S3E1 Whistleblowers & Spies

IN THIS EPISODE Welcome to Season 3! As the title of this episode suggests, season 3 will refocus the podcast on spying and, this season, on whistleblowing, too. We may be in a Golden Age of Corruption, but that's a future Golden Age of Whistleblowing. Whistleblowing is the cure for corruption and one of our goals this season is to make the podcast a safe space for whistleblowers - especially if they need to unburden themselves. While whistleblowing will eventually lead to John's re-emergence, when fresh out of prison, all anyone saw when John walked in the room was an ex convict. Rebuilding a life after prison is hard for everyone. John had the CIA and the FBI undermining him constantly. For John, that meant the rebuild of his life would be extra challenging. SHOW NOTES If you enjoy Dead Drop, please check out our other podcasts at Costard & Touchstone Productions costardandtouchstone.com,. Your next favorite podcast is just a click away! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:24Speaker 01

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• 0:33Alan Katz?

  This podcast, it's a coster and touchdown production.

• 0:36John Kiriakou?

  As we start season three, I wanted to tell a quick story about how doing this podcast has changed my life and in the most unexpected ways, all for the good. Literally the biggest superstar in Greece is this singer named Konstantin Arhiros. I called him the Frank Sinatra of Greece and somebody said, oh, no, no, that's not right. He's more the Justin Bieber of Greece. And I was like, okay, but he's very manly, a manly man, right? With a beautiful man's voice singing manly songs. I was in the Hamptons for four days of events. There were four billionaires there and three congressmen and it was a big, big deal.

• 1:20John Kiriakou?

  All of a sudden I'm the featured speaker. Nobody told me I was going to speak, but I get up and I give this off the cuff speech and these titles don't mean anything to you, but they're really important to me. The international commander of the archons of the order of St. Andrew, the protectors of the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople runs up to me, gives me his card. Three congressmen were in this group hug. One of them told me to come up on Thursday. We're going to call Trump together on the cell phone. I can ask him directly for a pardon. Big. So I'm like a little fangirl with Arhiros. He sings this one song. Do you remember when we were kids? You light up my life was number one for 11 weeks. That's what this song is.

• 2:05John Kiriakou?

  It's been number one since the beginning of the year. I mean, there hasn't been a song this popular in a hundred years in Greece. The song is called Athena more, it means my Athens. Oddly enough, it's just a song about the neighborhoods of Athens and why he loves them so much. But it's just such a touching, beautiful song. They hired him to perform at this event for all the billionaires. So I'm there and I kept saying, I can't believe I'm seeing Arhiros. I'm like standing there next to the stage, looking at Arhiros singing this song that I've loved for so long. One of the billionaires says, you want to meet him? And I said, I friggin love to meet him. I go in the, in the green room.

• 2:50John Kiriakou?

  I never saw so many guys with machine guns in one place in the United States in my life. It was nuts. So I go through all the machine guns and into the green room and one of the billionaires says to him, Costa, I want to introduce you to one of your biggest fans. And I said, I said to him in Greek, I'm like a fangirl. I'm old enough to be your father and I'm like a fangirl. And he goes, are you John Kiriakou? And I said, yes. I love everything you've done. He said, I've watched your interviews in English, in Greek, I read your book, I listened to your podcast.

• 3:34John Kiriakou?

  Can I tell you, for a guy used to toiling in the shadows, whose work mostly had to be kept secret, having an artist, a singer, whose work I greatly admire, greatly admire my work? I must be dreaming. To be fair though, the more dreamy part of my post-prison life took a long, long time to actually come around. It's been a decade during which there were long stretches where I seriously wondered what would become of me? What would become of my family? Serving time in prison cuts you off from a lot of higher income generating jobs. To tell you the truth, it cuts you off from getting most jobs.

• 4:15John Kiriakou?

  I got turned down by everybody from McDonald's and Safeway to Uber and as a baggage handler at Reagan National Airport. If you can't pay your bills or meet your obligations, you can't get your life back. The biggest obstacle to me getting my life back was the CIA. Though I had served my sentence and I had quote unquote paid for my crime, the CIA simply was not done fucking with me. That would never stop, not even to this day. If the agency could have had its way, I would still be in prison, serving the full 45 years that prosecutors had first put forward as a deal. Why was the agency so vindictive toward me?

