John Kiriakou's Dead Drop - S1E6 A Failure Of Analysis

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

THE BLURB: When his assignment to Bahrain ends, John finds himself back at CIA HQ in Langley, settling in to life as an analyst - a bored drone at a boring desk. It doesn't take long for John to hanker instead for something more satisfying: something in operations - out in the field. Something a little more dangerous... SHOW 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 Costa and Touchstone production. I'm John Kariaki. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick. In this episode, we're going to continue the story of what makes this spy tick. But before we get there, I want to, as usual, say thank you, a heartfelt thank you, and ask you to do us the kindness of commenting on, reviewing, subscribing to, following, and or liking the podcast on whatever platform you're listening to it. It really does help us.

reach a bigger audience. Our story so far, having been recruited into the CIA by a CIA legend, I am more or less golden-boyed through the early stages of my CIA career. Not a bad way to start. The good news, I became the agency's go-to guy for anything and everything on the subject of Bahrain. The bad news, that threatened to hamstring me by tying me down to a Middle Eastern backwater. Fortunately for me, though, that backwater was right next to Saudi Arabia where terrorists blew up the Kobar Towers that killed some of the U.S. military personnel who were housed there and wounded a lot more. After some time spent back at headquarters in Langley and with my marriage beginning to unravel, I longed for another foreign posting. When I left Bahrain, I was excited to get back home, see my family, I had a newborn son, my other son was three. I missed them terribly.

I wasn't exactly sure what I was going back to. I expected to go back to Langley and work on Iraq. Nobody had made that promise to me, but it just seemed the logical thing to do. The Cobar Tower bombing took place on June 25th and I went back on August 1st, 1996. My work at the bomb site lasted the day after the bombing and that was it. The Saudis were in control. The FBI was really the liaison organization on the ground because this was a crime against Americans.

NCIS was involved. I literally got in the car and drove back to Bahrain and just resumed my normal life. There was nothing else for me to do. I was still State Department at the time and so there was nothing that was expected of me. I went back. It was the summer so things were slow. I wound things down, I packed up everything in my house for the movers, and I just bided my five weeks until it was time to get on the plane and go home. Going home was kind of a funny experience

for a couple of reasons. First of all, I was a big fish in a small pond in Bahrain. I liked being known by His Majesty and hanging out with a crown prince and half of the male members of the royal family. It was fun. It was heady. It was the little things too. For example, the royal family liked me so much that the prince who was in charge of security at the Bahrain International Airport gave me a staff badge so that I could just walk right through security. And when my dad and brother came to visit, and when my wife and son came back from vacation the previous summer, I just did. I just held up my badge and I walked out onto the tarmac and met them on the tarmac. So it's the little things. It's fun to be important in a little place.

There were no direct flights on American carriers back then and there's a law in the United States called the Fly America Act. So you have to go as long a distance as you can go on an American carrier before you can switch to or from a foreign carrier. And so there were no American carriers that flew to the Middle East back then. There was this new invention, the Airbus A360 or 40 or whatever it was, that Gulf Faire operated. And so it came to an agreement with American Airlines. So that 60 seats on the plane were technically American Airlines ticketed seats and the rest were

Gulf Air. So I bought a ticket on Gulf Air, but through American Airlines and I was able to fly from Bahrain to JFK. It was long. It's a 15-hour flight. But I did that. I always loved golf air. It's not as good as it used to be, but it was really great. It was comfortable and reliable and friendly. I'm flying in the back because I'm State Department.

I'm not flying business class like a CIA officer would. Usually CIA officers travel business class if the flight is seven hours or longer. So you can't take a domestic flight and fly business. You can't fly to Mexico City or to Havana and fly business. But on these long halls, you have a choice. You can either fly business class or you can take a day off when you arrive at your destination. Nobody takes the day off. They all fly business class. And so I'm on the plane, I'm in the back. I remember being like in a middle seat in the middle section of the plane, and there was an announcement over the PA system.

They were asking if there was anybody on the plane that spoke Greek. So I ring my buzzer and I said, yeah, I speak Greek. And they said, oh my gosh, great. Great. What a coincidence. We have a passenger who speaks Greek but doesn't speak any English and they don't know how to fill out the landing card. And I said, yeah, no problem. I can do that for them. So I went up and I said, you know, hi, I'm John Kiriaku from the State Department. I speak Greek. I'm a Greek American. I'm happy to fill out your landing card. So I filled out the landing card. And I went back to my seat and sat down. And about 15 minutes later, there's this other announcement. Is there anybody on the flight that speaks Arabic? And I thought, come on. So I rang my buzzer again.

