John Kiriakou's Dead Drop - S1E1 What Makes THIS Spy Tick

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

THE BLURB: John Kiriakou knew when he was 9 years old that he wanted to be a spy. Plenty of people want to be spies but only a few ever actually become spies. In E1, John tells his origin story. Where he and his family came from had a lot to do with his success as an intelligence officer working in dangerous places. From wanting to be James Bond to actually becoming something a lot like Bond. It's "How To Be A Spy, Part 1".SHOW NOTESFor more great podcasts like Dead Drop, please visit https://costardandtouchstone.com/To listen to Just The Photographer, please visit Just The Photographer with David Swanson - Hosted by David Swanson Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast, it's a Costa and Touchstone production. I'm John Curiochard, and I want to welcome you to a brand new podcast. Dead Drop, as its subtitle says, is going to be about what makes a spy or spies in general tick. The first spy we're going to talk about is, well, it's me. What makes this spy tick? Like a lot of podcasters, I make several different podcasts. That's one of the great things about podcasting. One can do multiple podcasts that speak to different audiences.

And I talk about this subject, spying, and my other podcasts. But the way we're going to handle the subject in this podcast, it's along the same lines of describing, or should I say, telling the story of how this spy ticks. For the record, I'd call myself a former spy, but no one who ever spied for a living is ever truly a former spy. I don't mean that I subscribe to that false and infuriating slogan, once CIA, always CIA. I really, really hate that because it's intellectually lazy and it's simply not true.

What I mean is you never lose the tradecraft skills that the CIA teaches you. You always look for surveillance. You always question whether you're being developed by a foreign intelligence officer. You always wonder whether the FBI is looking at you for whatever reason. Most importantly, this podcast is going to tell you how I tick as a human being. That's always been a core element of spying, the human element. Though popular culture might imagine spies lurking silently in the shadows, wearing trench coats, a good spy is actually a people person.

The more they can relate to people and get people to relate to them, the more people they'll be able to spy on or recruit as spies, in essence. As I think you'll come to appreciate from listening to, or watching this podcast, spies and storytellers have a lot in common, probably more than you realized. So let's get started. Looking back at my family's story and how it produced me, maybe it's not that shocking that spying and I found each other. Tap a vein in my family and you're just as likely to get an interesting story as you are to get blood. All four of my grandparents came from the island of Rhodes, which is a very important part of modern Greece.

But for 450 years was under the Turkish Ottoman yoke. We were the slaves of the Turks, starting in 1456, and not liberated until 1917. In 1917, when the Ottomans pulled out, the Italians moved in. And we were an Italian colony. Rhodes didn't join Greece formally until 1947. And so when I went through the process of trying to get my own Greek citizenship, it was tough because the Turks didn't allow us to keep records. And then the Italians kept such good records that when I went to the Greek embassy to apply, they told me I had a stronger case for Italian citizenship. My grandparents, when they immigrated to the United States, my father's parents in 1931, my mother's parents in 1934, they came on Italian passports, which I still have.

I told the Greek consul, I'm not Italian. None of us are ethnically Italian. We're all Greeks. And I happened to be the keeper of the family genealogy. I'm the only one who's ever been interested in it. And so I had hundreds and hundreds of documents that my grandmother gave me. And in those documents, we found two that were important. One was a receipt for a 100 olive trees that my grandfather bought in 1930 indicating that he owned land in roads and he intended to remain. Why would you plant olive trees that are going to live for 500 years if you don't intend to remain? The second was a document that the Italian army gave my grandmother giving her permission to teach Italian soldiers how to speak Greek. And the Greeks said,

enough, you're Greek. And so I got my Greek citizenship and citizenship for all five of my children. But it goes back farther than that. I did 23 and me, like so many Americans did, about 10 years ago. In 23 and me, as in ancestry, they tell you that you have DNA relatives, is what they call it. So I'm going through the DNA relatives and who do I see? But the Greek or the Greek or Orthodox Archbishop of Pittsburgh. I sent him a message through 23 and me and I said, Dear Eminence, it says in 23 and me that you and I are related. Fourth cousins, etc. Do you have any idea how we could be related? He must have been on 23 and me when I sent him the email. He responded immediately and he said, I don't know, but if it helps, I'm from the island of

but my family originally came from the island of Patmos. And I said, ah, my family's from the island of Rhodes, but my grandmother said that on my grandfather's side, we came from the island of Fatmos. And he said, well, let's try to figure this out. My last name is not really Kyriaku. It's actually Christodulu, which means servant of Christ. Kiriakos means Charles.

Kiriakou means the son of Charles. As it so happened, my great-great-grandfather was arrested for stealing a potato. He was starving, and he stole a potato, and he got caught. And they took him to court, and they said, what is your name? He said, Marcos, Mark. Markos what? He said, Marcos to Kiriaku, Mark, the son of Charles. And they wrote Mark Kiriaku, and he never fixed it.