• 4:59John Kiriakou?

  Because I told the truth? In a moral world, the CIA would have looked deeply at itself and understood how badly it had compromised its own mission and many of its best people. But instead of confronting its own behavior, the agency felt compelled to punish me for mine, for whistleblowing. In this third season of the podcast, in addition to returning the storytelling focus to spies and spying, we're going to focus on whistleblowers and whistleblowing. Spies make great whistleblowers and whistleblowers make great spies. In the episodes ahead, you will meet some of the best known and most important whistleblowers in the world.

• 5:40John Kiriakou?

  Yes, we'll continue to investigate what makes spies tick, but in season three, we're going to ask what makes whistleblowers tick too. If ever we needed whistleblowers, my God, it is right now. They are the cure for corruption and we seem to be living through corruption's golden age. Our mission this season is bigger than just telling whistleblower stories, though. By telling these stories, including the processes that whistleblowers can use to operate as safely as possible, we hope to encourage present and future whistleblowers to step forward. Corruption's golden age should become whistleblowing's golden age. Every whistleblower needs to believe in their core that the truth will set them and everybody free.

• 6:25John Kiriakou?

  We have so much in store this season. Let's get this show on the road. Welcome to season three of Dead Drop. I'm John Kiriakou and I'm free at last, free at last, and truly happy that we're starting a third season, which we're doing because so many of you have told us in your reviews and comments that you wanted the story to continue. This season will be a little different from the previous two seasons. Whereas the others told what happened to me, this season ultimately will be about what's happening to me. These are truly exciting times and I want to share as much of it with you as I can. What I'm especially excited about is the series of whistleblower roundtables we're going to hold.

• 7:10John Kiriakou?

  You'll get to meet some of the whistleblowers that you've heard of in the news and you'll meet a few that you haven't. Like I said, we want to nurture an environment that inspires whistleblowers to come forward and share what they know without fear of reprisal or personal retribution. Think of it as how to be a whistleblower. We'll also tell you some stories I've been dying to tell. As many of you probably know, I do another podcast called Briefing Room, where I talk about what's on my mind right now, right here, mostly around the news. This podcast, meanwhile, will continue to be the space for deeper dives into stories, whether they're stories about me or stories that, like I said, I've wanted to tell for a long time.

• 7:52John Kiriakou?

  They'll all have elements of spying or whistleblowing or both. First up, starting a couple of weeks from now, and I'm very excited about this, is the story of the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palma in 1986, pretty much forgotten by most Americans, if they ever even knew it to begin with. But America and the world should remember that story. The events, like the Cold War itself, may have happened in the past, but they continue to ripple across our present and into our future. As we stand here today, one could argue that in fact, the Cold War never really ended. It went into hibernation and then it changed form.

• 8:37John Kiriakou?

  A few new players have come to the table, but the divisions created and driven by the Cold War remain divisions today. We no longer frame the divide as capitalism versus communism. Now, right wing and populist movements often frame politics as a defense of traditional national identity versus global integration and EU style liberal internationalism. Immigration, LGBTQ rights, reproductive freedom and gender policies trigger intense legislative and societal pushback, championed by conservative forces in countries like Poland, Spain, Italy, France and Germany. The assassination of Olaf Palma helped put us on the road to this terrible place.

• 9:22John Kiriakou?

  It was a giant canary in a coal mine squawking its head off, but to no avail. The CIA won't be happy with us telling you this story because in telling it, I'm blowing another whistle on them. Did they have something to do with the cold blooded execution of a foreign head of state? Were they in any way involved? I'm going to let you be the judge. Also, we'll tell you the story of notorious political terrorist Carlos the Jackal. He was protected and supported by the KGB and the Stasi despite having led the 1975 raid on OPEC headquarters in Vienna, which killed three people.

• 10:05John Kiriakou?

  And we'll give an intelligence officer performance review of Vladimir Putin. The question we'll be asking isn't, is he a good guy or a bad guy, but rather as a highly trained spy, and that's what he is. He was a colonel in the KGB. How is he performing? He's hardly the first former spy to run a country, but as people say, and I hate, hate, hate this, in many cases, once a spy, always a spy.

• 10:33John Kiriakou?

