gets undercut when Joanne kidnaps the boys. 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.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  This podcast, it's a Castleton Touchstone production.

• 0:39John Kiriakou?

  There was one point in Athens, before I left Athens, when I was on an operation with one of my colleagues. He tapped me on the chest, just in a friendly way. And then he said, "Hey," and he tapped me harder. "You're not wearing a bulletproof vest." And I said, "You know what, man? I just don't give a shit anymore. No, I'm not wearing a bulletproof vest."

• 1:09John Kiriakou?

  I'm John Kiriakou. Welcome to Dead Drop: What Makes a Spy Tick. This is another episode in our series, What Makes This Spy Tick? What Makes Me Tick? What made me do the thing for which I gained all that notoriety? That's our goal in telling you this story on this granular level. It's one of the wonderful things about podcasting. This medium gives storytellers like me the absolute freedom to tell our stories completely, without any outside interference. And because of the way podcasts are distributed, there really is a direct connection between me and you. To that end, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all of your very kind reviews, ratings, likes, and shares. Please, keep it up.

• 1:53John Kiriakou?

  You doing your part really does help our little podcast grow. Now it's time for me to do my part.

• 2:02John Kiriakou?

  Not too long after my family returned from Athens to the United States as the dust was still settling around us, I developed some photos that I'd shot in Athens. They were just ordinary snapshots. Well, they were ordinary snapshots when I took them, in late June 2000, just a few weeks before we left Athens in such a hurry. My parents had come for a visit, and at one point, I took a picture of my mom standing with my two sons outside the house that the embassy had rented for us. Well, that's what I saw when I took the photo. Looking at it now, though, in Virginia, having just gotten the photos back from being developed, I saw something else in the photo. Specifically, I saw someone else.

• 2:43John Kiriakou?

  A guy in a red Toyota, parked not too far away from me, watching me take this very photo as he spied on me. That was a few weeks after we got home. Nothing about coming home this way was good. My cover had been blown, my marriage was a shambles, and my mood was very dark. Joanne's cold offer of a handshake at the airport before she headed to Ohio and I headed to DC was easily the closest thing to nice that she would ever be again. Eight months before that day that we had to get on the flight back home, she moved into a guest room in our house, and I was alone in our bedroom.

• 3:23John Kiriakou?

  And I got so angry with her about it that I made her move her clothes out of the closet. All the years that we were married, she always had the master closet because she had so much more stuff than I did. And I always had my stuff in the closet of some other room. And I decided, "Damn it, this is my house. We're in this giant house because of my position. I'm the only one living in this bedroom. I want the closet." And I made her take all of her stuff out. I always assumed that, you know, she was angry about something, she was gonna get over it, she was gonna move back into the bedroom, and she never did. It's not because Joanne pined for Uncle Stelios. That really wasn't it at all. He was a symptom of something bigger, and not the something bigger itself, if that makes sense.

• 4:09John Kiriakou?

  One of the guys with whom I worked in the station was a real sweetheart of a guy. I confided in him that Joanne was having an affair with this guy, Stelios. My colleague said, "Do you want me to go to the island this weekend and do surveillance? You would do that for me?" And he said, "Of course. Do you know what this guy looks like?" And I said, "No idea." So, on his own dime, he took a ferry to the island of Hios, rented a car, went to the village. Now, the village where Joanne and the kids were staying, in her grandmother's house, only had but 150 people in it, so you'd stick out like a sore thumb. But he was able to successfully conduct surveillance. He found Stelios, took some pictures of him, came back, gave me the pictures,

• 4:53John Kiriakou?

  and said, "The guy is a fat, unshaven slob. He has a little fix-it shop in the village where he'll fix your toaster or a little motor on something. He'll fix your hairdryer. That's it. That's all that there is to him. He's a nobody." I will say that I did something that I later was not proud of. I got his full name, I got his birth date and his address, and I put him into the State Department's computer system as a possible terrorist, so that he was never, ever, ever able to travel outside of Greece for the rest of his life. After my friend went to the island, I concluded that this wasn't about Stelios.

• 5:38John Kiriakou?

  She wasn't in love with Stelios. She was unhappy with me. She was unhappy in our marriage. So I didn't see Stelios as threat to my position as husband and father. My sexual relationship with her ended a year before I ever heard of Stelios. She didn't want me touching her. She just simply didn't want to be married to me. If it hadn't been Stelios, it would have been somebody else at some point. I had no experience in this kind of thing. In Greece, there's no such thing as marriage counseling. Believe me, I sought it out. You can go to a psychiatrist. I didn't need a psychiatrist. I needed a therapist. There just isn't such a vocation in Greece. I later learned that that was not unusual in Eastern and Southern Europe,

• 6:23John Kiriakou?

  that you just kind of suck it up. And if you really, really have a problem and can't suck it up, then you go talk to a priest about it. I actually made an appointment for us to go to see the Anglican priest in Athens. He was Irish, Northern Irish, native English speaker. I didn't want to talk to a Greek Orthodox priest about this. So I wanted to talk to somebody who understood the nuances of the English language. I made an appointment. I went to the Anglican church, which is right smack in the center of Athens. I went to his office and I sat there and I waited and waited and waited. And where is Joanne? Finally, I called her. I said, where are you? She said, traffic is terrible. I'm gonna be late.