He was not literate, which would explain it. So our family name is actually Christodulu. I said to the Archbishop, our family name really is Christodulu, and my grandmother used to tell me this story, that we were descended from a very wealthy man who was very, very religious. And he owned a lot of land on the island of Platmos, and he traded the land in the 17th century to the emperor in Constantinople. And in exchange, the emperor gave.

him the cave where St. John received the Book of Revelation. And he said, wait a minute, you're talking about Saint Christodoulos. I'm descended from Saint Christodoulos? He said, that would account for the name Christodulu, the sons of Christodoulos. And I said, you know, funny thing, my wife is descended from Jesse James and she's been bragging about it. I'd rather be descended from a saint. I have pictures of most of my great grandparents, and they're all wearing Turkish what are called vrakas, Turkish vrachas that they were forced to wear by the Turkish occupation forces. Their religion was not impacted for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, the Ottoman government was tolerant of non-Muslims so long as they paid their taxes.

You had to pay a tax to the Ottomans if you weren't Muslim, but still wanted to live in the empire. Though tolerant, the Ottomans were harsh nonetheless on the Greeks under their rule. Lucky us. Sure, you could remain Christian, but you were not permitted to speak Greek, and you were not permitted to teach your children Greek. Ironically, that's why the Greek Orthodox Church survived. They forced us to teach our children Greek in caves or in stables, where the Turks weren't searching.

On my mother's side, I come from a long line of, of Greek Orthodox priests. Our name, my mother's mother's maiden name was Papa Dimitrio. It means Demetrius the priest, James the priest. It's because we came from a long line of priests. There was one, my great, great grandfather on my mother's mother's side who was a priest,

and I found his death record in the Greek Orthodox Church in our little village in Southern Roads. And it says that he was killed by a shark, while he was sponge diving. My grandmother said, that's not true. The Turks killed him and threw his body into the sea. And when it finally washed up, sharks had taken bites out of it. But she said he was murdered because he would not stop teaching children how to speak Greek.

I took genealogy very, very seriously. I was also very close to my paternal grandparents. My father's father dropped out of school in third grade to work in the fields. He was one of 19 children. My great-grandfather couldn't keep his hands off, my great-grandmother. 19 children. And how do you feed 19 children when you're slaves of the Turks? They worked the fields.

In the first decade or two of the 20th century, the Greek economy was in a state of utter shambles. We had just fought this absolutely desolate. disastrous war with the Kamalist Turks upon the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Two million Greeks were expelled from Turkey, 150,000 Turks were expelled from Greece. The Turks called it the great population transfer of 1920. The Greeks call it the catastrophe of 1920. There simply wasn't enough food. There weren't enough jobs.

And the Greek government had an active policy of encouraging young men to just get out. Go to America, Canada, Australia, Britain, just... Get out. It was a threat. Get out or starve to death. And so my grandfather left in 1920. He had two brothers living in Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania. So he went to Cannonsburg. This is a town about 20 miles south of Pittsburgh. And he went to work for U.S. Steel as a slab cutter. He did that for 10 years from 1920 to 1930. Think about how that move from rural Greece. He told me once, that he never saw an automobile until he went to Pereus, the Port of Athens, to get on the SS Themistoclis,

to take this month-long ship ride in steerage to the United States. He had never seen an automobile before. He lived on a farm on this semi-tropical island with ancient ruins all over the place, and all of a sudden he's in Pittsburgh, in 1920 working in a steel mill, and living with 10 Greek guys in this giant group house. He did that for 10 years, and he was able to save $20,000,

which in today's money is worth about 250,000 that he saved in 10 years. The idea being that he had no intention of staying in America. He was going to go back to Greece and buy a farm. He always considered himself to be a farmer until the day died. He was going to find a wife and plant his crops. He went back in 1930, met my grandmother on the beach, saw her. They smiled at each other. He found out who she was, went to her father and said,

I'm from the village of Trianda. She was from the village of Marizza, which was the next village over. He said, I would like to marry your daughter. They negotiated a dowry. I have the original dowry contract, and it is so sweet. In exchange for marrying his daughter, my grandmother's father gave my grandfather, a bed and two pillows, copper pots and pans, a cow, two goats, and two icons, one of St. John the Baptist and one of the Virgin Mary. Well, my grandfather returned in 1930 to marry my grandmother.

Part of the dowry, he got two plots of land. One was worthless. Why? Because it was beachfront. And you can't plant crops beachfront. Oh, my cousins own it now, and it is a multi, multi, dollar plot. My dad and his sister sold it to cousins in 1991 and they got rich beyond their wildest dreams. The other one was a farm halfway up the mountain that overlooks the village. My grandfather went back, married my grandmother, bought a hundred olive trees to plant on his land, and then received a letter from his brother in Cannonsburg saying, the Congress is going to pass a new law, making it much harder to become an American citizen. My grandfather got his citizenship in the 20s,

but he said if you want your wife to be American, you need to come back right now. He literally walked out of the field, left his tools, abandoned his trees, collected my grandmother, took her to Athens, got her an American visa, which is funny because when I worked in the American embassy, 80 years later, they had a framed visa on the wall from 1930, 1940.

And I said, oh, I can beat you. I have my grandmother's visa from 1930. They said, are you kidding me? I gave them a copy. They framed it and put it in the consulate. So they got on a ship called the MN Saturnia. Ironically, it was the ship that brought all four of my grandparents to America. Backwards and forwards.