  The answers might surprise you. No, I'm pretty sure that the answers are going to surprise you. It's another whistle that we'll be blowing across season three. In spying, preparation can be the difference between life and death. The same is true of whistleblowing, except with whistleblowing, you don't necessarily know how prepared you need to be, or even how exactly to prepare for what's about to happen. I was a total naf walking into the whistleblowing door. I hadn't put together a trove of information proving my point. I hadn't collected any data. Most importantly, I hadn't even hired an attorney. I simply confirmed what I knew to be true. The CIA had twisted itself into legalistic pretzels

• 11:18John Kiriakou?

  to justify torturing detainees. For comparison's sake, Ed Snowden knew the kind of fire with which he was playing. He saw what was happening and collected proof. He wasn't surprised when the CIA and its friends went after him, although I suspect he was surprised by their relentlessness and their total willingness to play dirty.

• 11:40John Kiriakou?

  The same goes for my friend Tom Drake, who we just spoke with on the podcast. Tom tried to go through channels to report the illegal behavior that he had personally witnessed. In the end, when that failed, as it was designed to fail, Tom took a great leap of faith in the legal system. And although it took time, energy, and money that he will never get back, he prevailed. As I told you during season two, when I spoke with Brian Ross at ABC News, I honestly thought the story, being somewhat common knowledge, would blow over in a day or two. I do look back on whether or not I was appropriately prepared. I remember the decision-making process,

• 12:24John Kiriakou?

  and I remember having a conversation about it with my then-wife, who said, "You should go for it." Neither one of us were prepared for the fallout. We were both convinced that this was a one-day story. The International Committee of the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International had all published reports saying that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. And these reports had detail. So they were talking to somebody, and probably multiple somebodies. So what I thought I was doing

• 13:06John Kiriakou?

  was simply confirming what was already very well-known and was out there. I didn't place enough value on the notion that I was the first-ever CIA officer to confirm the use of torture.

• 13:24John Kiriakou?

  I had a very good job at the time at Deloitte and Touche. Now it's called Deloitte. Very good job, working with a really, like, a truly wonderful group of people. When I made the decision to go on ABC News and blow the whistle on the torture program, I thought, "Well, I gotta clear it with my bosses first." And so I went to my immediate boss, a director, and I told him what the situation was. And he said, "All right, let me talk to the managing partner about it." So he talked to the managing partner, and they decided that I should go ahead and do it, but I could not mention Deloitte or any Deloitte client. Well, of course, there was no possibility of mentioning either Deloitte or any Deloitte client.

• 14:08John Kiriakou?

  We're talking about Al Qaeda and the CIA. And so I did it. Brian Ross from ABC News called me midday on the day that the story was going to run. It was going to run on World News Tonight, which runs at 6:30 PM Eastern Time. So he said, "You want to fly up here? We'll have dinner, and then you can watch Nightline go live." He too believed that this was a one-day story. The information was already out there. I didn't offer up any new details. I simply confirmed what these human rights groups had already reported. So I got in a plane, but I was in the air when the story ran for the first time.

• 14:52John Kiriakou?

  And when I landed at LaGuardia Airport, I turned on my phone, and the mailbox was full. And I said, "Oh, shit." So I started going through some of the voicemails. That flight's only 45 minutes long, and there were 36 voicemails in my inbox from the 45-minute flight. And it was every major news network in the world. In addition to that, 60 Minutes, Face the Nation, Meet the Press, PBS's various shows, BBC, you name it, they had called. One of those messages was from my boss at Deloitte,

• 15:37John Kiriakou?

  and he said, "Call me immediately." So I called him. He said, "I am so angry, I could fire you right now." Whoa, whoa, whoa, you gave me permission to go on this show. And he said, "I'm in Dallas. Fly to Dallas on the first flight tomorrow morning." I said, "Okay." So I spent the evening with Brian Ross, and then I didn't realize at the time that Nightline was a live show. So I was in the studio, I watched Nightline. It was a longer version of the interview that ran at 6:30. I got up really early the next morning and flew to Dallas. I didn't go into the office.

• 16:22John Kiriakou?