• 7:06John Kiriakou?

  And I said, well, I gotta get back to work, so hurry up. And another 20 minutes passed. And finally, I called her back and I'm like, look, we have 20 minutes left in the appointment. Where are you? And she said, oh, I turned around and went home. Traffic was too heavy. I knew at that instant that my marriage was over.

• 7:26John Kiriakou?

  Maybe it should be obvious. People who keep secrets for a living tend to do poorly in long-term relationships. The agency's ranks are chock-a-block with employees who've been married three, four, even five times. You'd think the CIA would understand the pressure it puts on its hard-working employees' relationships and then do something to accommodate those very real hardships. They don't do much now. They did nothing then. Instead, plenty of us did what I did. We just kept our problems at home a secret. Boy, the irony of that. What made the whole situation worse for me was that while Joanne didn't know any of the CIA's secrets, she knew its culture and she knew how to use that culture to further punish me,

• 8:11John Kiriakou?

  to stick me on an island, and I don't mean a nice Greek island. You can't tell anyone what's happening at work. Because then they're gonna report you back to the Office of Medical Services and then the shrinks get involved and then you can't travel overseas and then you have to be polygraphed again. So I didn't want the CIA to know that I was having marriage problems. And then she did something specifically to hurt me. Just as we were leaving Athens, she called the station chief. At home, without my knowing. He called me and he said, listen, you should know that your wife just called me. I said, my wife called you. He said, the connection was terrible, but he thought that what she was trying to say was that I was abusive.

• 8:56John Kiriakou?

  And I said, of course she is. And I remembered telling her one time that there was a rule at the CIA that if you have been credibly accused of domestic violence, you can't carry a gun. If I couldn't carry a gun as an operations officer, my career was over. So in the days after I caught her and this Stelios character, she tried to get back at me by wrecking my career. I said to the chief, what did you tell her? And he said, I honestly couldn't make out what she was saying. I said, Joanne, the connection's terrible. I can't understand you. There is an office at headquarters that can walk you through the divorce process.

• 9:42John Kiriakou?

  If you have any questions or concerns, you can take it up with them. That's what saved me. She never contacted them. But I've never raised a hand to a woman in my entire life, nor would I. That is just not something that my father ever did. It's not something that my grandfathers ever did. It's just not in my nature. But she was fully prepared to end my career by falsely accusing me of domestic violence. She went back to Ohio and moved in with her parents. She took the boys and moved in with her parents. I went to DC, moved in with a buddy of mine. He had a spare bedroom. I stayed with him for six weeks while I looked for an apartment. All my stuff was still in Greece. My colleagues had to pack out the entire household and put it on a ship.

• 10:27John Kiriakou?

  And that took months to get my stuff back. Even her car, we had to abandon her car. They had to drive it into a container and put it on a ship. So I had to, you know, try to make do with what I was able to to just buy with my first paycheck. In order to see the boys, I made a decision that I would drive to Ohio every other weekend. And I'm proud to say that in the next 11 years, I never missed a weekend, except when I was stationed in Pakistan after 9/11. It cost me $250,000. I went through three cars. The toll collectors on the Pennsylvania Turnpike knew me by name and would welcome me

• 11:10John Kiriakou?

  and say hello when I would pick up my ticket and pay my toll, in the days before all of that was automated. My parents lived just barely on the Pennsylvania side of the line. So I would drive to Ohio, pick up the kids, drive back to Pennsylvania, spend the weekend with the kids at my parents' house. And then Joanne refused to drive the 26 miles to my parents' house to pick them up. So at the end of the weekend, I would drive back to Ohio, a half hour, drop off the kids, and then all the way back to Virginia again, usually getting in around 11:30 at night. I did that for 11 years. Joanne was being difficult because she realized that she could be difficult,

• 11:55John Kiriakou?

  and there was almost nothing I could do about it. So I went to interview divorce lawyers. A friend of mine made an offhanded comment. He said, "If you want the best divorce lawyer, interview all the divorce lawyers, but ask them, if they were getting a divorce, who would they hire?" So I interviewed about six. Five of them said that they would hire a woman named Mary Jane Stevens. I had never heard of Mary Jane Stevens. It turned out that she was a divorce attorney in Youngstown, Ohio. It would never have occurred to me to look in Youngstown for an attorney. My parents were in Pennsylvania, I was in Virginia, and Joanne was in Warren, Ohio, which is a different county. It's Trumbull County, and Youngstown is in Mahoning County.

• 12:38John Kiriakou?