We collect memorabilia from the Saturnia. I've got like a place setting. I have a menu. It ended up becoming a troop transport ship during the Second World War. And then it was scuttled off the coast of Taiwan in the 70s. I have the whole history of the ship that brought them to America. So they arrived in Cannonsburg in February of 1931. My grandfather really wanted to be a farmer, not a steelworker. He opened a greengrocer.

And in 1933, moved from Cannonsburg to Farrell, Pennsylvania, where I was born, where my father was born. My aunt was born first in 1932. Then my father was born, interestingly enough, on the kitchen table in Farrell, 1934. And then my grandfather went back to the mill and worked in the mill until 1964, opened up another grocery store in 64, and worked there until 69 or 70. But he and I were very close. I'm named after my grandfather. He's John Chris Kiriaku. I'm John Chris Kiriaku, which is a Greek, an Orthodox tradition.

I remember sitting on his lap and just hearing the story of the world. He would talk about the first trip to America, the second trip to America. My grandfather was a fierce Republican, not in the American political context, but he was a fierce anti-royalist. He did not believe in royalty, royal families. Interestingly enough, my grandmother was a staunch royalist. There was a royal family that was imposed on Greece. They were Danish.

They ended up being expelled. I should add, my father's side of the family were from two villages in the far north of the island of Rhodes. So the capital is in the northern tip. It's called Rhodes City. It's been populated since 550 BC. It's an old place. There's a walled city that the Crusaders built

from which they launched the Third and Fourth Crusades called Ipa Ljapoli, the old city. And there's a 30-foot wall around it, very historic and very beautiful. We're from the first two villages outside the Wall of the city. My mother's family is from the southern most inhabited point on the island. It's a village called Katavya. There's literally nothing down there but farms.

On her side of the family, they were farmers and sponge divers and priests. Sponges were treasured back then because we hadn't yet figured out how to make synthetic sponges. Synthetic sponges are made out of chemicals. And science hadn't advanced that far. So everybody in the world needs a sponge, whether it's to clean yourself or your floor or your sink or whatever. Most of these sponges at the time, a lot of them come from the Philippines today, but almost all the sponges 100 years ago were from Greece, and not just from Greece, from the islands of Rhodes and Kalimnos.

So my family was involved in sponge diving. You'd go offshore, a couple of hundred yards, dive down. You learn how to hold your breath for two minutes at a time. Like abalone divers, it's the same thing. You have to know how to cut them so that they regenerate and you don't decimate the population. It's an animal. It's a living thing. You cut off the part that grows back, almost like a lizard's tail.

And then it just regenerates and grows again. And then you sell them all over the world. On my mother's side of the family, we had originated in Anatolia along the Black Sea. It's an area that today is called Trebzon. The Turks during Ottoman times would massacre Greek populations, just like they did with the Armenians and the Syrians and the Syriacs and anybody they didn't like. We were from a very heavily Greek area along the Black Sea, and we were able to escape that Turkish massacre and make our way to Rhodes, which at the time, of course, was also Turkish, but they at least weren't killing people there. They went to the southernmost tip of the island because it was unpopulated and it wasn't worth the Turks trouble to go all the way down there just to kill a handful of Greeks.

That's why you'll find villages at the very tops of mountains where it's too far from the sea to fish. It's too high up and too rocky to farm. So why would you go up there? You go up there so the Turks don't kill you. That's why you go up there. And so they all became farmers. My mother's father's side of the family were farmers, very large family, another dozen or so kids, but the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 wiped out most of them. That's when my grandfather decided

this isn't for him. He worked in order to save money to come to America. He married my grandmother in the village. My grandmother was 14. My grandfather was 18. They got married. They got on the ship. The M.N. Saternia. They ended up in Wearton, West Virginia, where my grandmother, my grandfather worked in the mill, and then they moved to Warren, Ohio, where both my grandmother and grandfather worked in the mill. My grandparents on my dad's side were wildly different from my grandparents on my mother's side. On my dad's side, there was nothing in life more important than education for two reasons. Number one, because my grandfather didn't have one. He could barely read and write. But my grandmother, my grandmother was different. This is my father's

mother. She was the oldest of four. It was girl, girl, girl, boy. But the boy, my great-uncle George, died when he was 17 from tuberculosis. So there were just three girls in the family. And my great-grandfather, God bless him, wanted his daughters to succeed in life. So he insisted that all of them have a skill. My grandmother, being the oldest, he sent her to school, and she learned how to speak English, Turkish, and Italian. In addition to her, to Greek. I have a picture of my grandmother teaching in the one and only school in Rhodes in 1927. There's a picture of her with all these little kids. The building still exists. I've been to it. I've taken a picture of it. So she was educated and was able to teach foreign languages.

Her sisters became dressmakers, which was an important skill back then because clothes weren't made in bulk. And then on my mom's side, my grandmother and grandfather had nine children. Eight of them lived to adulthood, but education was never important. Of the eight that lived, my mother was the only one that got an education, and that was only at the insistence of my father. If you're enjoying Dead Drop, and of course, we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great, granular story podcast from the Costard and Touchstone family.

Just the photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism. what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't, what it felt like being in all those dangerous places, like war zones and natural disasters, doing his job taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this. Just the photographer will put you right there on the ground, right next to David. Inside his head, in fact. It's a hell of a podcast, and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costard and touchstone.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. It never occurred to me. that Greek society of that era was teared. But it was. When I got married for the first time, my first wife was Greek. Greek-Greek. Her parents were from the island of Hios.