  I checked into a hotel early, and I got a call from NPR. I said, "I don't want to do any media today." "Well, before you hang up, Senator Blunt of Missouri, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, is calling for you to be executed. Do you have a comment?" And it rattled me, but I got my bearings. And I said, "It's an election year. Senator Blunt could lose his race, but I'm happy to debate Senator Blunt." And I just left it at that. If he wants to defend torture, that's on him. My boss then calls me. He said, "Are you in Dallas?" I said, "Yes." "Where are you?" I said, "I'm at the Marriott." He said, "I got pulled away. Go back to Washington.

• 17:04John Kiriakou?

  I'll see you in your office in Washington tomorrow, 9 o'clock." Well, I'm not an idiot. I knew what was going to happen. They were going to fire me. So instead of meeting him at 9, I went into my office at 6, and I completely cleaned out the office, even my plant that I... I took everything and packed my car to the roof. And then he sent me a text and said, "Meet me in HR." Of course, it's going to be in HR. So I go, and there's some toady from HR in there. And he said, "I want you to resign." I said, "Absolutely not." And he said, "I had no idea this was going to be this major international story."

• 17:49John Kiriakou?

  I said, "Well, I didn't have any idea it was going to be a major international story, but before you lose your mind, it's going to pass in a couple of days. It's going to pass, and nobody's going to remember who I was. "I want you to resign." I said, "Not in a million years." I said, "If you're going to be a dick about this, I am not going to make it easy on you.

• 18:13John Kiriakou?

  I have a signed letter from you telling me to go on that show." So, "No, I'm not interested in resigning." And he said, "Well, I'm suspending your access to the database." "Fine, that's on you." The truth is, my job was in intelligence collection. I was the deputy chief of the competitive intelligence practice. We had a team of seven people all around the country, and the month before, we had done 45 intelligence reports on our competitors. I had done 36 of them.

• 18:47John Kiriakou?

  So, yeah, you want to kill your own program? Go ahead, fire me. Suspend my access to the database. I'm at the point where I don't care anymore." Well, as it so happened, my neighbor from four doors down, who I really loved, shout out to Damian. Damian was and is an awesome guy. He was also the director of PR at Deloitte.

• 19:11John Kiriakou?

  So he walks down to my house that afternoon, and he says, "Boy, you really stepped in it." And I said, "Yeah, I guess I did." He says, "Let me tell you how this is playing out behind the scenes." He was so generous to me. "Let me tell you how this is playing out behind the scenes. The CEO of Deloitte is a Luddite, meaning he hates technology. And so rather than work on a computer, he has a big corkboard, and the corkboard is covered with 3x5 cards. And each 3x5 card has on it a problem that he has to deal with as CEO. He says, "Your 3x5 card that says John Kiriakou's interview is on the very top row of the corkboard. His goal at the end of each day

• 19:56John Kiriakou?

  is to remove as many of those 3x5 cards as he can." And I said, "Okay." He said, "They really, really want you to resign." And I said, "Damian, I'm not resigning." And he said, "What did they offer you?" I said, "Nothing yet." He said, "They're going to give you a low-ball offer, but he said, 'Just between us, and I didn't tell you this? He said, 'They're willing to go one year severance pay, one year.'" And I said, "Okay." One of my colleagues had been fired a couple of months before, and I called her, and I said, "Do you mind if I ask you?" I said, "They're going to fire me tomorrow. Do you mind if I ask you what they gave you in severance?" And she said, "Those jerks offered me three weeks of severance.

• 20:40John Kiriakou?

  I ended up taking four months." And I said, "Okay, thanks." So that afternoon, I found an employment attorney in Washington, and my boss called me again. "Have you made any decision about resigning?" And I said, "What are you, thick? I'm not resigning." And listen, I said, "Don't call me again. I'm represented by counsel. I'll give you her name and her number. From now on, I speak through my attorney." And I gave him the name and number, never spoke to him again. Another guy in the office called me later to say, "Holy shit, did you know he hired an attorney?" That's what he was screaming when we hung up the phone.

• 21:21John Kiriakou?

  To make a long story short, the negotiations went on for several days and I got a year of severance. To tell you the truth, I had no intention of shitting on them. They were good to me and it was a great group of people. The work was boring compared to what I was doing at the CIA, but they were a good group of people and I had no complaints at all about that job.

• 21:43Alan Katz?

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

• 21:57John Kiriakou?

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

• 22:42Alan Katz?