  So I made an appointment, and I went to see Mary Jane Stevens. Mary Jane was a hard-talking, hard-drinking, hard-smoking woman in her 60s. She literally lit one cigarette off the other. You had to take an oxygen tank into her office with you if you wanted to breathe for the next hour. I immediately took a liking to her. Two years after my divorce, her secretary called me to say that Mary Jane had been found dead at her home. She had had a heart attack. She was single and just didn't show up for work on Monday morning. And where did I want them to send my box of files?

• 13:18John Kiriakou?

  I burst into tears because that's how much I came to like and respect that woman. She was a guardian angel when I really needed a helping hand. She really was. She no longer represented me. I was divorced, but she was just so important to me in that little slice of my life that I'll be forever indebted to her. The divorce process took a lot longer than I thought it would, only because I didn't realize that for me to file for divorce, I had to be a resident of Ohio. I thought just because my ex and my kids were in Ohio, that I could file in Ohio. I kept telling Joanne, are we getting divorced or not? You're the one who said you wanted divorce. Why don't you file for divorce?

• 14:03John Kiriakou?

  One of the reasons why she didn't file for divorce is I sat with a calculator one day. It was like my next to the last day in Athens. I figured out how much I made, divided by 26 pay periods, and I calculated what I thought Joanne would need to live. I said, look, I'm gonna start sending you X amount of money every month, which I did immediately. I wrote her a check that day and said, this is what I'm gonna do every month. I'm gonna send you a check. It was within $25 of what the court ended up calculating the amount to be. And the judge even lauded me and said that she's done thousands of divorces, and that was the first time that she had ever seen somebody calculate the child support, pay the child support, and then have the child support so close to what the court calculated it to be.

• 14:48John Kiriakou?

  I had gone online, how long does it take to get a divorce in Ohio? It takes a year. Okay, I waited a year, and I called Mary Jane and I said, it's been a year, let's file. And she said, you can't file. I said, what do you mean I can't file? You don't live in Ohio. Are you kidding me? All this time, I thought we were just waiting for the one-year cooling-off period, and I thought we'd file. She said, "No, Joanne has to file." The problem was that Joanne liked how things were. She was in total control of nearly everything, but especially me. By keeping the status quo going, the money kept coming in and she pretty much got to live just how she wanted. And me, well, the status quo meant that I couldn't move on.

• 15:32John Kiriakou?

  I certainly couldn't think about starting a new, maybe even a healthy relationship. I couldn't even think about dating anyone. That was the icing on her "I hate John" cake. And so she just never filed. And if the money's coming in, then why upset the apple cart? I said to Mary Jane, "But what should I do? Should I file in Virginia?" She said, "Oh, they'll take you to the cleaners in Virginia. The laws are vastly different in Virginia. You'll lose everything. I would recommend that you write Joanne a nice note and tell her that effective immediately you're cutting her child support in half." I tried to be a little bit insulting in a passive-aggressive way about it. So what I did was I happened to be in New York and I stopped in at Tiffany's and I

• 16:15John Kiriakou?

  bought Tiffany stationery that said Tiffany and Company on it, on the back of it. I took my unnecessarily expensive Tiffany stationery and I said, "Dear Joanne, on the advice of counsel, I am hereby cutting your child support payments in half effective immediately. Best regards, John." She filed for divorce the very next day. And I called Mary Jane and she said, "I told you." And I said, "Okay, so here we go." Even that took longer than I expected because Joanne challenged literally everything. For example, could my parents pick up the kids? I had the kids from 6 o'clock PM on Friday to 6 o'clock PM on Sunday. Well, I can't leave work until 5.

• 17:00John Kiriakou?

  It's a 6-hour drive. I can't get there till 11. And when I would get there at 11, she wouldn't answer the door. She would pretend to be asleep. So I said, "Well, my parents are gonna pick up the kids at 6." "No, your parents can't pick up the kids at 6. It's your child visitation, not your parents' child visitation." So I had to file a suit. And then that had to go to court and we had to schedule a hearing. And then the judge said, "No, his parents can pick up the kids at 6." And then I said, well, Your Honor, what would be really helpful is if my parents could pick up the kids at five? And then we make it till five on Sunday because she won't come to Pennsylvania to pick the kids up.

• 17:42John Kiriakou?

  I have to drive them back to Ohio at six and then I'm not getting back to Washington until eleven thirty. And Joanne says, objection, won't do it. So I had to file another suit and then that went to a trial and I won. I had to make a separate motion for Joanne to come to Pennsylvania to pick up the kids. Literally everything that I needed, she made me sue her. I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was fortunate in that I didn't have to pay her legal fees and it was because she had so pissed off the judge. At least I got away with that. In any event, we worked it out so that my mom and dad would pick them up at five on Friday, take them out to eat and then back to Pennsylvania.

• 18:26John Kiriakou?

