S1E6 A Failure Of Analysis

THE BLURB: When his assignment to Bahrain ends, John finds himself back at CIA HQ in Langley, settling in to life as an analyst - a bored drone at a boring desk. It doesn't take long for John to hanker instead for something more satisfying: something in operations - out in the field. Something a little more dangerous... 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 with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:06Alan Katz?

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

• 1:14John Kiriakou?

  I'm John Kiriakou. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick. In this episode, we're going to continue the story of what makes this spy tick. But before we get there, I want to, as usual, say thank you, a heartfelt thank you, and ask you to do us the kindness of commenting on, reviewing, subscribing to, following, and/or liking the podcast on whatever platform you're listening to it. It really does help us reach a bigger audience. Our story so far.

• 1:45John Kiriakou?

  Having been recruited into the CIA by a CIA legend, I am more or less golden boyed through the early stages of my CIA career. Not a bad way to start. The good news, I became the agency's go-to guy for anything and everything on the subject of Bahrain. The bad news, that threatened to hamstring me by tying me down to a Middle Eastern backwater. Fortunately for me, though, that backwater was right next to Saudi Arabia, where terrorists blew up the Kobar Towers. That killed some of the US military personnel who were housed there and wounded a lot more. After some time spent back at headquarters in Langley and with my marriage beginning to unravel, I longed for another foreign posting.

• 2:32John Kiriakou?

  When I left Bahrain, I was excited to get back home, see my family. I had a newborn son. My other son was three. I missed them terribly. I wasn't exactly sure what I was going back to. I expected to go back to Langley and work on Iraq. Nobody had made that promise to me, but it just seemed the logical thing to do.

• 2:55John Kiriakou?

  The Kobar Tower bombing took place on June 25th and I went back on August 1st, 1996. My work at the bomb site lasted the day after the bombing and that was it. The Saudis were in control. The FBI was really the liaison organization on the ground because this was a crime against Americans. NCIS was involved. I literally got in the car and drove back to Bahrain and just resumed my normal life. There was nothing else for me to do. I was still State Department at the time and so there was nothing that was expected of me. I went back. It was the summer, so things were slow.

• 3:36John Kiriakou?

  I wound things down. I packed up everything in my house for the movers and I just bided my five weeks until it was time to get on the plane and go home. Going home was kind of a funny experience for a couple of reasons. First of all, I was a big fish in a small pond in Bahrain. I liked being known by His Majesty and hanging out with a Crown Prince and half of the male members of the royal family. It was fun. It was heady. It was the little things too. For example, the royal family liked me so much that the prince who was in charge of security at the Bahrain International Airport

• 4:18John Kiriakou?

  gave me a staff badge so that I could just walk right through security. And when my dad and brother came to visit and when my wife and son came back from vacation the previous summer, I just held up my badge and I walked out onto the tarmac and met them on the tarmac. So it's the little things. It's fun to be important in a little place. There were no direct flights on American carriers back then, and there's a law in the United States called the Fly America Act. So you have to go as long a distance as you can go on an American carrier before you can switch to or from a foreign carrier.

• 5:03John Kiriakou?

  And so there were no American carriers that flew to the Middle East back then. There was this new invention, the Airbus A360 or 40 or whatever it was, that Gulf Air operated, and so it came to an agreement with American Airlines. So that 60 seats on the plane were technically American Airlines ticketed seats, and the rest were Gulf Air. So I bought a ticket on Gulf Air, but through American Airlines, and I was able to fly from Bahrain to JFK. It was long. It's a 15-hour flight, but I did that. I always loved Gulf Air. It's not as good as it used to be, but it was really great. It was comfortable and reliable and friendly. I'm flying in the back because I'm State Department. I'm not flying business class like a CIA officer would.

• 5:47John Kiriakou?

  Usually CIA officers travel business class if the flight is seven hours or longer. So you can't take a domestic flight and fly business. You can't fly to Mexico City or to Havana and fly business. But on these long hauls, you have a choice. You can either fly business class, or you can take a day off when you arrive at your destination. Nobody takes the day off. They all fly business class. And so I'm on the plane. I'm in the back. I remember being like in a middle seat in the middle section of the plane, and there was an announcement over the PA system. They were asking if there was anybody on the plane that spoke Greek. So I ring my buzzer, and I said, "Yeah, I speak Greek."