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

• 22:50John Kiriakou?

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

• 22:54Alan Katz?

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

• 23:00John Kiriakou?

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

• 23:12Alan Katz?

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

• 23:24John Kiriakou?

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

• 23:36Alan Katz?

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

• 23:49John Kiriakou?

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

• 23:58Alan Katz?

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

• 24:06John Kiriakou?

  The ethical part is very important.

• 24:08Alan Katz?

  In these here times, it absolutely is.

• 24:12John Kiriakou?

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

• 24:38Speaker 04

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• 25:18John Kiriakou?

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

• 26:01John Kiriakou?

  Inside his head, in fact. It's a hell of a podcast and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts, or at costardandtouchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at Costard and Touchstone, like The Donor, a DNA horror story, The Hall Closet, Sage Wellness Within, and the How Not to Make a Movie podcast. Who knows? Your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now, back to Dead Drop.

• 26:33John Kiriakou?

  Whistleblowers seem to make people in power very nervous, even when they're not actively blowing any whistles. It's so ironic that the same clumsy, abusive power that makes whistleblowing necessary to begin with will invariably double down on its abuses when confronted by whistleblowers, rather than stop abusing power, which makes whistleblowing even more essential. Seriously, after leaving prison with minimal prospects and a mountain of obstacles, what kind of threat could I possibly have posed to America's national security or to anyone?

• 27:11John Kiriakou?

  Not much. And yet the FBI felt compelled to spend considerable time, taxpayer money, and other resources keeping tabs on me. Once a week, twice a week, I would have FBI surveillance teams following me. And I'd give them the finger sometimes, or I'd smile at them sometimes. And they would follow me to the grocery store, follow me to church, follow me to Target. It was harassment. There's a guy that I used to work with at the CIA, good guy, and he resigned while I was at Loretto. And then he called me one day and he said, hey, I'm in town. I met him at this pizza place in Reston, Virginia, that was on a corner and it had three walls of windows.

• 27:54John Kiriakou?

  I noticed, I'm not exaggerating, I noticed within a block of my house I was under surveillance. Three cars, I wrote down the license numbers, descriptions of the cars. I'm cutting through the neighborhood, taking these shortcuts that only somebody in the neighborhood would know how to use. And then I drive out to Reston, meet up with him at the pizza place. I said, were you under surveillance on the way over here? He said, absolutely not. You were? And I said, oh yeah, I was. I dragged him all the way over here. And because we were surrounded by windows on three sides, I was able to point them out. So they had set up at three different locations across the street from the pizza place.

• 28:37John Kiriakou?

  And he's like, seriously? This is your life now? I said, these fucking guys, they just don't know when to stop. It did not surprise me, but it disappointed me.

• 28:47John Kiriakou?

  I had this kind of backhanded mantra that I would repeat all the time, and I would tell them right to their faces. I am happy to waste as much of your time and the government's money as I possibly can. But you really are just wasting your time and the government's money. They weren't looking for any end product. They were doing it just to harass, not for any other reason, just to harass. Look at the case of Reality Winner. Reality's been out of prison for, what, three, four years already? And she's still not allowed to leave the state of Texas. Why? Why is she not allowed to leave the state of Texas? No other whistleblower had that put on him or her.

• 29:31John Kiriakou?

  And to tell you the truth, she released the least amount of information of any of us, but this asshole federal judge that handled her case says that she's not allowed to leave the state of Texas, period, for five years. Getting your life back, feeling like you did before your freedom was taken away from you, takes longer than you think and longer than you want it to. You keep bumping into the ways being in prison deprived you of even the most basic life experiences that you took for granted. I hadn't had a tomato in two years. I hadn't had any fresh fruit or vegetable in two years.

• 30:14John Kiriakou?

  And it's funny, we're talking about something that happened 11 years ago and I remember eating that tomato like it happened yesterday. It was like eating manna from heaven. I felt very self-conscious because every day in prison...

• 30:32John Kiriakou?

  I wrote this in my second book. You're no longer John Kiriakou. You're inmate number 798063- whatever. I've blocked that number out of my head now. And I made a point in my Letters from Loretto series. I never, ever called myself an inmate. I called myself a prisoner. Because I was their prisoner. It was as simple as that to me. So I bought the tomato. I went to the house. The kids were there waiting for me. They had waited up. We took a picture together, sitting on the couch. I posted it on Twitter to say that I was home. The very next day, I had to try to start my life again. And this is another thing, too, that's important.