And the flight attendant comes up. She says, seriously? And I said, actually, yeah, seriously. I speak Arabic too. And she said, there's a family from Yemen. Can you help them with their landing card? I said, of course. So I go up to this family from Yemen.

And it wasn't really a family family. It was two women, completely veiled, and three young children. And they gave me American passports. And the passports had American visas in them. That's not possible. If you have an American passport, you don't need an American visa to go to America. So I'm looking at the passports.

And mind you, I had the 10-week State Department consular class. And I'm thinking, well, these passports are fake. And these people were so worried that they would be turned away that they thought, oh, we'll go one better than just a fake U.S. passport. We'll put fake U.S. visas in it, too. I said to the flight attendant, listen, I showed her my diplomatic passport. I said, I'm a State Department officer, and I'm consular certified. And these passports are fake.

And she's like, oh, my God, okay, I'll tell the pilot. Pilot radios ahead and says, these people have fake passports, so be ready when we land to grab them. And they did. And the flight attendant came back up to me, and she said, oh, you've been so helpful. She gave me $100 worth of vouchers to use at Kennedy Airport. I think I spent 20 bucks on dinner and just handed the rest out. But I remember thinking to myself at the time, it's not going to be fun like this anymore. In Bahrain, you know, you're the go-to guy.

You're the guy that everybody needs to talk to. You're the guy who has the answers. And now I'm going to be one of many thousands at CIA headquarters again. Just another drone in another cubicle. So I got back to headquarters. I didn't go right away, of course. I was entitled to take six weeks of home leave. That way you can find a place to live.

And I was moving back into the house that Joanne and I had rented out to some tenants. So my father-in-law and I went to the house. We painted everything, all the walls, painted the ceilings, got everything back in order, shampooed the carpet, bought a car. I didn't have a car. And that took the whole six weeks. And then I went back to headquarters. Again, assuming that I was going to go work on Iraq,

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

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

It's a great place to just get your footing. She did that for about six months. And then there was a little skirmish in the Persian Gulf one day between the United Arab Emirates and Iran. Over two uninhabited islands called Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunb. T-U-N-B, it's hard to pronounce. The Greater and Lesser Tune-Ilands were owned by the United Arab Emirates. There is nothing on the Tuneba Islands but sand.

just sand. Iran sent a couple of boats and they put five or six guys on each island and put an Iranian flag and said, now these are ours. Well, it's not worth going to war over two uninhabited islands that are the size of a city block. I think the Iranians did this for a couple of reasons.

They did it to be provocative and they did it to protest the closeness of the UAE's relationship with the United States with the idea, we're going to take these islands. What are you going to do about? it, probably nothing. The intentions behind this, I'm going to call it occupation of these two islands, was not meaningless. In the greater scheme of regional power conflict, sure, it meant something. The practicality, though, was not terribly important. So we went into the morning

meeting like we did every day at 9 o'clock and she was very excited. This was a big deal. She was going to get to write something for the president's daily brief for the very first time. And we went back to our seats after the meeting and we sat directly across from each other. And I said, the UAE's not going to do anything for these islands. They're just going to let them go. She said, really? Why do you say that? And I said, because the islands are actually owned by the Emirate of Sharjah.

Dubai has such important trade relations with Iran. 70% of their trade was with Iran. And Abu Dhabi doesn't care. it's rich from oil, Sharjah doesn't have anything, but maybe a couple of Middle Eastern banks. And if they're not going to have the support of Abu Dhabi or Dubai, Emirates, they're not going to be able to fight the Iranians over this. So the Iranians are going to keep these islands, and the Emirates are just going to walk away. She submitted a 36-word analysis that we called a snowflake for the president's daily brief, which ran the next day. On the last page of the PDV, we had a page of

well, what we called snowflakes. So a snowflake is something that is important enough for the president to know about, but not important enough for him to spend more than 30 seconds reading about. So a snowflake was not permitted to be more than 36 words, and it had to be three separate thoughts separated by ellipses. Dot, dot, dot. A snowflake would read something like this. Iran occupied two islands owned by UAE yesterday.

dot, dot, dot, islands owned by Sharja, comma, which is unlikely to be able to defend them, dot, dot, dot, dot. No help expected from Dubai or Abu Dhabi. You've conveyed the entire story. And the president is not going to read a page or two or ten about the greater and lesser Tundb islands. So she submitted it. It was accepted by the PDB staff and it was included in the president's book for the next day.