  And then I would get there at that point by ten, I could get there at ten P M. And then we had the weekend and then I could leave directly from my mom and dad's house at five o'clock on Sundays and then get back to Washington by ten instead of getting there by eleven thirty. So it helped a lot. And then when nine eleven broke and I had to move to Pakistan, I wanted my mom and dad to be able to have the weekends with the kids. And she said, absolutely not. Your mom and dad can't have any access to the kids if you're not there. So I had to sue her again. The judge was very generous with me and let me do it online from Pakistan with that terrible phone connection. The judge ended up allowing my mom and dad to have the kids from ten A M. on Sunday to six P M. on Sunday.

• 19:10John Kiriakou?

  Literally everything was a fight unnecessarily. So it was like a siege. Warren, Ohio is a very small town. The Greek community in Warren is a very big community. The Greeks all know each other. Warren, Ohio is where Joanne was born and raised. Her family, as I said, was from the island of Heos. Warren is also the city where my mom was born and raised. The Greek community is enormous and it's very clearly divided. About 75% of the Greeks in Warren are from the island of Heos. In fact, there's a chapter of the International Heian Society that's in Warren, Ohio. The first time I ever went to Heos, they said, "Are you Greek-American?" I said, "Yes." And they said, "Are you from Warren?" And I said, "Warren?

• 19:55John Kiriakou?

  Uh, no, I'm not from Warren, but how in the world do you know Warren?" And he said, "All the Hyades moved to Warren." The other 25% of the Greeks were from Rhodes, which was the earlier generation. On the day that my divorce was final, just to give you an idea of what the community was like, on the day that my divorce was final, a bunch of Greeks were sitting in the Greek coffeehouse where my grandfather spent seven nights a week smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and playing peanuckle. And they started talking about me and my divorce. And some old man who I had never met said something about, "That kid's no good. He abused that girl." Just going on and on.

• 20:39John Kiriakou?

  I have no idea who this old man was. Well, there was a dentist who was also in the coffee shop. He was Rhodian. He stood up and said, "Wait a minute. I've known that boy's family for the last 60 years. They're an honorable family. You take that back." The Hyade stood up, and the Rhodian stood up, and my cousin called me and told me that the next thing you know, fists are flying. "I've never met these people, and they're in a fistfight over whose fault my divorce was." The police were called. The police ended up just saying, "You Greeks, you need to calm down." I ended up calling the dentist and thanking him. He was a real gentleman. And he said, "You know, you and I have never met, but I knew your father, I knew your

• 21:24John Kiriakou?

  mother, I knew your grandparents, I know everybody in your family." And when he started talking trash about you, I knew that I had to stand up. It was incredible to me, but that's how contentious this divorce was, completely unnecessarily so. In the meantime, work was actually going pretty well. I had been told that I would have to sit in the penalty box for a year, which meant you take this job that really nobody else wants, you're probably not going to get promoted for a year, but just tough it out and things are going to turn around. Well, the job that I got was in a training group where I was assigned to travel all

• 22:04John Kiriakou?

  around the world and to train foreign intelligence services in how to carry out counter terrorist raids, how to break down the door, how to grab people, how to do interrogations, how to disrupt terrorist cells. It's understood that the CIA has expertise in this area and for many of these countries, they either can't or won't ask the Israelis to train them. In many of these countries, having been colonies of the UK, they just don't trust the Brits to do it. So they ask us to do it. Plus, we have lots and lots of money, more money than anybody else, and so it doesn't cost them anything. So I started traveling quite literally all around the world, doing these training sessions. And these training sessions would last for weeks at a time.

• 22:49John Kiriakou?

  My boss at the time, it's funny, I only met this guy on my first day on the job. I had never encountered him in my career. He was completely new to me. We hit it off immediately. I liked him, he liked me, we respected each other. I went into his office that morning of my first day to introduce myself and he says, "So, you beat the shit out of a pastry chef? What was that all about?" I said, "Well, listen, it was just incidental that he was a pastry chef. The guy was actually a real douchebag and he deserved a good beat down." And he's like, "Yeah, well, to tell you the truth, I actually did the same thing in Yemen." He wasn't a pastry chef, but he deserved a beat down. And I gave it to him. I laughed and I thought, "Oh, I'm going to get along just fine here."

• 23:33John Kiriakou?

  He said, "What do you want to do in this job?" "Honestly, I'll do whatever you want me to do." "I want you to be in charge of the Middle East, but in addition to that, we're a little bit short-staffed and one of your colleagues is an idiot. I don't trust him to do the job. So I want you to take the Middle East and two..." East Asian countries. I said, okay, I've never been in East Asia, but that sounds like fun. We didn't do this for every country in the world. We did this for the countries that needed our help and with which we had good diplomatic and intelligence relationships. This guy was such a good guy to me. I said to him, on a man to man level, I've got this situation with my ex-wife. He says, listen, whatever it is, don't worry about it. I have three ex-wives. I know what you're going through.

• 24:16John Kiriakou?