• 31:12John Kiriakou?

  And I say this about any, anybody who has served time in prison. You think that when your sentence is up, you can just step back into your life again. And you can't. That will never be possible. You've got to start from scratch. I felt mentally exhausted. I expected jubilation, celebration. And it's like, no. It's anxiety and depression and a very sharp-edged anger that I didn't expect. When I was arrested, my wife and I had to move out of our house.

• 31:54John Kiriakou?

  I was making a ton of money at Deloitte and we built this 5,200-square-foot mansion. Five bedrooms, five bathrooms, a stone wine cellar, two-car garage. It was a dream home. We had to move out and rent it out. And we rented because we wanted the kids to be disrupted as little as possible. We rented a house a block away. A little, teeny-tiny ranch. So every day, I could see these strangers living in my dream home, my mansion. And I'm living in this shithole a block away. It really was a shithole. It was actually knocked down a couple of years ago and somebody built a giant house in its place.

• 32:35John Kiriakou?

  But every day, I would look out the window and see my house. And every day, it was a reminder of what I had lost. And I didn't have any idea how I was going to recover it. I applied for jobs literally everywhere. From McDonald's and Starbucks and Target and Safeway to Michael's and Uber and literally everywhere. And nobody would hire me. The rental income did not fully cover the mortgage. The mortgage was massive. With taxes and insurance, it was $10,000 a month. So we were able to rent it out for like $7,500.

• 33:17John Kiriakou?

  So we had our own rent of $3,800, plus the $2,500 on the other house, plus utilities and food and insurance and school and cars and everything. I mentioned earlier how a few people, quite a few members of my own family, stopped talking to me once I'd been sentenced. More than a few friends from my previous life didn't consider themselves my friends anymore. By the same token, there were angels, too. There is a Greek Cypriot couple in Pittsburgh. The husband and wife are respectively the director of oncology and the director of surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

• 34:00John Kiriakou?

  They're two geniuses and two of the kindest, loveliest, and most generous people I've ever known in my life. Their son is a dear friend of mine. I'll give you an example of what they did. They knew that I collected art. I've got several Andy Warhols. I'm looking around right now. I have a Fernando Botero I'm next to. This is a Warhol. That's a Warhol. I've got a Liechtenstein. I have a Jasper Johns. It's the only vice I have in life. I don't drink. I don't smoke. I don't do drugs. I don't gamble. I buy art, way too much art. But it's good art. And so they offered to buy all my art. They wrote a very generous check. They bought everything.

• 34:43John Kiriakou?

  And then the week I got out of prison, they gave it all back to me. It was one of the most generous and selfless things anybody's ever done for me in my life. I loved these artworks like they're my babies. Some of them I started buying in college. I've had them for that long. Forty years. And they gave them all back to me and said, "Welcome home." So they hired me to try to sell an invention that they had created, which was an early detector of blood cancers. I did as well as I could. It's a process.

• 35:26John Kiriakou?

  There are patents involved and the FDA gets involved and it's years and years of applications. And so I started looking for other jobs. And I got a call from the Institute for Policy Studies. The think tank in Washington. Now, remember, the BOP said, "I was not allowed to work at the Institute for Policy Studies." So I accepted the job. My start date was the first Monday after my last dance with the Bureau of Prisons. The Bureau of Prisons said that inmate Kiriakou should not be in a job which allows him an opportunity to comment on foreign policy. It's like, "Sorry, morons, but I didn't lose my First Amendment rights as much as you would like for me to have."

• 36:11John Kiriakou?

  Like I say, I just thought I could step back into my life again. My wife and I sat at the dining room table one day and she said, "We're not making enough money to move back into the house. We're going to have to stay in this rental for another year." And that was just heartbreaking. But she was right. We were living on her salary and on the generosity of her father. But I was bringing in, quite literally, minimum wage. I got this job at IPS, the Institute for Policy Studies, but I had to raise my own salary. And so I had this never-ending GoFundMe going. Some months I'd make $500 and some months I'd make $2,500.

• 36:54John Kiriakou?