• 6:30John Kiriakou?

  And they said, "Oh, my gosh. Great. What a coincidence. We have a passenger who speaks Greek, but doesn't speak any English, and they don't know how to fill out the landing card." And I said, "Yeah, no problem. I can do that for them." So I went up and I said, "You know, hi, I'm John Kurayaku from the State Department. I speak Greek. I'm a Greek-American. I'm happy to fill out your landing card." So I filled out the landing card, and I went back to my seat and sat down. And about fifteen minutes later, there's this other announcement. "Is there anybody on the flight that speaks Arabic?" And I thought, "Come on." So I rang my buzzer again. And the, uh, flight attendant comes up. She says, "Seriously?" And I said, "Actually, yeah, seriously, I speak Arabic too." And she said, "There's a family from Yemen.

• 7:15John Kiriakou?

  Can you help them with their landing card?" I said, "Of course." So I go up to this family from Yemen. And it wasn't really a family, family. It was, it was two women, completely veiled, and three young children. And they gave me American passports. And the passports had American visas in them. That's not possible. If you have an American passport, you don't need an American visa to go to America. So I'm looking at the passports. And mind you, I had the, the ten-week State Department Consular class. And I'm thinking, "Well, these passports are fake." And these people were so worried that they would be turned away, that they thought, "Oh, we'll go one better than just a fake US passport. We'll put fake US visas in it, too."

• 8:00John Kiriakou?

  I said to the flight attendant, "Listen." I showed her my diplomatic passport. I said, "I'm a State Department officer, and I'm, I'm Consular certified. And these passports are fake." And she's like, "Oh, my God. Okay, I'll tell the pilot." Pilot radios ahead and says, "These people have fake passports, so be ready when we land to grab them." And they did. And the flight attendant came back up to me and she said, "Oh, you've been so helpful." She gave me a hundred dollars' worth of vouchers to use at Kennedy Airport. I think I spent twenty bucks on dinner and just handed the rest out. But I remember thinking to myself at the time, "It's not gonna be fun like this anymore." In Bahrain, you know, you're, you're the go-to guy. You're the guy that everybody needs to talk to. You're the guy who has the answers.

• 8:45John Kiriakou?

  And now I'm gonna be one of many thousands at CIA headquarters again. Just another drone in another cubicle. So I got back to headquarters. I didn't go right away, of course. I was entitled to take six weeks of home leave. That way you can find a place to live. And I was moving back into the house that Joanna and I had rented out to some tenant. So my father-in-law and I went to the house. We painted everything, all the walls, painted the ceilings, got everything back in order, shampooed the carpet, bought a car. I didn't have a car. And that took the whole six weeks. And then I went back to headquarters and again, assuming that I was going to go work on Iraq, the deputy director of the office said, "Do me

• 9:25John Kiriakou?

  a solid. Can you do Bahrain just for six to nine months? Nobody knows Bahrain like you do." And I said, "Sure, Bruce, I'll do Bahrain. But man, don't forget me at promotion time, because now I'm going to go back to a country that I would have done as a new hire just walking through the door. And I'm mid-career already, grade-wise." He said, "I promise, I won't forget you." So I'm doing Bahrain. And I was very proud to say, literally, no one in the American government knew as much about Bahrain, or knew the players as well as I did. I read a couple of papers where the ambassador weighed in and then asked if I would come out and talk to him about the paper. I did that more than

• 10:10John Kiriakou?

  once. Word gets around that you're in town, and the Crown Prince wants to see me, and this guy wants to see me, and that guy, and the head of the Chamber of Commerce. And it was wonderful to feel welcomed and appreciated again. And I did those nine months on Bahrain. I felt at once a sense of boredom, like it was Groundhog Day, like I didn't really have to work very hard because I knew this stuff so well, I could just write the paper without actually reading the background cables. They asked me to mentor a young, new hire, a young woman who had just graduated from the University of Virginia, which is a top school. They put her on the United Arab Emirates, where nothing ever happens. It's a great

• 10:54John Kiriakou?

  place to just get your footing. She did that for about six months. And then there was a little skirmish in the Persian Gulf one day between the United Arab Emirates and Iran over two uninhabited islands called Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunb.

• 11:13John Kiriakou?