Now, Hios was the site of the famous massacre of Hios, where Eugène de la Cue painted this masterpiece called the Massacre of Hios that's in the Louvre, for example. They escaped from Hios to Athens. When we got married and she showed me pictures of her family from the 19th, 19th century. They're all wearing very expensive, high-class, Athenian society clothes. The pictures of my family show them in rags coming out of the field. It just never occurred to me that Greeks would be societally tiered like that, but they were. And I think that in retrospect, I think my dad's father

said, only in America can we rise to the top. He was able to save $20,000 between 1920 and 1930. He knew we could do it. The key was education. My aunt, my father's sister, my aunt Chrysanthe, who I loved like a mother, got a degree in nursing, and then she got a master's degree in nursing, and then she got a PhD in hospital administration. My father got a bachelor's, degree in music, a master's degree in education, and a PhD in music education. And then after my sister, who's our youngest in our family, started kindergarten. My mother went to college, and she got a bachelor's degree in education and a master's degree in education. My mom was so proud to be the very first person ever in her family to go to college.

but she was colossally disappointed that her brothers and sisters were jealous and angry. And they used to refer to her as the teacher. The teacher called today. The teacher's coming over. Very jealous. That bothered her until she took her last breath. Ironically, she was the only one of the eight who ever made any money. I used to do my parents' taxes every year and I used to tell them every single.

single year, you have got to stop giving away all your money. And she would say, my brothers and sisters need it more than I do. It's because none of them ever went to college. Let me add one other thing. My dad played music in a Greek band. He started on the accordion, which most people don't realize is an instrument that's important in Greek music, especially what's called rebetica. Rebettico is a form of music that came out of the Turkish prisons. It's like the blues. That's the music that he was trained on. I have a picture of my dad in a Greek band in Sharon, Pennsylvania, from when he was 16 years old. The picture was taken in 1950. It's the earliest one I was able to find. He insisted that we all be musical in our family. I took 12 years of classical piano lessons. I played

the clarinet and the saxophone, and I played clarinet in his Greek band. My brother is one of the most important music producers in Hollywood. He got a degree in classical guitar performance and then a master's degree in music theory, came to L.A. and hit it big. But we were all in my dad's Greek band. That's how I got through college playing, you know, weddings and baptisms and Banagiri, the church festivals in the summer and stuff like that. So my dad was playing at these different functions all around what we call the tri-state area, which for us was Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. And he met my mom at a Greek dance.

And they hit it off. He was in the band. She was very, very beautiful. He went to my mother's father and said, I'd like to get to know your daughter. My mom used to say that her dad told her, if you don't marry him, I'll kill you. My dad's mother was not so happy about the arrangement.

She said, my mother later related, Oyosmu Ejianasoro Diplomatah, which means my son has a mound of diplomas. That family has nothing. But she was Greek, she was Orthodox, and she was from the same island. So that wedding was a go. My parents were married for 42 years when my dad died. My parents were so deeply in love with each other. It was a model that I always aspired to and could never accomplish myself.

They were the perfect match for each other. I was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania. We lived in Farrell, but Farrell's such a small place. Farrell had about 5,000 people at the time. It didn't have a hospital. So I was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania. Two years later, we moved to Newcastle, Pennsylvania. And I consider Newcastle to be my hometown,

because that's where I grew up from 2 to 18. Newcastle had a good 40,000. It's down to about 20 or less than 20, because, look, you know, Western Pennsylvania Rust Belt, yeah, nobody wants to live there. But it was a great place to grow up. It really was. I remember my parents taken us downtown at Christmas time to go shopping, and there were shops. Now it's just there's a homeless shelter and some projects, and that's it.

I remember the beginning of the end. I was in junior high school, and the Youngstown sheet and tube closed, and kids were crying in the hallway that day. because their dads had all been thrown out of work. And by the end of the school year, half of them had moved, gone to Florida, California, anywhere where there was industry. And the town just died. That was the end of it.

1977, I was in eighth grade. I was working later on for our congressman, the summer of 1982. The congressman asked me to go to J&L Steele to pick up a campaign donation. So I went to the office of the president of J&L Steele, and he was just saying, sitting there in his office in blue jeans. And I said, working hard or hardly working, right? Which is what adults said back then. And he said, we haven't had an order in two months. I don't think we can keep this going. I actually sat and talked with him that day about it. And he said, you know, we're the only steel plant in the world that produces seamless steel. Japanese steel, when they make

a tube, imagine a sewer pipe. It's riveted. They produce it as a flat piece of steel, they put it on a spool, they make it round, and then they rivet it closed. He said, let's say that costs $1,000. Our tube is seamless. There is no riveting. It'll never go bad. But there's as 1,000, ours is 5,000. Which one is the city going to buy? Which is any city going to buy? The Japanese put us out of business. I remember at the county fair back then. The county fair and farm show was a big deal when I was growing up. They would always have like a Toyota that they bought for $100 from the junkyard. And for a dollar, a whack, you could take a sledgehammer to it.