  But you can't live on that, especially in someplace like Washington, DC. The way I left that job was kind of odd. They just couldn't pay me. My job there was to write columns. And I did two or three columns a week that were sent out by their syndication service called Afterwards. And my columns ran in 220 small-town newspapers all across America. The boss, this lovely, lovely man named John Kavanaugh, he calls me into his office one day and his deputies in there, who was just as wonderful as John was. And her dad loved me because he was Greek and I'm Greek. And he came by to shake my hand one day. These were just all-around really good people.

• 37:38John Kiriakou?

  John said, "Well, we wanted to talk to you about your performance evaluation." And I said, "Oh, I didn't even realize I had a performance evaluation." And he says to me, "John, since you started writing for the syndication service, our traffic is up 500%." And I said, "Hey, good for me. Good for you." And then he says, "We have never had so many inquiries from the media as we have since you joined us. And we never had this, and we never had that, and we never had the other thing." And I interrupted him and I said, "John, are you firing me? I am so sorry. It's not you. We have to get rid of 14 people. Our budget is broken."

• 38:21John Kiriakou?

  I said, "But I raised my own salary. I don't count as a cap or against a cap." And he said, "But we don't have enough to pay for this office space. And so we have to get rid of 14 people and 14 offices." So I shook his hand and I shook his deputy's hand and I said, "I think you guys are wonderful. And I wish you the very best." I said, "Thanks for extending a helping hand to me when I really needed it." So then I was out of a job again.

• 39:24John Kiriakou?

  I got a call from the Sputnik News Agency. This is a news agency owned by the Russian government. And they offered me my own radio show. And I said, thanks, no thanks. I have no interest in working for the Russians. And I just walked away. They said, come on down to the studio and check it out. I said, all right, I'm curious. I go down to the studio, first class studio, like any American broadcast studio, just beautiful, high end equipment, everything was first class. And I said, thanks, I appreciate the offer, but I'm not interested in working for the Russians. Eight months later, I still haven't found a job. And so they called me again.

• 40:09John Kiriakou?

  And they said, listen, we still have this position open. We'd like to give you your own radio show. Well, let me come down and talk to you about it. So I go downtown and they offer me a job and the money was good. And I said, the only way that I would take this job is if I am able to say anything I want about anyone I want, including Vladimir Putin. And the general manager says, done. And I said, yeah. I said, would you put that in writing in the contract? He said, done. They sent me a contract a couple of days later, and there it is in the contract.

• 40:53John Kiriakou?

  No checks on my freedom of speech. I can say anything I want about anybody I want. And I signed it. It was fortuitous because even though I may not have realized it at the time, my marriage was over. I just hadn't yet been informed. So it was very fortuitous that I ended up in a job that paid me well when I needed the pay necessary to hire a divorce lawyer. I was angry at life. I'm a relatively religious Greek Orthodox Christian.

• 41:33John Kiriakou?

  And I remember saying out loud to God, am I really that bad a guy? That I deserve this? Listen, I understand being tested, but this is ridiculous. I didn't deserve this. I have a friend who I've mentioned a couple of times. We worked at the CIA together. We go to the same church, we're in the same men's group. He happens to be a psychiatrist and a brigadier general in the army and a CIA officer, total overachiever, wonderful guy. And he said to me, why don't you come to the office and we'll talk? I said, thanks, Steve, I don't need a psychiatrist. He said, no, I'm not saying as a psychiatrist, just come and let's talk.

• 42:18John Kiriakou?

  And so he made a recommendation for someone that I should go talk to. I went one time. It's a female psychiatrist in Bethesda, Maryland, who specializes only in fucked up former CIA people. Her entire practice is just completely fucked up CIA people. So I went, I disliked her from the moment I walked into her office and I never went back again. She would just sit there and stare at me like, like I was a circus sideshow, like lady, tell me what to do. Tell me how I break out of this. Don't just sit there and stare at me. And then when I say, well, you're not going to say anything? And she says, how do you feel about the fact that I'm silent?

• 43:02John Kiriakou?