  T U N B, it's hard to pronounce. The Greater and Lesser Tumba Islands were owned by the United Arab Emirates. There is nothing on the Tumba Islands but sand, just sand. Iran sent a couple of boats, and they put five or six guys on each island, and put an Iranian flag, and said, "Now these are ours." Well, it's not worth going to war over two uninhabited islands that are the size of a city block. I think the Iranians did this for a couple of reasons. They did it to be provocative, and they did it to protest the closeness of the UAE's relationship with the United States. With the idea, "We're gonna take these islands, what are you gonna do about it?" Probably nothing.

• 11:55John Kiriakou?

  The intentions behind this, I'm gonna call it occupation of these two islands, was not meaningless. In the greater scheme of regional power conflict, sure, it meant something. The practicality, though, was not terribly important. So, we went into the morning meeting, like we did every day at 9 o'clock, and she was very excited. This was a big deal, she was gonna get to write something for the President's Daily Brief for the very first time. And we went back to our seats after the meeting, and we sat directly across from each other. And I said, "The UAE's not gonna do anything for these islands. They're just gonna let them go." She said, "Really? Why do you say that?" And I said, "Because the islands are actually owned by the Emirate of Sharjah."

• 12:40John Kiriakou?

  Dubai has such important trade relations with Iran. Seventy percent of their trade was with Iran. And Abu Dhabi doesn't care, it's rich from oil. Sharjah doesn't have anything but maybe a couple of Middle Eastern banks. And if they're not gonna have the support of Abu Dhabi or Dubai Emirates, they're not gonna be able to fight the Iranians over this. So, the Iranians are gonna keep these islands, and the Emiratis are just gonna walk away. She submitted a 36-word analysis that we called a "snowflake" for the president's daily brief, which ran the next day. On the last page of the PDB, we had a page of, well, what we called "snowflakes."

• 13:21John Kiriakou?

  So a "snowflake" is something that is important enough for the president to know about, but not important enough for him to spend more than 30 seconds reading about. So a "snowflake" was not permitted to be more than 36 words, and it had to be three separate thoughts separated by ellipses, dot, dot, dot. A "snowflake" would read something like this: "Iran occupied two islands owned by UAE yesterday." Dot, dot, dot. "Islands owned by Sharjah, comma, which is unlikely to be able to defend them." Dot, dot, dot. "No help expected from Dubai or Abu Dhabi." You've conveyed the entire story, and the president is not going to read a page, or two, or 10,

• 14:06John Kiriakou?

  about the greater and lesser Tund Islands. So she submitted it. It was accepted by the PDB staff, and it was included in the president's book for the next day. But that afternoon, she came back out of our boss's office, and sat down, and she looked at me, and she said, "I just resigned." I said, "What? Are you crazy? What happened?" And she said, "When you told me that Sharjah owns the Tund, and you explained why the Iranians would not be forced to give up the Tund, I realized that I will never know the Middle East as well as you do. And so I resigned. And I'm going to sell real estate with my brother." And I said, "Please, don't make such a rash decision." I didn't know anything about this stuff when I first started.

• 14:51John Kiriakou?

  I mean, I did, I had a degree in Middle Eastern Studies, but I didn't tell her that. I said, "Please," I said, "you're so bright, and you have such a bright future. You just got here, you just started this a couple of months ago." And she said, "No, it's not for me." And that was it. That was her two-week notice. She was a very free-spirited young lady. I really liked her. I really enjoyed sitting next to her. And over the years, we've stayed in sporadic touch. She lived in Vermont for a while, where she actually did sell real estate with her brother, and then she got married and moved to Florida. She just realized, on the Directorate of Intelligence side, it's thirty years of sitting in your cubicle and thinking the big thought.

• 15:34John Kiriakou?

  And that's just not rewarding for a lot of people. So she was gonna nip it in the bud and get out early. She didn't have the desire to learn it. That's exactly what it was. There's more to life than driving to CIA headquarters every day and sitting in your cubicle year after year after year. There's gotta be more. To tell you the truth, that's why I ended up switching to the Directorate of Operations later on in my career, and not too much later on.

• 16:03Speaker 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.

• 16:37Speaker 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.

• 17:10Alan Katz?

  I'm Alan Katz.

• 17:11Speaker 04

  And I'm GD Thundersen.

• 17:13Alan Katz?

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

• 17:19Speaker 04

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

• 17:23Alan Katz?

