John Kiriakou's Dead Drop - S1E22 The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Episode Date: April 6, 2026

THE BLURB: John finds that working in the private sector (doing corporate intel at Deloitte and Touche) for big money, perks and benefits has its advantages over working a lot more for a lot less at the agency. Then one day - when everything's going gangbusters for John, he gets a call from Brian Ross at ABC News. And everything changes. But, how did Ross find John? And why was the news media so slow to take up and believe the torture story? By the time reporters like Ross found their way to John, they were in a feeding frenzy. In this episode, we'll tell you why that happened and how it contributed to what happened to John. 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. I'll tell you a funny thing about Deloitte. My very first day at Deloitte, after the Chicago conference, which lasted a week, got to meet everybody, genuinely liked everybody, still in touch with most of them. And I went back to my new office in Tyson's Corner, Virginia, which is McLean, Virginia, where the CIA is located. Nicest office I ever had in my life. Beautiful view of the Virginia countryside, reserved parking space.

I was making exactly double what I had been making at the agency. Life is good. My very first day, the big boss calls the partner, I should add, I was hired at what was called the senior manager level, so I was just one promotion away from partner principal. Partners have accounting degrees, their CPAs. Principles are partners, but who don't have their CPA. So I was just one promotion away from the principal level. So he says, hey, we just got a tip that such and such happened.

and get out there people and talk to your sources. Well, that just meant picking up the phone and calling all the people, you know. I didn't know anybody because this was my first day on the job. I started hearing ping, ping, ping, as everybody's writing these intelligence reports and sending them around everybody. Wow, this is actually really cool. People are calling all their sources.

They're getting answers to these important questions. It's going to allow Deloitte to make whatever decision they need to make for revenue enhancement or new clients or whatever. this is going to be fun. But there are a couple of things I'd like to do my way. First of all, there was no standardized way to interview new hires. I said to the partner, do you mind if I go talk to HR, like global HR on my own? No, knock yourself out.

So I went to HR, New York, I think it was. I said it would be immensely helpful if I could get a spreadsheet of everybody that Deloitte hires everywhere in the world, every month. month. This is a major global company. There were some months where we would hire 25,000 people in a month. Now, in that industry, there's huge turnover too. So what I would do, she would send it to me, this HR contact I had. She would send me the list. I would pair it down to everybody, no matter where they were hired, everybody who was doing work in the United States, but who had come from one of our direct competitors and who was at the senior manager, partner, or principal level.

That usually got it down to between five and 20 people in each one of our national regions. We had six national regions. And the partner's like, why in the world did I never think of that? I said, the intelligence is fresh, it's current. And even if they have non-disclosure agreements, we can just dance around those. If there's a non-disclosure agreement, we'll just skip those questions. So I then wrote up a standard interview sheet. It wasn't a sheet.

It was like 15 pages where we were all asking exactly the same questions. And then once you ask all these questions, you just write your intelligence report. There are six of us doing these every month. My first full month I produced, I still remember this, 36 intelligence reports. All six of us combined produced 45 intelligence reports. Of the 45, my five colleagues wrote nine. I wrote all the rest. The partner calls me and he says, buddy, I appreciate your excitement about the job.

But you got to slow down. You're making everybody look bad. And I said, I said, nobody has ever said that to me in my life. Listen, you work, what, nine, ten hours? I said, no. Honestly, all my life, all my adult life I've had trouble sleeping. I'll get up in the middle of the night and just log on and write something. Which I still do to this day.

I'll get up in the middle of the night. I think, well, I can lay here in bed staring at the ceiling, or I can go downstairs and write an op-bed and make $500. So I go downstairs and I write the op-bed. So he said, okay, how about this? You take a two-hour lunch instead of a one-hour lunch. Go to the gym or something. I said, okay, if that's what you want me to do.

But I'm a very quick writer. I would get my list from HR. I would pare it all down. I'd send all my colleagues there people for the month. I would bang mine out as fast as I could. Well, now what do I do? I've written 20 of these. Everybody else has written three each, and I have to slow down.

So what should I do? He said to me, how about this? We'll send you on like a special assignment. We want you to get the inside scoop from all of our nine competitors as to what special perks they offer partners from other firms that they're trying to recruit. It's like, okay, that's a little tougher. I'm going to have to actually recruit somebody on the inside of each one of these companies. It's going to take a little time. But I did it.

Everybody wants to talk about himself or herself. What I did is I joined the Rotary, for example. Because all these partners, there's a rotary right there in the center of Tyson's corner and they're all sitting together and laughing and throwing in $1 bills for charity and having breakfast once a week. And they just talk and talk and talk. I would excuse myself to go to the men's room and I would jot down notes as to what they were talking about and write intelligence reports.