And there was a line. You could just bash this Japanese car. I remember one of my earliest memories was talking to my Uncle Sonny, my mom's oldest brother. It was 1972. And I said, Uncle Sonny, who are you going to vote for? He said, I'm going to vote for Wallace. And I said, Wallace, why would you vote for Wallace? Because he's like Truman.

I said, so? He said, Truman taught the Japanese. a thing or two. And I was like, wow, I still remember that. 1972. But that was the attitude in Western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. Anything Japanese was bad. And by God, if you bought a Japanese car, somebody was going to set it on fire. As much as I enjoyed growing up in Newcastle, Pennsylvania. As much as I loved that my entire extended family was within 20 minutes drive, I knew I had to get out. I knew there was no future for me there. I begged my parents to move to the Washington, D.C. area.

I moved to Washington to go to college the week after I turned 18 and I never went back. Before I leave home entirely, in high school I was a good student. History and current events were my forte. That's probably why I got into debating. I saw that I had a real facility for it, but while it was important to be able to win a debate on the merits of my argument, there was something even more fundamental that I liked about debating. I once read a story about James Madison. who wrote a bill for the House of Representatives to consider,

and then led the debate in opposition to his own bill. And I said, now that is a guy who can debate with equal fervor to be able to argue both sides of an issue. I said, that's for me. I always believed, even when I was a kid, that everybody's opinion is worthy of being listened to. You may not like the opinion. You may think it's a stupid opinion, but it's worthy of discussion. And I always felt that reasonable people can agree to disagree on an issue.

I have this group of best friends, right? Shout out to Gary Sanko, Russ Coletta, Guy Cabellis, and David McCracken. David unfortunately passed away when we were 48 years old. Two of us were Republicans, two of us were Democrats, and one was an independent. And none of it ever mattered because we love each other. we're all on each other's weddings, we're godfather to each other's kids, and politics never, ever mattered. It wasn't until I went to college that I realized, geez, people take politics seriously.

So I decided that I really wanted to understand both sides of these issues. And so I joined the debate team and realized that I was actually best at this subgenre of debate called contemporaneous speaking. Improv! That was actually harder than debate, but it taught me how to give speech in. You walk into a room. There are three judges at a table, and they say, your topic is whether or not to open a military base in the United Arab Emirates. Go.

You have five minutes. And man, you best know about the conversation taking place between our two governments about opening a base in United Arab Emirates. And I'm talking about in 1980, but taught me to be quick on my feet, to be well-informed. I read constantly, constantly. In fact, when I joined the CIA so many years later, I was developing a very sensitive source, and he was very highly placed where it was too dangerous to meet with him in the country where I had originally met him. And so I got a cable from headquarters saying, bring him to Washington, and we'll meet him

in Washington. I put him up at the Ritz Carlton in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. I went to headquarters, picked up my boss and his deputy and another case officer. We went to the Ritz Carlton, and I introduced the source to the three. But you don't want to just jump into business. You want to make chit-chat, small talk. So the guy's like, hey, I saw this soccer match between Team A and Team B the other day, and I said, oh my God. I said, did you see their strike? He made this kick. And of course, only the source knew what I was talking about. He's like, oh my God, it was the greatest kick I've ever seen in my life. And then he says, I haven't been in America in 30 years. I would love to see a Broadway show. He said, there's this show right now

called Whatever. I had just read a review of the show in the Washington Post. And I said, oh, listen to this. And I told him about the show. And I said, and while you're up, there. You may want to go to some obscure museum. They have this wonderful show that just started and it's going to be open for only the next four weeks. And then he said, what about this sport you have here, baseball? And I said, well, you know, we're trying to get a team in Washington. I'm a Pittsburgh Pirates fan. But if you're up for it, I'm happy to drive you to Baltimore. They've got this guy, Cal Ripkin. He's setting a record. Afterwards, we finished our meeting. We went back to headquarters. And my boss says, how the fuck are you able to speak authoritatively on literally every issue that came out of

that man's mouth? I never really thought about it that way. I read a lot, I said, a lot. Another thing you should know about me is that I'm a polyglot. I have a facility with foreign languages. The first time I went to Saudi Arabia, my boss said to me, listen, we need for you to go to Saudi Arabia for three months. We want you to do X, Y, and Z. But you don't speak. Arabic, so you might struggle. And I said, now I have a facility for languages. I speak English, I speak Greek, I can pick up Arabic. He goes, you're not going to pick up Arabic. There was no such thing as the internet back then. So I live in Arlington, Virginia. There's a neighborhood in Arlington called Roslyn. There used to be the Roslin School of Languages. I called them and I said,

how much just to teach me the Arabic alphabet? They said, oh, $200. So I went for like three Saturdays and I learned the Arabic alphabet. So when I finally got to Saudi Arabia, you know, one of the things about the Saudis, they only did this because they're assholes. The Minister of Transportation was a member of the royal family. He went to UCLA, graduated from UCLA. And when he went back to Saudi Arabia to become the Minister of Transportation at the ripe old age of, you know, 23, he said, well, when I lived in Los Angeles, the signs aren't in Arabic. So why should we have signs in English in Saudi Arabia. Just in the diplomatic quarter where all the English speakers are, he made all the street signs only Arabic, just to screw us. I knew the alphabet so I could

sound out Shahi al-Abd-Avda-Azis Avenue. And if I can sound out street signs, then I could sound out menus in restaurants. And then I could write my own name. And so finally, after I went back to headquarters, I worked for another two years in that office. And then they said, do you want to take a year off and learn to speak Arabic fluently? And I said, done. So I applied for a job. It was a CIA rotation to the State Department. So legit, on the level state department job as the head of the economic section in Manama Bahrain, the American Embassy in Manama Bahrain. I went to full-time, complete immersion Arabic language training and came out of it speaking fluent Arabic. In fact, up until that point, I was the only person who came out of the first year speaking fluent Arabic.