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

• 17:28Speaker 04

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

• 17:30Alan Katz?

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

• 17:33Speaker 04

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

• 17:40Alan Katz?

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

• 17:44Alan Katz?

  A minister and then a stripper.

• 17:46Speaker 04

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

• 17:51Alan Katz?

  Groucho Marx was a huge, huge early influence.

• 17:55Speaker 04

  Hooray for Captain Spalding, the African explorer.

• 17:57Alan Katz?

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

• 18:03Speaker 04

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

• 18:10Alan Katz?

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

• 18:14Speaker 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.

• 18:27Speaker 04

  That's what makes us laugh: A Serious Look at Comedy.

• 18:30Alan Katz?

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

• 18:40John Kiriakou?

  After nine months of Bahrain, I went back to the boss. I had the same ants in my pants. It had been nine months and I went back into the boss's office and I said, "Bruce, you told me six to nine months. It's been nine months. I want to go back on your rock again." And he said to me, and I'm still angry about this 30 years later, he said, "You know, you're getting a reputation as something of a job jumper." I said, "Job jumper, you forced me to take this job as a favor to you because you couldn't fill it. And now what, you want me to stay here another two, three years? What? All right, all right, you can work Iraq, but don't think I'm gonna forget this." I'm like, "Okay, whatever." So I transferred on to Iraq.

• 19:24John Kiriakou?

  And not only did I transfer on to Iraq as a political analyst, remember, I had been the leadership slash psychology analyst. But there were already five Iraq political analysts. And so they carved out a little niche for me that was Iraqi foreign policy. I was the analyst only for Iraqi foreign policy. Their foreign policy toward the rest of the world. So I'm reading the cable traffic, which, from a foreign policy perspective, was mostly press. "The Iraqi vice president is going to China." Okay. "The Iraqi deputy foreign minister had talks with the Irish ambassador,

• 20:09John Kiriakou?

  and they discussed issues of mutual concern," which is a very Arab thing to say in their newspapers. "The Iraqis sent a letter to the King of Saudi Arabia offering to clear the air," which is another Arab phrase that you see commonly in the media. And I thought, "This is not gonna work out for me." But I was a good soldier. I did my thing. I got promoted, actually, by then GS-13. GS-13 is high journeyman analyst. So I'm solidly mid-career, moving up quickly. But now that I'm a GS-13, I'm gonna be expected to do more sophisticated analysis, which I was fully prepared to do. Remember, I was writing such deep analyses on Bahrain.

• 20:53John Kiriakou?

  I got a medal from the State Department. The Iraqi Vice President goes to China. From what you can glean from the Chinese press, what did they talk about? But more importantly, what does it mean if what they talked about actually comes to fruition? What does it mean for United Nations sanctions? What does it mean for Russia, which at the time was very competitive with China? What's it mean for India, which was even more competitive with China? Most importantly, what does it mean for the United States? If China's a member of the Security Council of the United Nations, so what happens if all of a sudden the Chinese say, "You know what, these Iraqis, they aren't so bad as we thought they were, and we're going to veto the next United Nations Security Council Resolution on Sanctions."

• 21:35John Kiriakou?

  Well, I volunteered for a couple of things that nobody else wanted to do. I volunteered to go back to the State Department as the Iraq Desk Officer. And as the Iraq Desk Officer, I actually wrote the United Nations Security Council Resolution on Sanctions. The original one was called UN Security Council Resolution 986. That was the famous one. Well, it had to be renewed in 1997. When I wrote it, it became UN Security Council Resolution 1096. Then it was up to our people at the UN to convince the Russians and the Chinese to keep their hands off. UN Security Council Resolution 1096 banned almost all of the countries in the world from exporting to Iraq.

• 22:17John Kiriakou?

  But it set up a system that would be based in Jordan, where if they wanted to buy food, no problem. The food will be sent to Jordan, giant warehouse there that we built, and then it can be trucked to Iraq. Medical supplies, no problem. Send it to Jordan, and then it's trucked to Iraq. But if you want fiber optic cable, well, no, because missile systems use fiber optic cable. They came to us and they said, "We need these giant seamless tubes, because we want to lay new sewers in the Baghdad sewer system." And we're like, "No, you don't need seamless tubes, which you can also use in a nuclear program for heavy water. You can have plastic tubes like everybody else has." That kind of thing.

• 23:02John Kiriakou?