This was the perfect job for me. I'm John Kiriaki. Welcome to Dead Drop. What makes a spy tick? Before we get back to the good, the bad, the ugly, that's what we're calling this episode. Some good. Well, some thank you's anyway. Thank you.

That's for helping this little podcast of ours attract the kind of attention that it's getting. Your likes, shares, kind reviews, and comments, just you listening to the podcast, have helped it grow exponentially. Whatever it is we thought this podcast was going to be when we started making it, it's become and be. becoming so much more. And that really is all because of you. So thank you again from the absolute bottom of our storyteller hearts. We appreciate it more than you know. Since we're rolling in the good, let's stay there for a little while longer. Deloitte had me do two things that were really, really fun. They told me one day, listen, we want you to go to Hyderabad India for six weeks. And we want you to identify a couple of open source intelligence companies that we might be interested in purchasing.

And I said, cool. I get in the plane, fly to Hyderabad India. They had hired a driver for me. They gave me an office in the Deloitte offices in Hyderabad, and I started collecting. There were six open source intelligence companies doing business there at the time. I narrowed it down to two. And I said, I would recommend that the firm purchase, India Tiger analysis. I said everybody's highly educated. And where in D.C., we're charging out our time at an average of $1,000 an hour, we're going to pay the Indians $5 an hour, and we can still charge out the time at $1,000.

It may need a little bit of editing because maybe their English isn't as good as ours, but, I mean, this is a serious revenue boost. They bought the firm. They paid something like $50 million for it. And they bought it just based on my recommendation. And then something happened that was literally the most fun I ever had outside the CIA. I had a source to call me. He was a new partner.

He and I just hit it off. He was fascinated that I was from the CIA. And then even more fascinated that all of my colleagues were from the CIA. So he had come from a firm called KPMG consulting that had later changed its name to Bering Point. He called me and he said, something's up at Bering Point. Like what? And he said, I don't know, but it's big. They sent an email to every partner around the world and said, mandatory global partners meeting at the convention center in Orlando, Florida, next week, be there. I said, what do you think it could be? He said, honest to God, I have no idea. So I told my partner, he said, pick somebody, anybody, and get down to Orlando. convention centers attached to two hotels.

There's one hotel on each side, the Ritz-Carlton, and they took every room in the Ritz-Carlton, and the Marriott on the other side. So my colleague and I, a young, new hire woman, she and I were on the Marriott side. She was the least experienced out of all of us, which was good in a way, because I could sort of mold her as to how things like this are done. And it was bad in that she took risks that were utterly unaccept. And I'll tell you about that in a second. I had to go to New York first to meet with the general council of Deloitte.

And he said, here are the rules, the laws that you have to operate under. You can walk into their meetings so long as the door stays open. If the door is closed, that's a private meeting and you have to leave. I flew down there. The first thing I did was I went to Radio Shack. You remember Radio Shack. They would sell radios and phones and batteries and games. gadgets and this and that. I bought an earpiece with one of those curly queue wires attached to it,

and I put it in my ear and I ran it down my shirt, but it wasn't attached to anything. So it looked like I was security or secret service. On the first day of this conference, they're all in the giant ballroom of the convention center. And I'm standing in the very back with this earpiece hanging out of my ear. If you put 600 people in a room, it gets hot in there. It gets hot in there. So they left all the doors open. Okay, this is a public meeting. Well, I also bought one of those little pocket recorders, little digital recorders, and I recorded everything. The CEO of the company gets up. He says, people, we're going bankrupt and we have to sell the company. We can't keep this up. Well, as it so happened, they had the biggest federal practice of any one of the big four

or the little eight consulting firms. Deloitte, as it so happened, had the smallest federal practice of any of them. So Deloitte would be very interested in purchasing Bering Point. Everybody's like, oh my God, what are we going to do? We're all going to lose our jobs. Oh, this is a catastrophe. Then they take a break. I run into the men's room. I go into a stall and close the door, and I sit down on the toilet seat, and I just hold my recorder up. All these guys, guys come in, they're all standing at the urinals saying, this is bullshit. I just booked a $150 million deal with the Department of Agriculture, blah, blah, blah, just spilling their guts in there. Every hour or two, I would call the general counsel and say, what do I do? What can I do? What should I not do?