  I said, fighting her over visitation and I gotta be in Ohio to pick up the kids. He said, no worries. What are you asking me for? I said, I'm happy to travel anywhere in the world that you want me to travel, but I need to be back by Friday night and then I can fly back out on Sunday night. He said, fine, you just want to be back in the States every other weekend. I said, exactly. Done. In the year before nine eleven, I made twenty four international trips and I never missed a weekend and it was thanks to him. Good guy. The most important thing that happened to me in that year involved a guy that I call Abdallah Zin.

• 24:59John Kiriakou?

  That's not his real name, but I'm not allowed to disclose his identity. I'm not allowed to disclose his nationality and I'm not allowed to disclose the names of the countries involved, but I can still tell the story. I had a friend who was a station chief in the Middle East. Not just a friend, he also happened to be Orthodox, so we bonded over this shared faith. He introduced me to my second wife. He called me one day and he said, what are you doing? I said, I'm in the penalty box. I'm working in this branch in the counterterrorism center. And he said, I was hoping you could do me a favor. Sure, name it. One of my guys has recruited a double agent. The double doesn't know that we know that he's a double.

• 25:45John Kiriakou?

  Oh, this sounds dangerous and intriguing. And I'm an adrenaline junkie. I need this constant rush, this surge of adrenaline to stay interested in an issue. He said, the guy has been instructed. by his handler to insist that I handle him. I, meaning the station chief. And I said, and you want me to come out there and pretend to be you? Exactly. I said, that sounds like fun. Let me run it up the flagpole, but I'm sure they'll say yes. So I went to my boss and I told him, there's this double agent case out in the Middle East. He said, yeah, I heard about it. Cable came in and they're asking for you. You want to take something like this on? And I said, yeah, I said, I am trained out the wazoo in not just counterterrorism ops,

• 26:30John Kiriakou?

  but advanced counterterrorism ops and surveillance and surveillance detection. I was an instructor in the evenings doing surveillance and surveillance detection instruction for new hires. I said, yeah, I'd like to do it. A couple of days later, I got on a plane and went back to the Middle East. I flew to this country in the Middle East. The entire station was waiting for me, prepared to brief me. They had recruited an agent whom they believed was the founder and leader of the Hezbollah cell in this country. And they believed that he was secretly working for one of our greatest enemies. He had been tasked by the enemy country to allow the CIA to recruit him so that he

• 27:14John Kiriakou?

  could report back to them on what the CIA wanted him to collect, what the CIA's interests were, the identities of CIA officers. This was a very high-risk, double-agent operation. My friend said, look, it's just too dangerous for me to meet with this guy. He's going to out me to the bad guys and they're going to kill me. He said, but if you pretend to be me and you're constantly flying in and out, they won't be able to get to you. I said, yeah, dumb, not a problem. We came up with an operational plan. There were what were called protocols. You call and you say, the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plane and the guy answers Merseydotes and Dozydotes and Little Lamseydivy, and that means meet me at the Marriott at eight o'clock. I trigger a meeting.

• 27:59John Kiriakou?

  Just to be on the safe side, I would never tell him what room the meeting was going to be in. I would always say, come up to the sixth floor or come up to the fourth floor or the eighth floor, whatever. I would meet him there at the elevator and I would give him a big bear hug and pat him down to feel for weapons. I would tell him to walk down to the stairwell and then meet me in room five thirty five. Or two seventeen or whatever room I happen to have. That way I could be sure he didn't have any weapons on him. And I would get to the room before he would. So he came to the room that first meeting. I took off my jacket only because the air conditioner was broken and I was hot. Later on, he reported back to the, I'm gonna call the enemy country the bad guys.

• 28:43John Kiriakou?

  He reported back to the bad guys that I made a show of taking off my jacket to show that I didn't have a gun. But he knew that I had a gun on my ankle. I didn't have any gun. There are no guns. We had a security team in the lobby. They had lots of guns, but I didn't have any gun. I actually felt very comfortable with this arrangement for several reasons. Number one. At the time I was thirty six years old. I was in the peak of health. This guy was twenty years older. He was fifty pounds overweight. It became clear to me later in the process that he was in over his head. We sat down. I asked him if he wanted a cup of coffee. Are you hungry? I can order room service, whatever he'd like. He didn't want anything, which is not unusual.

• 29:28John Kiriakou?

  I said, here's how we're gonna do our meetings. In the first sixty seconds of our meeting. We're gonna do something called the mad minute. In that sixty seconds, I'm gonna ask you if you arrived safely. Were you followed here? Did you do a surveillance detection route? And then I'm gonna tell you when and where the next meeting is gonna be. If for some reason the police break down the door and grab us both. We can talk our way out of it somehow and we know when the next meeting is gonna be. The very first thing that you have to understand is that every time we meet. You are going to have to have successfully completed a surveillance detection route. I told him, listen, if we get caught, it's no skin off my nose.

• 30:13John Kiriakou?

  They're just gonna expel me from the country. I should add, they weren't gonna expel me from the country because we were doing this operation in. Concert with the host government. So we told them absolutely everything that was happening. And in fact, as soon as the meetings were over, I would go to the host government's intelligence service headquarters with my colleagues and do the debriefing. I pulled out a map of the capital city. I said, this is how you do a surveillance detection route. And I explained it to him. Always be 100% certain that you're not followed here. Well, the truth was that we were following him from his house to the hotel every single time. He never did a surveillance detection route.