  Back at the State Department, I was working with another officer by the name of David Bain. I liked Dave a lot. I think he became an ambassador. He worked so hard. The hours were ridiculous. I would get there around nine, and oftentimes I wouldn't leave until midnight. And by then, the subway system had closed, and I had nowhere to get home. And I lived 25 miles outside of Washington. There was one night that I said to Dave, "If I'm gonna catch the last train out, I gotta get out of here." And I left at like 11:30. He worked into the night and then fainted from work. And the cleaning lady found him on the floor and had to call 911. This is how dedicated some of these State Department people were. But the thing is, is we had, you know, 60 people at the CIA working on Iraq.

• 23:46John Kiriakou?

  They had four at the State Department, expected to keep up. I did that for about six weeks, and then I went back to headquarters. My boss said, "Hey, I want you to do something that's important. I want you to be the Assistant National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, for the whole Middle East." Um, for two months. The National Intelligence Officer, which is a senior intelligence service position, she was on some kind of sabbatical. And then there was a vacancy for the deputy position. So I went up there working with people, four, five, six grades senior to me. And not only held my own, but I zeroed out the Freedom of Information Act requests. Some of them had been pending for years.

• 24:27John Kiriakou?

  These Freedom of Information Act requests, you're compelled by law to respond to them within 60 days. Some of them had been four, five years sitting in this stack. So I thought, "Well, if I'm gonna do anything that's worth anything, I'm gonna get rid of all these Freedom of Information Act requests." So I did it, working 14, 15-hour days every single day. And then finally, when the National Intelligence Officer came back, Ellen Lepson, she went on to really great things at think tanks in Washington. She came back and she said, "So you, you kept all the fires at bay?" And I said, "I did. Iraq is still a problem, but we had it all covered." And then she said, "Where's the stack of FOIA requests?" And I mean, this thing was six feet tall. And I said, "Oh, I answered them all." She laughed. "No, seriously." I said, "No, seriously."

• 25:12John Kiriakou?

  Couldn't come in here every day and look at this six-foot-tall stack of requests that we are compelled by law to answer. So she put me in for some big award. It was very generous of her. I made a good impression up there. I went back down to the Iraq group and my boss said, "Okay, big shot. If you want the next big promotion, you're gonna have to write a great paper. I want you to write the next National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq." Now, a National Intelligence Estimate, NIE, or Special National Intelligence Estimate, SNE, these are the most important papers that come out of the intelligence community. There's a lower-level form called a Sense of the Community Memorandum, SOCUM, that's short, two or three pages.

• 25:57John Kiriakou?

  Everybody in the intelligence community coordinates on it, and then it goes to the president, the vice president, the national security advisor, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense. An NIE goes to the same people, but is much longer. It can be ten pages, it can be a hundred pages. And they're almost always requested by the president himself. In this case, the NIE was requested by the national security advisor. It was Sandy Berger at the time. We had done one the year earlier, and he wanted one entitled "Iraq: Saddam's Next Twelve Months." So I said, "Okay, I'm your guy. I can do it." So, I wrote it. And it was about, I'm gonna say it was twenty-four, twenty-five pages. It took me a couple of weeks, which is fast, but the hard part's not writing it.

• 26:42John Kiriakou?

  The hard part is getting seventeen other intelligence agencies to agree on every single word. So here's what we do. I write the paper, I send it to all seventeen intelligence agencies. And I mean everything from NSA and DIA to the Coast Guard, to the Department of Energy Office of Intelligence, to the Department of Commerce Office of Intelligence, to little organizations you've never heard of. And then, the national intelligence officer convenes the community in his conference room. We're all sitting around this big conference room table. And we all have our copies in front of us.

• 27:24John Kiriakou?

  I'm sitting next to him and he says, "Okay, let's start with the first sentence." And he reads the first sentence out loud. "Any objections?" Half a dozen people put their hands up. "I want to change 'happy' to 'glad.' I want to change 'will' to 'will probably.'" Seriously. When you're coordinating things inside the building, you can speak more directly with your colleagues with whom you work every day than you can with these people that you might see once a year or once every two years. So I would submit things to my colleagues, like I did with the NIE. And I said, "Listen, I'm not changing little fiddles. So if you don't like individual words, tough luck. If you have something substantive, say it now or forever hold your peace."

• 28:07John Kiriakou?

