John Kiriakou's Dead Drop - Mini Episode 3: A Spy's Guide To... Sofia

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

THE BLURB: In this episode, we preview a new podcast series that we'll start dropping in Spring 2026 - "A Spy's Guide To" which will look at the great cities of the world (and the not-so-great) entirely from the perspective of spies and spying. It'll be like a travel guide for spooks. Since spies have to live in these cities (in addition to working them), we'll approach and appreciate our first city guide - to SOFIA, BULGARIA - as we will all of these cities - like a spy would. A City is a place to recruit agents, locate safe houses and begin collecting secrets.SHOW NOTESFor more great podcasts like Dead Drop, please visit https://costardandtouchstone.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production. Welcome to Dead Drop. I'm John Kirooku, and always, thank you for joining us. In this mini episode, we'll be previewing a brand new podcast series that we're going to start dropping in the spring of 2026. It's called A Spies Guide 2, and the things we'll be guiding you to are the great cities of the world, but from a spy's perspective, Tourists see a city one way. Locals see it quite another. Spies, on the other hand, we see a city or a town

or any place, really, in a way that's entirely unique to it and to us. Of course, spies got to eat and spies got to sleep, so our spy guides will appreciate each city's livability. Spies like to be entertained, too, and plenty of us want all the local culture we can get. So that's also a part of the spies guide to calculus. But from a spies' POV, a city is a workplace, filled with potential agents to recruit, safe houses to suss out, and clandestine rendezvous to choreograph. Some cities have been home to spies and spying forever, while others are a little newer to the game. Of course, we'll cover the obvious. Cities like London, Vienna, New York, Washington, D.C., Moscow, Jerusalem. We'll cover less obvious places too. Think Miami, Brussels, Berlin,

Beirut, Amsterdam, and Beijing. And we'll cover what are perhaps entirely unexpected places like the city I'm going to tell you about in this episode. So without any further ado, welcome to a spy's guide to Sophia Bulgaria. When I was stationed in Athens, one of the things that I loved about my job was the accompanying analysis that went with planning for operations. I was an analyst at heart. I loved doing deep dives into these terrorism issues, and I really loved going through the old yellowed files from the 1970s, from the Dick Welch era.

While I was going through one of those old weathered yellowed files, and I found an FBI course evaluation form from a class that the FBI had offered to foreign intelligence. officers just after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. They took a whole bunch of Eastern European intelligence and military leaders, generals, and they took them down to Fort Polk, Louisiana, and taught them shooting and driving and just fun things. So I found this course evaluation form, and it was signed by a Bulgarian general, and he said how much he appreciated the course, how much he loved the course, and that he would be very pleased to accept another invitation to a different course. And nobody ever talked to him again.

And I thought, my God, why in the world would they just let this guy go? Well, the reason why he was in the file in the first place was that back in 1991, when he submitted this course evaluation form, an alert analyst at the CIA said, wait a minute, I know this general's name. This general was a major in 1975. He was the Bulgarian defense attaché in Athens in 1975. And on the night that Dick Welch was assassinated, December 23rd, 1975, he was walking his dog one block away. No one had ever bothered to ask him, Did you see the getaway car? Did you hear the shots?

Did you hear a scream? Anything. Do you have any memory of that night? You must, because it was in every newspaper in the world the next day. So I went to my boss in Athens and I said, listen, I know that this is a long shot, but there's this Bulgarian guy. I don't even know if he's still alive. But he was one block away when Dick Welch was assassinated.

He's pro-US. He's been to the U.S. for training courses. I'd like to go to Bulgaria and just talk to him and see if he remembers anything from that night, 25 years earlier. And he said, sure, send a cable to Bulgaria and ask if you can come up. So I sent a cable to Bulgaria.

And our man in Bulgaria said, sure, you're welcome to come up, but I'm not paying for it because I don't care about this issue. My boss said, fine. we'll pay for it. Go ahead and do your thing. So I flew up to Bulgaria. I found him working as a security officer in a bank. And I knocked on the door. I introduced myself. And I said I'd like to invite him for a cup of coffee and just talk about December 23rd, 1975. He didn't remember anything that necessarily

advanced the investigation. But he was willing to be debrief. He was, he was, was a Bulgarian patriot and he said, look, I'm going to report this contact to my service. It's my patriotic duty. I said, absolutely, go right ahead and do it. My agency is working with your former agency. It's all on the up and up and public and friendly. There was no espionage involved. This was just a friendly cup of coffee just to see if you can remember one night from 25 years ago. But I went up to Bulgaria at least a half a dozen times over the next year to meet with him. And I got to know, Sophia Bulgaria. I got to know it very well. Sophia has become one of my favorite cities in the world. It's unusual for a couple of reasons. It's the only capital in

Europe that's not built on a river. There's no river. It was the site of an ancient civilization, an ancient Greek civilization. In fact, there was a coffee shop that I was fond of going to just off campus of the University of Sofia where there are Greek columns just coming out of the ground and they've set up tables and chairs and they come and serve you your coffee and you're sitting amongst these 2,500-year-old ruins. Just fascinating. Another thing that I really loved about Sophia was there's an enormous Bulgarian Orthodox cathedral in the center of the city called the St. Alexandrnevsky Cathedral.