• 30:57John Kiriakou?

  He always lied to me and told me that he did. And in fact, after the meetings, he would drive directly from the hotel to the bad guy embassy to report on what I had said. And he said, I need to make sure you're the chief, right? And I said, right. You said you wanted the chief, you got the chief. He said, you're awfully young to be a chief. And I said, I'm awfully good. That's why I'm the chief. And he accepted that.

• 31:24Speaker 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.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 32:31John Kiriakou?

  I said, "Here's what I want you to do before our next meeting. I want you to rent a post office box so that in the event that we lose communication somehow, I can leave a message in the post office box. So I want you to just swing by the post office once a week and check to see if there's anything in there." It was a dead drop. I gave him a cellphone that back then was known as a tri-band cellphone. I had one for myself and one for him. A tri-band cellphone was a cellphone that you could buy locally in the Middle East. It was a local number to that country, but it would ring like a local phone call no matter where you were in the world. So he thinks I live in that country.

• 33:13John Kiriakou?

  I'm actually in Washington, and he would call me and say, "You know, the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plane." I would run to Dulles Airport, get on a plane, and then meet him for dinner. There were a couple of times when I flew to the Middle East, I arrived at 10:00 PM, the meeting would be at midnight, and then the plane back to Washington would be at 2:00 AM. I did that twice. It was nuts. Even at the Office of Medical Services, they said, "You need to be careful about a blood clot. You fly an awful lot." And so I would get up and stretch and do exercises. I did this for months, almost for the entire year before 9/11.

• 33:56John Kiriakou?

  And in the meantime, I'm having to go to other countries in the Middle East to do my counterterrorism training for these liaison services.

• 34:06John Kiriakou?

  I'm back at headquarters one day, and I get a call from a sister agency in the Washington metropolitan area. The woman on the other end of the call, and it's on my green line, on my classified line... The woman on the other end says, "Are you handling this double agent case out in this Middle Eastern country?" And I said, "Yeah." She said, "Listen, we just picked something up that's very disturbing. The bad guys have instructed him to shoot you in the next meeting." "Oh, they have, have they?" I said, "Thanks for the heads up." As soon as I hang up the phone, my boss just busts out of his office. "We just got a cable from this sister agency." I said, "I know, I know, they just called me."

• 34:50John Kiriakou?

  He says, "You have to abort the operation." And I said, "Wait a minute, one step at a time here. He's not gonna kill me in the next meeting. They're never gonna let you," they meaning CIA leadership, "they're never gonna let you continue this operation." I said, "Well, let's put a meeting together because I think that would be a big mistake." Within an hour or two, we had a meeting of movers and shakers in CIA counterterrorism. It was the director of the counterterrorism center, the director of operations for the counterterrorism center, my boss, the division chief who headed the division that covered this country, a couple of hangers-on, and me. They said, "We've gotta end this operation right now." And I said, "Wait a minute, I know this guy better than anybody. He's afraid of his own shadow.

• 35:34John Kiriakou?

  He's 20 years older than I am, he's 50 pounds overweight, he's slow, frankly, he's not even a very good terrorist. How about this? Just hear me out. Let's do the next meeting at the Marriott because every Marriott in the world is designed in exactly the same way. You walk into the room and the bathroom is right there as soon as you walk in." So we get adjoining rooms. And in the adjoining room, we have our guys and the host country guys. The bad guy is gonna call me from the lobby and tell me he's here for the meeting. Rather than pat him down, I'm just gonna give him the room number and I'll have the door propped open. He's gonna come to the room, he'll knock on the door.

• 36:18John Kiriakou?

  I say, "Come in." He'll come in. I come out of the bathroom, grab him, take him down. Our guys bust in from the adjoining room and we take him. And they all kinda looked around at each other and said, "All right, but only if you promise that you'll wear a bulletproof vest." I said, "Sure, I promise. I'll wear a bulletproof vest." I flew back out there. We had cabled all of this in advance, so my colleagues knew what the plan was. We met up at the station. And my buddy, my buddy who was the actual chief, said, "You're sure you want to do this?" "Oh, I'm sure I want to do this." "If only so I can look in his eyes and say, 'You stupid fool.'"

• 36:59John Kiriakou?

  He said, "Okay, we have a large security team, six guys, and they're going to be in the lobby. Everybody's going to be heavily armed, they're going to be ready for anything." I said, "Great." So we did a surveillance detection route to the Marriott. We were clean, I checked in, and I'm talking like six hours in advance. I actually took a nap. Our security team, six guys, they were just in a bar in the lobby, like for fruit juices and stuff. So they're just kind of spread out around the lobby. About two hours before the meeting is scheduled, the bad guy security team shows up in the lobby. And it's six of them, and they're all armed. Well, our security guys are giving the stink eye to their security guys.