Most people needed the second year at the State Department Language School in Tunis. And then when I got to Bahrain, the ambassador said to me one day, said, you're Arabic is excellent. It's better than mine. I said, oh, thank you. I said, I figured out it's a very mathematical language. He said, your Arabic is so great. He said, would you consider being my translator? And I said, certainly, we went to have a meeting one day with the minister of what's called al-Qaf and Islamic Affairs.

Al-Qaf is the plural of waqf, which is charity, Islamic charity. And he didn't speak a single word of English. We came out of it, and as we were leaving, he said to me, young man, your Arabic is excellent. And I said, oh, thank you, Your Highness. I appreciate that. Nobody had ever really said that to me before, especially not an Arab.

It worked out well, for better or for worse. Ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The languages and the history and the politics I ended up studying, my whole career path sprang from one particular moment. When I was nine years old, I told my parents that when I grew up, I wanted to be a spy. And they thought that was cute. And so for Christmas that year, they bought me walkie-talkies,

and they bought me a little box that had disappearing ink and a little code reader. Well, I was serious. And so when I was 16, I told my dad, I still remember the conversation we were driving down Old Plank Road as we were passing Fraser's Pond. and he was adamant that I get a degree in some sort of science. I said, but dad, I'm not interested in science. I want to be a spy in the Middle East. And he said, why?

After all these years, can't you just get this out of your system? And I said, no, I want to be a spy. You know, there were James Bond movies on TV, and there were comedies, get smart, and I just thought it was so cool. I really believed I was going to be James Bond. And in a lot of ways I was. We all were.

I had a very good idea of what spies did. And later on in my career, well into my career, I was the executive assistant to the deputy director of operations. He used to have this mantra. He would say it almost every day. The job of the CIA is to recruit spies, to steal secrets, and to analyze those secrets to provide the best informed analysis to the policymaker. I knew when I was 16, that's what the CIA did.

And I knew that that's what I wanted to do. Like every high school senior, you have to start thinking about colleges. I knew with 1,000% certainty that I only wanted to go to George Washington University in Washington, D.C. I knew I wanted to major in Middle Eastern Studies. And there were only three schools in America that offered the major at the time. Brigham Young. I didn't want to go to school at Brigham Young, obviously. The other one was Rutgers.

I had zero interest in going to school in New Jersey. And then the other was George Washington University, which was literally two blocks from the White House. Talk about being in the center of the action. It's two blocks from the White House in one direction. It's two blocks from the State Department, another direction, and it's a 10-minute subway ride to Capitol Hill. I said, this is the place for me.

And my dad finally accepted the fact that I'm not going to go to Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh. I'm going to go to Washington. I took out loans. I got a half tuition scholarship because my grades were really good. My aunt had no children and she helped me as well. And so I went to GW. I was one of only four people in the Middle Eastern Studies program.

Of the other three, one was my roommate freshman year. None of them really had any interest in the Middle East. Their interest was Israel. They all happened to be Jewish. And they all just thought it would be really great and really easy. One ended up selling commercial real estate. One became an investment advisor at like Bear Stearns, and the other one got a PhD and became a college professor.

None of them ever did anything with those degrees. I took it seriously, but I immediately saw that there were weaknesses in this program. It was a new program. How in the world can you have a Middle Eastern Studies program that does not mandate a class in Islam, or in Judaism, for that matter, or in oil economic? Zoroastrianism. So I went to the dean because I'm an idiot and I thought I was, here's an 18 old freshman and he's going to have an impact. And I said, Dean, you know,

I'd really like to take these classes on Islam and oil and he's like, yeah, we don't have any of those. What kind of degree program is this? And he said to me, and this was really a big deal, he said, but we do have this thing called the consortium of DC universities. So if there's a class that you want to take that we don't offer, but they have it at Georgetown or American or whatever, you can take it and get credit for it. This is where the world gets very small. They didn't offer Arabic at GW. How in blazes can you have a Middle Eastern Studies program that doesn't offer Arabic? Well, Georgetown had Arabic. I go up to Georgetown and I said, I'd like to take the Arabic class. The guy says, we started two weeks before GW, you can't.

You're already so far behind. You can't make it up. Can't do it. I thought, well, now what am I going to do? The only class they would let me take, language class they'd let me take at GW, was Russian. And they don't speak Russian in the Middle East. But they speak Greek. They speak Greek in Cyprus and in Israel and in Alexandria, Egypt.