And I'm on the phone constantly with the analysts. We had this analytic team. I would give the recorder to this young woman that I was with, she would run to FedEx Kinko's, which is now FedEx office, and she would fax, because we couldn't attach to emails back then, she would fax all of it back to the analysts. That night, I see the CEO, the C-O, and the CFO of Bering Point go into a breakout room. So I call New York, and I told them. They were like, oh my God, is the door closed, I said the door's closed, so I can't go in, but it's just the three of them in there. They said, don't leave the door. So I stood there for three hours. And then at seven o'clock that evening, they came out. They left the door open and they had left all their papers on the

table. So I called New York again. I said, they walked out of the room and they left all their shit on the table. And they were like, oh my God, don't look at it. Don't look at it. I said, I haven't looked at it. I called you first. They said, if they don't come back in two hours, it's considered abandoned and you can take it. I'm just standing there in front of this open door. This cleaning lady comes up.

Por favor, por favor, no. Come later, later. And I chase her away. Finally, two hours pass, they never come back. I go in there. It was the crown jewels of the company. They're a complete client list. They had like 115 client.

all of their revenue projections for the next two or three years. It was their discount formula. And one funny thing was the CEO wrote a little note on the top of one page to the C.O. And said, how much of a Christmas bonus are you giving your secretary this year? And then the COO wrote back, 5,000. She was a bitch to me. I took everything. I went immediately to FedEx Kinko's. It cost me $700 to fax it all back. One of the analysts called me and he said, I feel like crying having read it.

My boss said, come home. You hit a home run. When you're at the agency and you blow the doors off in operation, by God, you're going to get an exceptional performance award and a $500 bonus and Uncle Sam is very proud of you. They gave me a $25,000 bonus and a $25,000. raise. This is the best job I have ever had. This young woman, though, she would do things like after we had gotten all this. We can't leave until the next day. So she says, let's just go sit in the

bar and see if we can pull additional information out of people. We're sitting at the bar. She and I together. And there's this morbidly obese Bering Point partner sitting by himself at a table. They're all wearing Bering Point badges. She and I didn't have a bet. So she says, what's your badge say? point. Oh, are you a partner there? Yeah. And she said, there are so many of you must be something important. Oh, yeah, it's really important. It's about the future of the company. She says, I would love to hear more about that. Maybe in your room over dinner. I said, stop. What are you doing? Stop. And he was like, that sounds like a plan. And I said, don't you dare. Afterwards, I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? Well, he would have given me everything. And I said,

said you're not safe in a situation like that. So I wouldn't let her go. Afterward, she's like, John would let me go. And my boss is like, what? Are you crazy? He says to her. But anyway, gigantic success. Then my boss says, is there something we can do for you? You're just beating the pants off of everybody in terms of production. You want to do something fun? I said, actually, yeah. There's a PhD program at Harvard Business School in corporate leadership. And I would like to get my Ph.D. in corporate leadership. He says, done. I apply to Harvard Business School. Lo and behold, I get in. I can't believe how my life is changing. I'm going to get a PhD from Harvard Business School. And then I get a phone call from my doc. Hey, you haven't been in here in two years,

and I am not renewing your blood pressure medication until you come in and get a physical and take the blood work. I go in there. He draws blood. I will admit. that I was very active while at the agency because you're on the run constantly. And I preferred foot surveillance detection routes rather than car surveillance detection routes because it was easier to spot somebody. And at the same time, I was getting a ton of exercise. I gained 50 pounds at Deloitte. The business lunches did me in. And then there's so much domestic travel. I covered everything from Philadelphia to Miami. I was traveling constantly, eating in steakhouses every night with partners and drinking expensive wine and just gorging myself if it was

sickening. The doctor calls me on Christmas Eve. I was shocked when I saw that it was him calling. Hey doc, what's up? You're going to have a heart attack any minute now. You've got arterial blockage. You've got high cholesterol, high triglycerides, high blood pressure. And buddy, you've got diabetes and you've probably been diabetic for two years. I decided to take my health more seriously. I withdrew from Harvard and I decided to go on a doctor-supervised diet and in the next nine months I lost 77 pounds just by sheer willpower. It was when I was at my thinest, my happiest, and my most successful that I got a call one day from Brian Ross of ABC News. 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 Custard 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. That call would end up changing the course of my life. But before we get to it, let's talk about why they called me, how they found me, and why, at the very least, I had to say something. It's important to revisit the journalistic environment in which all this happened. One might assume, looking back from today's perspective, that the whole idea of Americans willfully committing torturous policy would cause outrage in the press.

There was outrage, but only smatterings of it. Though the CIA had concocted a legal argument that allowed it to torture Zane and the other prisoners it tortured, still, it knew that what it was doing wouldn't sell to the American public or to the American voter, or for that matter, to the rest of the world. Though the CIA did everything to keep their enhanced interrogations a secret, the secret got out nonetheless. We captured Abu Zabeda in March of 2002, and we rendered him to a place called Site Green, where we waterboarded him 83 times.