• 37:41John Kiriakou?

  They told me later, you could see in their faces, are we being overly cautious? Are these CIA guys? Are they tourists? That one looks Indian, so we're not sure. You know, should we run screaming from the room? Should we call off the meeting? But they let it go forward. Finally, Abdulazim calls me, again, not realizing that he had been under surveillance all day, because he was an idiot. And he had gone from his house to the bad guy embassy, and from the bad guy embassy, straight to the Marriott. And he calls me from the lobby. One of my guys called and whispered, "He's walking into the lobby." And then as soon as he said that, Abdulazim calls and he says, "I've arrived." I said, "Come up to room," whatever it was.

• 38:25John Kiriakou?

  He comes straight to the room, I have the door propped open. You know those, those locks that every hotel has? I just use that lock to prop open the door. He knocks on the door, "Come in," in my friendly voice. He comes in, I come out of the bathroom, I grab him in a bear hug, and I body slam him to the floor. He's reaching for the gun, his hand can't quite... Get to his belt to get the gun and I have him pinned. I'm sitting on his chest and I've, I've got him pinned on the floor. My colleagues and the host country intelligence officers burst in from the adjoining room and I said to him, "Did you really think I was so fucking stupid

• 39:09John Kiriakou?

  that I didn't know that you've been a double agent this whole time? Did you really think that I was such an amateur that I didn't know you came here to kill me today?" I smiled at him and I said, "I'm offended frankly." And he says, "Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar. God is the greatest, God is the greatest. Allah can't help you now, my friend." Well, I learned that day that one of the dirty little secrets of hotels all around the world is that people die in them every day. You have to have a way of taking a dead body out of a hotel. You can't do it through the lobby. So they have large freight elevators and my liaison friends gave him a shot of Demerol which knocked him out. We had an ambulance waiting by. We put him on

• 39:51John Kiriakou?

  a gurney, covered him up like he was dead, took him down the freight elevator, put him in the ambulance and took him to the host country intelligence service headquarters. In the meantime, the bad guy's security officers are in the lobby and they're starting to talk among themselves. Something's wrong. He's been up there too long. We haven't heard any shots. What's happening? Why hasn't he called? Why hasn't he notified us? Why haven't we seen him? He was supposed to come down. He was supposed to fire a shot. He vanished. He just vanished. He woke up two hours later tied to a chair. I said, "We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way. We know who you are. We've known from the beginning who you were. We know that you had Hezbollah

• 40:31John Kiriakou?

  here and we want the weapons. All of the weapons. You're out of business effective today." "Allahu Akbar. Fuck you. I fuck your mother." I was like, "Okay, if that's how you want to play it." My liaison friends just start wailing on him. Black eyes, bloody nose. I had to play by the rules, which means I was not permitted to lay a single hand on this guy, nor did I want to necessarily. He and I both wanted something from each other. He wanted to identify me and to identify other station officers that he could set up for assassination. What I wanted from him was very simple. I wanted Hezbollah's weapons. All of them. I wanted to put Hezbollah out of business.

• 41:17John Kiriakou?

  He would not budge and no matter how badly my foreign friends beat him, he just would not talk. So I said, guys, guys, listen, we know where he lives. I can call in a locks and picks team. We can pick the lock and we could just go in the house. The house was big enough to to maintain a cache of weapons. Maybe the weapons are just in the house. Let's just go in the house. And they said, we can't. He's got a Filipino maid and she never ever leaves the house. So we can't go in there. I said, okay, here's what we do. He lives in a cul-de-sac. The cul-de-sac has six mansions in it. Let's just declare, let's say, a gas leak.

• 42:00John Kiriakou?

  We'll say there's an environmental emergency and we have to evacuate the cul-de-sac. And they said, no, can't do that. We don't have underground gas lines in this country. We use propane. My God, do I have to think of everything? Bring an 18-wheeler full of propane. We'll spill some propane in the street. Then we'll declare an environmental emergency and we evacuate the cul-de-sac.

• 42:23John Kiriakou?

  An hour later, this 18-wheeler pulls down the cul-de-sac. I get out there and I turn this enormous wheel on the back of the truck. Propane's gushing out all over the street. Then I close the wheel and I said, fine. Now declare an environmental emergency. They call the fire department. The fire department comes, they close off the cul-de-sac and they evacuate all the houses. Now, was that really that hard? Seriously. We have a locks and picks team on standby. It takes them five minutes to pick the lock. They got the stethoscope and they're listening to the tumblers and whatever. They pick the lock. We go in there. We find an enormous gun safe.

• 43:07John Kiriakou?

  Triple the size of any gun safe I've ever seen for sale here in the United States. Okay, that's gotta be the weapons cache. The locks and picks team starts on the gun safe. This was tough. This was a good 20 or 30 minutes to get into this thing. They finally open it and it's completely empty, except for one piece of paper.

• 43:31Speaker 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.

• 44:08John Kiriakou?