  And I was like, okay, I quit. And I get up and I walked out one time. That was it. So I go back to my buddy, I said, I hated that woman, I'm never going to see her again. And he said to me, I think that your problem is not depression. I don't think you're depressed. You're clearly angry. I think your problem is anxiety. Anxiety is worry or fear of the future, of something that we have no control over. He sent me out to some place out by Dulles Airport in Virginia. I put this bathing cap on with wires coming out of it. And I sat in a completely darkened room. The woman had to wake me up three different times, I nodded off. She's like, no, no, you can't. She would whisper, you can't go to sleep, you have to stay awake.

• 43:47John Kiriakou?

  And they were just doing brain scans. And so at the end of it, it was like a week later, you got the results and he says, it's anxiety. You're not depressed. I said, no, I'm not depressed, but I feel like I want to kill someone or multiple people. And I can name them if you want. And he's like, no, no, don't do that, because then I'm going to have to report you. So yeah, I was able to deal with my anxiety and then it went away. My ex-wife once described me as irrationally loyal to friends. I'm not sure that there really is any such thing as irrational loyalty. But I am hardcore loyal to the people who are loyal to me.

• 44:32John Kiriakou?

  So I've mentioned that while I was in prison, I received 7,000 letters from 675 different people. Now, I have 27 first cousins on my mother's side. My mom came from a huge family. 27 first cousins on my mom's side. Three wrote to me, three. And two of the three, one of them, her son died while I was in prison. So in the depths of her grief, at the loss of her 38 year old son from a massive heart attack, he had one of those widow maker heart attacks like John Ritter did, in the

• 45:16John Kiriakou?

  depths of her grief, she was thinking about me. One of my other cousins who wrote to me regularly was writing to me from a homeless shelter in St. Petersburg, Florida. So here she is with God knows what kind of problems that she had in her own life, and she was worried about me. You really get to see who's with you and who's not, who's all talk and who's all action. As I mentioned in season one of the podcast, I struck up a friendship with former Senator George McGovern.

• 46:01John Kiriakou?

  And Senator McGovern told me a story once that just stuck in my mind for years and years and years. And then I seemed to live it myself. He said that when he ran for president against Richard Nixon in 1972, as every school child knows, Senator McGovern lost 49 of the 50 states. He didn't even win his own home state of South Dakota. He barely won Massachusetts. Two years later, President Nixon resigned. And in a poll taken that year in 1974, when Nixon resigned, 60% of Americans said they had voted for McGovern. Okay?

• 46:44John Kiriakou?

  So everybody cuts me off when I go to prison. All of a sudden, I'm anathema, I'm just a criminal, a common criminal. And then I get out and my media is really positive. And all of a sudden, I'm on TV all the time. And I start to gain a following. And all of a sudden, these people who had walked away from me, they want to be friends again. And surely I could understand their position, they're prominent in their fields, and they couldn't be associated with somebody, blah, blah, blah, blah. And my response was, actually, no, I can't understand that.

• 47:28John Kiriakou?

  I'm still John, I'm still your friend, I'm still your cousin. I didn't change. I think you changed. So I said the same thing to each of them. Loyalty is a two way street and you weren't loyal to me and it's time for me to move on. And I ended a whole bunch of relationships and I regret none of it. At the end of the day, when I considered my assets and my liabilities, spying was the one asset that could still keep my life pointed in the right direction. Sometimes life gets really simple that way. Hey, there's nothing wrong with flipping burgers for a living, there is dignity in

• 48:11John Kiriakou?

  all work, especially if flipping burgers covers your nut. But my nut was considerably more than flipping burgers could ever cover. Since no big company was ever going to hire me, not many little companies wanted to hire me either, writing became the best possible solution to my long-term problem. Not that writing your way out of financial difficulties is any sort of guarantee, ask most any other writer, but I was already a published author and a relatively successful one. I had written a book about spying. It did pretty well, so why not write more books on the same subject? Among the projects I took up and I applied myself to relentlessly was a series of what

• 48:55John Kiriakou?

  were called CIA insiders guides. For the cost of a book, someone could attend John Kiriakou's Spy Academy. And now so can you. First subject on the table, lying and lie detection. That's next time on Dead Drop, what makes a spy and a whistleblower tick? In the meantime, please don't forget to like, rate, review, and comment on the podcast. Better yet, if you're enjoying it, please share that flack with your family and friends. Hopefully they'll thank you. I know I do. Until 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,

• 49:38John Kiriakou?

  and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.

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