  And so a couple of people had suggestions, you know, add a paragraph, take away a paragraph, whatever. Fine, I'm happy to take those changes. We get into the conference room with all these people and I can't say something like that to them. If, after a discussion, you still can't agree on the language, you have a vote. But if the person that disagreed with the language feels strongly enough about the vote that they just lost, if they feel strongly enough about the language, they can, what's called, take a dissent. There's a little box that happens at the bottom where it says, "The Defense Intelligence Agency objects to this language and instead believes X." You don't want those in the paper because it looks like you guys don't know what the heck you're talking about.

• 28:51John Kiriakou?

  If you can't even agree amongst yourselves, how are you going to advise the president? So much to my shock, six hours later, we came out of this meeting and the National Intelligence Officer says to me, "Honest to God, that was the fastest coordination session I have ever sat through in my entire career." And I said, "I'm ashamed of this paper. It's exactly the same as last year's paper. All we really needed to do was just change the date and put this year's date on it." What the paper said in the end was Saddam could threaten the Kurds, Saddam could threaten the Shia, Saddam could threaten Kuwait,

• 29:33John Kiriakou?

  and Saddam will probably try to evade sanctions. That was far more a reflection on the failure of US policy toward Iraq than it was a failure of analysis. The analysis was exactly right, actually, in historical retrospect. What was bad was American policy toward Iraq. The analysis was that we were continuing to fail. That's really what it came down to. I've said over the years that I hated the paper, and that's really not true. I was, actually, I was proud to have written an NIE. Very, very few CIA analysts ever have the opportunity or the honor to write an NIE.

• 30:14Speaker 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.

• 30:48Speaker 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.

• 31:21John Kiriakou?

  So it wasn't the paper that I was ashamed of. It was that I was unable, through no fault of my own, to say anything that was really new or cutting-edge or deeply insightful, because there was nothing really to look into. The paper was bound. They give it a fancy cover. They send it to the president and the vice president and the national security advisor, the secretaries of state and defense. And then the national intelligence officer comes down to my little cubicle. And he says, "I want to congratulate you." And he hands me a letter from Sandy Berger. Berger said that it was one of the most insightful and valuable analyses that he had read on Iraq.

• 32:05John Kiriakou?

  And it was that day, because of that letter, that I decided I was going to leave analysis. I remember thinking that night, that if I have to do this for another 20 years, I am going to cut my throat. It was clear to me by 1997, that nobody was going to do anything about Saddam Hussein. Look, either Saddam Hussein is a danger to the free world, either he's a genocidal maniac slaughtering his own people, and you're going to do something about it, or you're not. There was one incident that I cannot divulge the details around, but it involved an intercept, which by its very nature would be classified at the top-secret level.

• 32:48John Kiriakou?

  I remember reading this intercept and thinking to myself, "This is a policymaker. This is an American government policymaker." And they're fudging it to make it look like it's either a foreign national or somebody who's not important enough to pay very close attention to. And I realized then, that nobody in any position of authority, whether it was at the White House, the State Department, or the Defense Department, was going to do anything about Iraq. And so I thought, "Why should I waste my career recycling year-old analysis, when I can be doing something fun?" I remember in the car on the way home that night, I thought, "Well, what else can I do?

• 33:32John Kiriakou?

  I don't want to really transfer on to another country. I'll have to start back at the beginning again." I could go overseas again, but convincing my wife to go anywhere but Athens would be practically impossible. She told me in Bahrain, the only other place that she would ever be willing to go would be Athens. And I said, "Yeah, but I don't cover Greek issues. I'm a Middle East person. And even if I switched to operations, I would still be a Middle East person. We could go to Cairo, we could go to Jerusalem, we could go to Amman or Riyadh, but we're not going to Athens."

• 34:09John Kiriakou?

  I went to church that Sunday. I lit my candle and I sat down in the pew. I always just sit there and look around and admire the beautiful icons and the mosaics. I just love the beauty of the place. And I remember thinking a prayer, thinking, "Come on, give me a sign, any kind of sign. Let me know what to do, because I genuinely don't know what to do." I remember thinking that. The next day, I went to work and there was an internal database of job openings, which I never accessed. I never had any reason to access it. But that day, I accessed it. And sure enough, what pops up?

• 34:51John Kiriakou?