  I grabbed a piece of paper, and it was like out of a cartoon, like out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. It was a childlike map, and it's got this X. And it literally says over the X, "The weapons are here," with an arrow to the X. What was written in Arabic was, "Drive to this village, and then get out at this mile marker or kilometer marker. Walk south 150 meters and make a right at the palm tree, and then go 50 meters and make a left at the big rock, and go 120 meters." And there was a bunker in the desert, and it was full to the ceiling with weapons.

• 44:51John Kiriakou?

  And not just weapons, but explosives, rockets, rocket-propelled grenades, landmines, ammunition. I thought my liaison partners were going to start crying. They were so happy. We had to requisition trucks to come from Intelligence Service Headquarters to take possession of all this ordinance. They ended up destroying it in a controlled explosion out in the desert, but we literally put Hezbollah out of business that day. Years later, after I had left the CIA, I ran into one of the guys from the station at a shopping mall in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. We're standing there laughing and talking and catching up.

• 45:36John Kiriakou?

  I said, "Whatever happened to the guy, Abdallah Zim?" "Oh, he's..." Still in prison. I said, it's been twenty years. And he said, he's gonna die in prison. Word quickly spread among people in the know in that country's government, what I had done. I was invited to the wedding of the Crown Prince. I had never even met the Crown Prince, but I was invited to his wedding as a guest of honor. Here we are twenty-five years after I did this operation. And as recently as yesterday, I took a call from a member of the royal family. Many members with whom I'm still in touch, because they will never forget what I did. And they're still appreciative after twenty-five years. I'm touched by it.

• 46:21John Kiriakou?

  I say all the time, I love the Middle East. I love Arab history, Arab culture, Arab literature, Arab poetry, Arabic language, Arabic food. I love everything about it. They appreciate that. And I appreciate that they appreciate it. And so for a little while, at least, during the spring and the early summer of two thousand and one, my life found something of a rhythm. Work, see the boys, work, see the boys, work, see the boys. Summer rolled around. The divorce decree gave both Joanne and me six weeks of summer holiday with the boys. I got the kids every other Christmas and she got the kids every other Christmas, and every other Thanksgiving and every other Easter or whatever. So it was all fifty-fifty. The only provision was, if she took the kids out of Ohio overnight,

• 47:06John Kiriakou?

  she had to inform me in advance, seven days in advance, that she was gonna do that. And if I took the kids out of Virginia when they were with me, I had to give her seven days' notice. We couldn't turn down each other's vacation plans unless there was a legally binding reason to do it. My mom said, let's take the kids to Disney World. It's been a rough year for everybody. We'll go to Florida, we'll go to Orlando, have a good time. We have family down there anyway. My dad was very much an old-school kind of guy. My dad loved AAA. He would always go down to AAA and get trip ticks and get hotel recommendations and stuff that old men used to do. He happened to be down at AAA.

• 47:50John Kiriakou?

  He saw these package deals for Disney World and said, hey, this is a great idea. They do all the planning. You just decide, do you want the diamond treatment? The gold, the silver, the bronze treatment? So I wrote him a check. He went down there and bought tickets for all of us. The hotel, Disney property, rental car, flights, everything. This was at least a month in advance. I only had to give Joanne seven days notice, but I told her a good three or four weeks in advance, hey, we're going to take the kids down to Disney World. It may have triggered Joanne that I was making plans to have fun. And Joanne never really liked my parents very much.

• 48:33John Kiriakou?

  She hated that the kids were having a good time with my parents. And I think she just decided that she was going to throw a wrench into things without really thinking about the consequences. And I'm not one to back down when faced with a fight. We were going to go to Disney on Saturday morning. Friday after work, I get in the car and I start driving to Pennsylvania. My parents go over to Ohio to pick up the kids. And my mom calls me from the car while she's parked in front of Joanne's parents' house. And she said to me, I don't want to panic you, but we're at the house. They're not here.

• 49:15John Kiriakou?

  And it looks like there hasn't been anybody here in weeks. I said, what are you talking about? She said, the grass hasn't been cut. There are no lights on in the house. There's nobody here. And I said, she's kidnapped the kids.

• 49:35John Kiriakou?

  In the next episode, being a trained spy comes in extremely handy in the search for my two sons. My work situation, like everyone's, was about to change profoundly, though. Well beneath the surface, a terrorist named Osama bin Laden was already hard at work planning an operation that would truly stun the world. 9/11 surprised the CIA, but not because we didn't expect it. We'll do a deep dive into what the CIA knew before 9/11 and what they did and didn't do with that information. You won't want to miss it. To that end, please don't forget to like, review, rate, and share the podcast. It helps more than you know, and if you have the time, please check out my other podcasts.

• 50:16John Kiriakou?

  That's Deep Program, Monday through Friday, on both YouTube and Rumble, and Deep Focus, twice a week, on YouTube. Till next time, I'm John 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.

• 50:50Speaker 01

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

• 50:55Speaker 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.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  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.