But that afternoon, she came back out of our boss's office and said, sat down and she looked at me and she said, I just resigned. I said, what? Are you crazy? What happened? And she said, when you told me that Sharjah owns the Tund and you explained why the Iranians would not be forced to give up the Tums, I realized that I will never know the Middle East as well as you do. And so I resigned. And I'm going to sell real estate with my brother. And I said, please don't make such a rash decision. I didn't know anything about this stuff when I first started. I mean, I did. I had a degree in Middle Eastern studies, but I didn't tell her that. I said, please, I said, you're so bright and you have such a bright future. You just got here. You just started this a couple of months ago.

And she said, no, it's not for me. And that was it. That was her two-week notice. She was a very free-spirited young lady. I really liked her. I really enjoyed sitting next to her. And over the years we've stayed in sporadic touch. She lived in Vermont for a while, where she actually did sell real estate with her brother, and then she got married and moved to Florida. She just realized on the Directorate of Intelligence side, it's 30 years of sitting in your cubicle and thinking the big thought. And that's just not rewarding for a lot of people. So she was going to nip it in the bud and get out early. He didn't have the desire to learn it. That's exactly what it was. There's more to life than driving to CIA headquarters every day and sitting in your cubicle year after year after year, there's got to be more.

To tell you the truth, that's why I ended up switching to the Directorate of Operations later on in my career, and not too much later on. I'm David Swanson, and I invite you to check out my new podcast, Just the Photographer, about the 40 years I've spent as a photojournalist shooting everything from war zones to natural disasters to work. red carpets and everything in between. While my photos can tell you what it look like standing in those dangerous places, taking news photos, they can't tell you what it felt like. That's what this podcast is here to do. Here are some clips from the first episode to give you a taste. I wish I could unsee some of the terrible things I've seen. The very worst things that human beings can do to each other. In 1992, Bosnia was going on, and I thought that would be the first time I'd attempt a war. I can't remember which book it was,

but there was a quote that war is a crucible of emotion, the best and the worst. If you're going to be a photographer, a photojournalist, why would you not want to go to a place like that? I was on that bridge the next day. I can honestly say that was one of the most nerve-wracking times of my life. Tracer bullets, which I think are every third or fourth shot, so that means there were four times as many bullets in the air,

started flying left and right. A guy named Deuce, but his real name is Charles, laid on my back, on my backpack, and used my backpack as a platform for his weapon. So they told me, you have to leave. We have a big screwdriver. And he said, I'm going to put that screwdriver in your chest. As dangerous as it was,

Mutaz and I laughed our heads off. There's a certain romance to it. For me, making art requires duress, and I don't know why. Or maybe I do know, and this podcast is my way of figuring it out. Either way, I hope you'll join me on this journey as I tell you what it was like standing in dangerous places and witnessing them with my camera. New episodes start dropping Fridays, starting August 1st. Subscribe to stay in the loop.

That's just the photographer with David Swanson. Stories my photos can't tell you. After nine months of Bahrain, I went back to the boss. I had the same ants in my pants. It had been nine months, and I went back into the boss's office, and I said, Bruce, you told me six to nine months, it's been nine months. I want to go back on Iraq again. And he said to me, and I'm still angry about this, 30 years later,

he said, you know, you're getting a reputation as something of a job jumper. I said, job jumper, you forced me to take this job as a favor to you because you couldn't fill it. And now what? You want me to stay here another two, three years? What? All right, all right.

You can work Iraq. But don't think I'm going to forget this. I'm like, okay, whatever. So I transferred on to Iraq. And not only did I transfer onto Iraq as a political analyst. Remember, I had been the leadership slash psychology analyst,

but there were already five Iraq political analysts. And so they carved out little niche for me that was Iraqi foreign policy. I was the analyst only for Iraqi foreign policy, their foreign policy toward the rest of the world. So I'm reading the cable traffic, which from a foreign policy perspective was mostly press. The Iraqi vice president is going to China. Okay, The Iraqi deputy foreign minister had talks with the Irish ambassador, and they discussed issues of mutual concern, which is a very Arab thing to say in their newspapers. The Iraqis sent a letter to the king of Saudi Arabia offering to clear the air, which is another Arab phrase that you see commonly in the media. And I thought, this is not going to work out for me.

But I was a good soldier. I did my thing. I got promoted, actually. By then, GS-13. GS-13 is high journeyman analyst. So I'm solidly mid-career, moving up quickly. But now that I'm a GS-13, I'm going to be expected to do more sophisticated analysis, which I was fully prepared to do.

Remember, I was writing such deep analyses on Bahrain. I got a medal from the State Department. The Iraqi Vice President goes to China. From what you can glean from the Chinese press, What did they talk about? But more importantly, what does it mean if what they talked about actually comes to fruition? What does it mean for United Nations sanctions? What does it mean for Russia, which at the time was very competitive with China?