St. Alexandrnevsky was a Russian prince who is now the patron saint of Bulgaria. He's venerated and loved by all Bulgarians. The cathedral is magnificent. But even more importantly, is seven days a week there's an art market in front of the cathedral. And so I was an avid fan of contemporary Bulgarian art and antiques and jewelry. I even found a Soviet Academy Award for sale there, which I bought. And I'll tell you how I know it's an Academy Award, because I was taking a tour of Francis Ford Coppola's winery in Napa, California, and he has a little museum to himself,

and he has a Soviet Academy Award for the Russian language release of the Godfather. Years and years later, in 2015, when I won the Penn USA First Amendment Award, he won the Penn USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and we were talking, and I said, you know, I've got this statue that's identical to the one that you have in your little museum,

and he said, oh, that's a Soviet Academy Award, from the Soviet Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, they gave it to me for the Russian language version of the Godfather. So anyway, I was going to Bulgaria so much that I really got to know the city. And I would do very sophisticated surveillance detection routes, part on foot, part on the subway, part on a tram, on a bus. Once I had a rental car pre-positioned in a parking garage and I walked in and drove out, I would just do it for fun. I knew I wasn't being followed in Bulgaria. and I was never followed in Bulgaria,

but it was fun to really get the feel of a city like this. One trip up there, I flew up to meet with the general. He said, let's not meet in the city this time. Pick me up and let's meet at a hunting lodge. About an hour outside of town, it's in the mountains. He said it's very rustic, all dark wood, roaring fireplaces, and they have wild boar and venison on the menu. And I said, that sounds like a great idea.

So we went up there, and I ordered wild boar, which I actually quite like. I also ordered, and I would never order an alcoholic drink, just because I wanted to remain sharp. That night, I ordered an uzo and orange juice. My grandmother used to drink uzo and orange juice. Normally, a Greek won't mix orange juice with their uzo. Normally, you add just a little bit of water. I prefer it straight. With orange juice, it gives it this very, very full.

fresh, very refreshing taste. So I order, and it was on orange juice. And we have a terrific dinner. A couple of months later, I go back up there. And I said, you know, General, I've been thinking about that wild boar ever since we went up there. I loved the place. I loved the setting. The view from the top of the mountain was gorgeous. All you can see is thick forest as far as the eye can see. Let's go back up there. This time I'm going to try the venison. So we drive. did a little SDR in town and once we hit the highway straight to the hunting lodge and we get up there and I ordered the venison. He ordered the boar that time and I said and how about a uh how about an uzo and orange juice? And the waitress says, I remember you? And I said, no, I don't think we've met.

She said, yeah, you were here two months ago and I remember that because you are the only person that I've ever waited on who ordered an uzo and orange juice. And I said, and I, I said, ha ha, okay, you got me. She walks away and he says, that's unfortunate. We can never come here again. And we never did. I was noticed. And being noticed is sort of the kiss of death for a spy. Sophia was such a special place. Having been under the communist yoke for so many years behind the iron curtain, it was virtually untouched. So most of the city, most of what you're going to want to look at in the city, was built in the mid to the late 19th century. Beautiful small hotels, which are now boutique hotels, the big cathedrals, which are from

the 18th century, the smaller Orthodox churches. And then on the outskirts of town, it was all just hideous concrete block Soviet apartment buildings. The center of the city, was stunning. And one of the great things about being there at that time was the CIA changed its internal regulations regarding per diem. Per diem is broken into two parts, hotel and meals and incidental. For Sophia, like in any other city in the world, it's based on the average five-star hotel. Well, there was only one five-star hotel. It used to be the Communist Party headquarters and it's now the Sheraton. Lovely place. Absolutely. enormous, it probably has 2,000 rooms, takes up an entire city block.

I didn't like staying at the Sheraton. In the bar, it's all just prostitutes. And I just wanted to be left alone. I also preferred, and this was the new rule, whatever you didn't spend, you could put in your pocket. And the old rule was, whatever you didn't spend, you had to return to Uncle Sam. So instead of staying at the Sheraton for $300 a night, I would stay at the Hotel Rila, which doubled as a whorehouse for $16 a night. I would eat all of my meals at the Pizza Troll Pizza Cafe for another 10 bucks a day and put the other

350 bucks in my pocket. But then I would spend that at the art market in front of the cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky. I didn't really accomplish anything espionage-wise just because there was nothing to accomplish, but my God, I enjoyed Sophia Bulgaria. And I was able to sort of stretch my legs and exercise. my spycraft without the threat of a hostile power watching me. As I said, we'll start dropping episodes of a spy's guide to in spring of 2026, which is actually just around the corner.

If you subscribe to this podcast, you'll be in the loop as details emerge. As always, we can't thank you enough for listening. But if you don't mind, it really does help the podcast thrive and reach more listeners if you rate, review, leave a comment about or like the podcast on the platform where you're listening. In the next episode, we'll continue the story of what makes this spy tick. We're getting to the part of the story where the nitty really does get gritty. Until then, I'm John Kariaku. Dead Drop is written by John Kriaku and Alan Kats.

Costard and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kriaku, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers. This podcast, it's a copy. Austin Touchstone Production.