  A position as a counterterrorism operations officer in Athens. I remember laughing out loud. There was a woman who sat just on the other side of the partition from me. She said, "What's so funny?" I said, "Oh, no, I was just thinking about a joke, nothing." And I thought, "This can't be." So I looked at the bottom of the job listing. It said that they're looking for an experienced operations officer to do counterterrorism operations in Athens in conjunction with the Greek government. And it said, "The chosen candidate should have either Greek or Arabic." Well, I had Greek and Arabic. It had the hiring officer's name and phone number at the bottom. I recognized his name.

• 35:32John Kiriakou?

  He was a very important guy, a multiple-time chief of station from big stations. And he was a real sweetheart of a guy. I knew where he sat. So I went down and knocked on his door and he said, "Hi." And I said, "Hi, I don't know if you remember me. We've met once before in the Middle East." He didn't remember me, but I reintroduced myself. I said, "I see that you're advertising this job in Athens. I have no operational experience whatsoever, but I'm fluent in both Arabic and Greek." And he said, "Are you kidding me?" And I said, "No, and I might be..." The only person in the entire CIA who is. I was, actually. He said, "Are you willing to be tested?"

• 36:16John Kiriakou?

  "Of course. In fact, I just tested Arabic a couple of weeks ago, but I'll test again if you want." He said, "No, no, if you're tester, that current, that's fine. What about Greek?" And I said, "I've never bothered to test in Greek, just because I didn't need to use it operationally, but my grandparents are all from the island of Rhodes. I learned Greek at home and then I studied Greek at Georgetown." He says, "Rhodes? My secretary's from Rhodes. She was born in Rhodes." "Helen, come on out here." "Helen," he says, "this young man says his family's from Rhodes and he speaks Greek." She immediately launches into a conversation. "In Greek, what village are your people from? When was the last time you were there? Are you married? Do you have kids? What church do you go to?"

• 36:57John Kiriakou?

  And then she turns to him and she says, "He's good with me," and she gives me the thumbs up. And then he says, "Look, buddy, it's a lot easier and a lot cheaper for me to take a linguist and teach him operations than it would be to take an operations officer and teach him how to speak Greek and Arabic. It's gonna take a little convincing, because there's a natural bias in operations against the eggheads on the analytics side." He said, "It's gonna take a little convincing, but let me work my magic. I'll be in touch." What is meant by operations in the CIA is very... This definition is pre-9/11, but it's really very simple. It's to recruit spies to steal secrets. So that the analysts can analyze those secrets

• 37:39John Kiriakou?

  to then allow the policymaker to make the best-informed policy. I checked in with him a couple of times over the next two months, and it did take a little bit of convincing, because these career operations guys did not want to work with an analyst. If I was gonna go to London, that would be one thing, because you're not gonna do any operations in London. But Athens? Bulletproof vest, strapped on two guns, a buck knife in my back pocket just in case. That changed on 9/11. We're gonna talk about that later. But they needed to teach me how to recruit spies to steal secrets. And then besides that, they needed to teach me how to use a myriad of weapons,

• 38:24John Kiriakou?

  how to build and to defuse several different kinds of bombs, and how to drive in such a way that I am not followed and cannot be ambushed in.

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• 39:46John Kiriakou?

  I had been waiting two months. Finally, he called me and he said, "The panel approved you." Thank God. Okay, I'm going to quit this job and tell him that I'm transferring over to operations. Man, they're not going to like it one bit. My immediate boss, who funny enough ended up working for me five years later, my immediate boss was so angry, he said to me, "Don't even think about coming back here." I said, "Oh, I'm not coming back." He said, "I mean it. Don't come back, hat in hand, and ask for your job back." I said, "Ben, you're not hearing me. I'm not coming back."

• 40:24John Kiriakou?

  Assignment to Athens would mean going to James Bond School, in essence. One more reason to leave boring desks and musty cubicles behind forever.

• 40:33Alan Katz?

  We'll get there soon.

• 40:35John Kiriakou?

  I'll tell you what training was like, and don't get me wrong, it was hard. It was challenging as hell. But all the counterterrorism training I was about to receive would make it clear that I had found my dream job. Or maybe my dream job had found me. Till next time, don't forget to review, rate, comment on, like, and/or share the podcast. I'm John Kiriakou.

• 40:59John Kiriakou?

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

• 41:17Alan Katz?

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