In December 2002, the CIA closed Site Green and rendered its two most valuable prisoners, Abu Zabeda and Abdahim Anashti to cite blue. That was reported in the media to have been in Poland. The closure and renditions were caused by word leaking out that site green existed and that terrible things were happening there. In How American Journalism Covered Torture After 9-11, which was published on August 8, 2022 in the Columbia Journalism Review, the author, Eric Umanski wrote, quote, coverage of the brutal practice was played down in print and on airwaves, unquote. As early as December 2002, the New York Times Carlotta Gaul began asking questions after detainees began dying without any explanation at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. But Gaul's tenacious reporting sat for more than a month, finally appearing two weeks

before the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. Umansky describes the battle in. the New York Times. Despite the quality and caliber of Gall's reporting, Howell Raines, then the Times top editor, quote, insisted that it was improbable, unquote. And yet, when the Times finally published Gall's story, it ran on page 14, under the headline, U.S. military investigating death of Afghan in custody. In his piece, Umansky quotes Gaul, who's British, as chalking up the delay to, quote,

a reluctance to believe bad things of Americans, unquote. And, quote, there was a sense of patriotism, unquote. Even the newsrooms could still smell the debris from 9-11. Still, as the CIA's secret slowly got revealed, it posed problems, like to the government of Thailand. They had agreed to turn a blind eye, but once the site was outed, the Thai government insisted that they knew nothing.

So began a kind of shell game. The CIA moved to Abu Zabeda, Abderihim Anashti and other high-value detainees from black site to black site to black site depending on who knew what. In January 2002, President George W. Bush approved the creation of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Soon enough, Gipmo would become famous all by itself. Gull's reporting opened a door that a few intrepid reporters, like the New Yorkers Seymour Hersh, and the Washington Post's Dana Priest and Barton Gellman tried to open a little further. It wasn't until January 2004 when Sergeant Joseph Darby, a U.S. Army reservist, gave two CD-ROMs of photos to Special Agent Tyler Pyrin of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command that the story of American torture began to not merely leak, but to surge out.

Apparently, seeing torture is far harder to doubt or to dismiss than merely hearing about torture. When CBS News got a hold of some of the photographs and published them, well, it was then that the shit finally hit the fan. The agency had an even bigger problem, however, they had been pointing a video camera at Zane since his arrival, and they had recorded more than 90 videos of Abu Zabedha's various interrogations and two of detainee Abdahim Anashidis. Among the 92 videos, 12 depicted enhanced interrogation techniques. The agency's lawyers feared that the videos could be viewed, pun intended, as evidence of torture. Of course it was. It was criminal behavior. Two camps formed. One wanted to destroy the tapes, like they were evidence of a crime. The other camp feared

that destroying the tapes would be yet another crime perpetrated on top of the first crime, which, of course, it was. Spoiler alert, the first group won. Gina Haspel, who later became CIA director during President Trump's first term, oversaw the project to destroy the tapes. She had a bit more skin in the game than most people, having been the commandant at Sight Green. The tapes were destroyed. They were actually ground up in an industrial grinder, but an awareness of their existence had come into being. Now the question became what was on the tapes that the CIA felt so compelled to destroy, to cover up. Then bits and pieces of the CIA's torture memos, its tortured arguments justifying and legalizing torture started to surface. And the news media's feeding frenzy

intensified. They'd gone from doubting the story to pursuing it relentlessly. As the CIA had been entirely closed about the subject, other than to deny that America ever did such a thing, and as they destroyed evidence, which would have clarified who exactly did what to whom, members of the press did what they could, to fill in the most obvious blanks. At some point, my name came up in their investigations. It was one of the few that they had, and so they made several assumptions. In December 2007, my life was really going great. I loved my job. My second marriage was happy. I was able to see my kids. I had stopped following news about Al Qaeda after I left the CIA. And really, to a larger degree, I had stopped thinking about it altogether. Then I got a call at the office

from Brian Ross, a senior investigative journalist at ABC News. I felt a slight rush of apprehension, really when I took that call. Brian was polite, professional, and direct. He said that he had a source who told him that I had tortured Abu Zubeda. In the next episode of Dead Drop, what makes a spy tick? We'll talk about what happened next. To say things we're about to get out of control, well, that's an understatement. If you enjoy the podcast and we sure hope you do, please remember to like, share, comment on, and review us. It really helps. And if you want to hear more for me, please check out my other podcasts. There's Deep Program that I do with Ted Raw that drops Monday to Friday at 9 a.m. Eastern

time on both YouTube and Rumble. And there's also deep focus that drops about twice a week on YouTube. Until next time, thanks for listening. I'm John Kirooku. Dead Drop is written by John Kirooku and Alan Katz. Costard and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kriaku, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are a... executive producers.

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