So I went to see the Greek professor at Georgetown, who happened to be the dean of the School of Languages and Linguistic, Dr. James Alatus. I went to his office and I said, Dr. Aladis, you don't know me. I'm not even a student here. I go to GW, but consortium, blah, blah, blah. He said, can't do it. We started two weeks ago. You're so far behind. I said, I speak Greek already though. He said, yeah, let me hear it. And he said, something to me in Greek. And I answer him. And he answers me and I answer him. And he says, your grief is terrible. I said, what? I couldn't speak to Greek all my life. He said, You talk in this weird 1930s-era island slang. He said, where are your people from?

From Rhodes. When did they come here? 1931 and 1934. He said, exactly. You're going to have to start in the beginner class, but you'll learn how to speak proper grief. And he says, when your people came from Rhodes, where did they go? I said, well, my grandmother and grandfather and my mom said they went to Weerton, West Virginia.

He said, wait a minute. I'm from Weirton, West Virginia. What are your grandparents' names? Nanyo in Armonia Prasopoulos. He said, Armonia Papa Dimitriu, and I said, yeah, that was her maiden name. He said, I grew up next door to her. Is she still alive? And I said, yeah, she's still alive. She comes down to visit me every once in one. He said, you're in. Not only did he let me in the Greek class, after I utterly aced the first semester, he pulls me aside and he said, listen, I would like you to transfer to Georgetown. You have a facility for languages. Your Greek is terrific, because you have to

major in a double language. You can take Arabic and I said, Dr. Laitis, I'm on scholarship at GW and my parents can't afford to send me to Georgetown. He said, we're one of the best schools in the world. And I said, I know and I really appreciate it, but I just can't afford to go to. So I stayed at GW. He took care of me though. I ended up taking three years of intensive Greek, which not realizing it at the time, set me up for the CIA to assign me to Athens to recruit spies to steal secrets and infiltrate terrorist groups, which is what I ended up being good at. In addition, I became such a pain in the dean's ass at GW. They hired the Shah of Iran's last chief of staff, who was one of the most important thinkers

in Shia Islam in the world. Sayyid Dr. Hussein Nasir. Funny thing, they hired him to teach an experimental class on Islam. There are only three of us in it. He assigned us 12 books. 12 bucks. First of all, it's going to cost me a fortune. Secondly, 12 books. The class is only 12 weeks long. And I went to the bookstore to buy the books, and he had written all 12 of them. The books were amazing. I still have them. Talk about the history of Islam? You really feel like,

you know more than 95% of Muslims in the world. I loved the guy. He's still alive. He's in his 90s. Flash forward a little bit. I was on assignment in Cairo in 1993, and I met the Imam. And we're talking. He said, so are you Muslim? No, but I said, I know all the prayers. Bismillah, Rahan Rahim. Al-Hamdhameda, Maliki, you're Madhiyom ad-a-a-a-a-oh-oh-oh. Oh, very good. You should think about becoming a Muslim. I said, Imam, may I do the call to prayer? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. We can't do that. You're not a Muslim. I said, I know all the prayers. All of them. I slipped him a $20 bill. A donation for the mosque, I told him, which of course went right in his pocket for cigarettes. and he let me do the call to prayer.

I was there with a friend also from the CIA, and he took a picture of me on the top of the minaret with a bullhorn doing the call to prayer. I was so proud of myself, and I'm not even a muscle. I finished my degree at GW in Middle Eastern Studies in 1986, and to tell you, the honest of God's truth, I didn't feel adult enough to go out into the world. I ended up enrolling in a master's program in legislative,

with a focus on foreign policy analysis, thinking, I'll go to the Foreign Service, maybe Capitol Hill, something in international affairs. My view of what a spy was, was less James Bond by the time I finished my bachelor's degree and more of a well-rounded intellectual. I realized with a bachelor's degree I can't compete. I have to have at least a master's degree. So I put myself through grad school in a number of ways. I got a job as an RA in one of the dorms that paid all of my tuition and my housing. I also got a job at the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. I loved those guys. My grandfathers were both members of the United Steel Workers Union. My father was a member of the National Education Association. My mother was a member of the American Federation of Teachers.

My dad was a life member of the American Brotherhood of Musicians and the Amalgamated meat-cutters union. I'm an organized labor guy. So it was all very serious to me. I loved that this was not only the biggest union within the AFL-CIO, they had a very strong international component. And I thought, you know what? If I don't go into government, I can go to AFL-CIO headquarters in their international division and help to develop unions overseas, especially in Africa. That would be interesting for me. So I go to grad school and I'm acing it. In my second year of grad school, I took a class that changed the course of the rest of my life. I took a class called The Psychology of Leadership and it was taught by an eminent

psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Gerald Post. Jerry had a PhD in political science, a PhD in psychology and an MD. The reason why this class was so interesting to me, and I'll give you an example that I frequently use. In one of the lectures, he asked us, who knows about the Yalta conference at the end of World War II? Everybody raises his hand. Now, why was that conference at Yalta? Why wasn't it in Cairo or Washington? It was in Yalta because there was a KGB penetration of the Roosevelt administration. And the penetration, the spy, told Stalin, Roosevelt is sick. He may be sick enough that he doesn't survive the trip to Yalta. So Stalin insisted that the conference be in Yalta. As a result, Roosevelt had to go all the way around the war to get to Yalta.

I've researched this. I can imagine the President of the United States has to get on a train from Washington to Norfolk, Virginia. He gets on a ship in Norfolk. The ship takes weeks to get to Malta. From Malta, he gets on a troop transport plane to Iran, and then from Iran flies to Yalta. It took weeks and he was exhausted when he arrived. Roosevelt at that time was suffering from multiple physical ailments.

He had polio, which had paralyzed him from the waist down. He had hypertension and cardiovascular disease. He also had anemia, chronic bronchitis, and possibly even an essential tremor. Ironically, after the Yalta conference, all three leaders there, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin would go on to have strokes. So diseased and travel-weary Roosevelt arrived in Yalta. He was so tired that all he wanted to do was go to bed, but Stalin insisted that the meetings begin immediately. And so just to go to bed, he gave up Poland.

That was so fascinating to me that something as simple as being tired and wanting to go to bed resulted in Poland falling behind the iron curtain. And a big reason why that happened was, because of the information and human insights that Stalin's spies provided to him. I was hooked. Partway through the class, Dr. Post gives us an assignment for a paper, and he tells us, I want you to shadow your bosses for a week and then write a psychological profile of your bosses. Now, I was the only person in the legislative affairs program who did not work for a member of Congress.

Everybody in the class, almost everybody worked for a house member. One guy worked for a senator from Tennessee, and I was the only one that wasn't on Capitol Hill. To tell you the truth, I was a little bit afraid of my boss at the UFCW. He was a mean, angry, old-school union organizer. He had had his back broken by scabs during a strike. He used to wear this absolutely grisly harness just to keep his body from breaking again. And he was just a mean guy. Halfway through the week, we had an argument.

and it got ugly, and I called him a racist, which he was. He hated black people, which I never understood. Half the labor movement is black people. I called him a racist. He got so angry that he bawled up his fists and he set a stance. And I put up my hands, because I thought to myself, and I remember this very clearly, I thought, oh, man, you went too far this time. I put up my hands to shield myself from the blow.

His face getting red. He says, my penis is bigger than yours. And I said, what? And he goes, my penis is bigger than yours. And I said, you know what? You're nuts. And I quit. And I walked out. And I went back to my apartment, started banging out this paper. Now, remember, we've been learning psychology through this whole class. It's not just John told this story and wrote the paper. It's dozens of footnotes. And I'm citing famed psychological studies. And I concluded that he was a sociopath with psychopathic and likely violent tendencies. I submit the paper. A week later, I get it back. I got an A. And in the margin, Dr. Post wrote, please see me after class. So I go up to him after class. I said, Dr. Post, you wanted to see me. He said, come to my office. Now the class was on like the sixth floor. And his office, you know how little teeny tiny academic offices was on the second floor. So I go down there and he says, close the door. So I close the door. And he says, look, I'm not really a professor here. I'm a CIA officer. undercover as a professor here. And I'm looking for people who might fit into the CIA's culture. I think you would fit into the CIA's culture. Would you like to be a CIA officer?

As I hope you heard in this first episode of Dead Drop, though I've told my story many, many times before, this telling of it will go far, far deeper. The word I have in my head is granular. That's one of the other great things about podcasts. There are just so much. many. In Dead Drop, I'll be able to take you as completely inside a spy's mind as you want. That's yet another great thing about telling my story via this podcast. Spying is about relationships. So is podcasting. There really is no one between you and me, me telling my story and you listening to it. And if you want to tell me how you felt about what you just heard, well, you can tell me directly via a comment. And you better believe I'll read it. I'm a spy.

after all. I always want to get my stories right. We'll also sprinkle in some interviews and surprises, and we're going to ask an interesting question about the business I don't think anyone's ever asked before. Did former spy and author John LaCarray invent the modern spy? We hope you enjoy Dead Drop and become a regular listener. Hey, now that you know where the Dropbox is, you might as well take advantage. Who knows what secrets you'll learn. Till next time, I'm John Kyriaku. Dead Drop is written by John Curiaku and Alan Katz. Costor and Touchstone Productions produced the podcast, and John Kyriaku, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are the executive producers.

This podcast, it's a Costod and Touchstone production. Looking back at my family's story and how it produced me, maybe it's not that shocking that spying and I found each other. Tap a vein in my family and you're just as likely to get an interesting story as you are to get blood. First and foremost, the Ottoman government was tolerant of non-Muslims so long as they paid their taxes. You had to pay a tax to the Ottomans if you weren't Muslim, but still wanted to live in the empire. Though tolerant, the Ottomans were harsh nonetheless on the Greeks under their rule. Lucky us.

Before I leave home entirely, in high school, I was a good student. History and current events were my forte. That's probably why I got into debating. I saw that I had a real facility for it, but while it was important to be able to win a debate on the merits of my argument, there was something even more fundamental that I liked about debating. Another thing you should know about me is that I'm a polyglot. I have a facility with foreign languages. Ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The languages and the history and the politics I ended up studying, my whole career path sprang from one particular moment.

Roosevelt at that time was suffering from multiple physical ailments. He had polio, which had paralyzed him from the waist down. He had hypertension and cardiovascular disease. He also had anemia, chronic bronchitis, and possibly even an essential tremor. Ironically, after the Yalta conference, all three leaders there, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin would go on to have strokes. So, diseased and travel-werey, Roosevelt arrived in Yalta. And a big reason why that happened was because of the information and human insights that Stalin's spies provided to him.