What's it mean for India, which was even more competitive with China? Most importantly, what does it mean for the United States? China is a member of the Security Council, the United Nations. So what happens if all of a sudden the Chinese say, you know what, these Iraqis, they aren't so bad as we thought they were. And we're going to veto the next United Nations Security Council Resolution on sanctions. Well, I volunteered for a couple of things that nobody else wanted to do. I volunteered to go back to the State Department as the Iraq desk officer.

And as the Iraq desk officer, I actually wrote the United Nations Security Council Resolution on Sanct. The original one was called UN Security Council Resolution 986. That was the famous one. Well, it had to be renewed in 1996. When I wrote it, it became UN Security Council Resolution 1096. Then it was up to our people at the UN to convince the Russians and the Chinese to keep their hands off. UN Security Council Resolution 1096 banned almost all of the countries in the world from exporting to Iraq. But it set up a system that would be based in Jordan where if they wanted to buy food, no problem.

The food will be sent to Jordan, giant warehouse there that we built. and then it can be trucked to Iraq. Medical supplies, no problem. Send it to Jordan, and then it's trucked to Iraq. But if you want fiber optic cable, well, no, because missile systems use fiber optic cable. They came to us and they said, we need these giant seamless tubes

because we want to lay new sewers in the Baghdad sewer system. And we're like, no, you don't need seamless tubes, which you can also use in a nuclear program for heavy water. you can have plastic tubes like everybody else had. That kind of thing. Back at the State Department, I was working with another officer by the name of David Bame. I liked Dave a lot. I think he became an ambassador.

He worked so hard. The hours were ridiculous. I would get there around nine. And oftentimes I wouldn't leave until midnight. And by then the subway system had closed. And I had nobody to get home. And I lived 25 miles outside of Washington. There was one night that I said to Dave,

If I'm going to catch the last train out, I got to get out of here. And I left at like 1130. He worked into the night and then fainted from work. And the cleaning lady found him on the floor and had to call 911. This is how dedicated some of these State Department people were. But the thing is, we had, you know, 60 people at the CIA working on Iraq. They had four at the State Department, expected to keep up. I did that for about six weeks.

And then I went back to headquarters. my boss said, hey, I want you to do something that's important. I want you to be the assistant national intelligence officer for the Middle East, for the whole Middle East for two months. The National Intelligence Officer, which is a senior intelligence service position, she was on some kind of sabbatical. And then there was a vacancy for the deputy position. So I went up there working with people four, five, six grades senior to me.

And not only held my own, but I zeroed out the first. Freedom of Information Act requests. Some of them had been pending for years. These Freedom of Information Act requests, you're compelled by law to respond to them within 60 days. Some of them had been four or five years sitting in this stack. So I thought, well, if I'm going to do anything that's worth anything, I'm going to get rid of all these Freedom of Information Act requests. So I did it. Working 14, 15 hour days every single day. And then finally, when the National Intelligence Officer came back, Ellen Leibson, she went on to really great things that think tanks in Washington. She came back and she said, so you kept all the fires at bay? And I said,

I did. The Iraq is still a problem, but we had it all covered. And then she said, where's the stack of FOIA request? And I mean, this thing was six feet tall. And I said, oh, I answered them all. She laughed. No, seriously. I said, no, seriously. I couldn't come in here every day and look at this six foot tall stack of requests that we are compelled by law to answer. So she put me in for some big award. It was very generous of her. I made a good. impression up there. I went back down to the Iraq group and my boss said, okay, big shot, if you want the next big promotion, you're going to have to write a great paper. I want you to write the next national intelligence estimate on Iraq. Now, a national intelligence estimate,

N-I-E, or special national intelligence estimate, SNI, these are the most important papers that come out of the intelligence community. There's a lower level form called a sense of the community memorandum, Sockham. That's short, two or three pages. Everybody in the intelligence community coordinates on it, and then it goes to the president, the vice president, the national security advisor, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense. And NIE goes to the same people, but is much longer. It can be 10 pages. It can be 100 pages. And they're almost always requested by the president himself. In this case, the NIE was requested by the national security advisor. It was Sandy Burger at the time.

We had done one the year earlier, and he wanted one entitled Iraq, colon, Saddam's next 12 months. So I said, okay, I'm your guy, I can do it. So I wrote it. And it was about, I'm going to say it was 24, 25 pages. It took me a couple of weeks, which is fast. But the hard part's not writing it. The hard part is getting 17 other intelligence agencies to agree on every single word. So here's what we do.

I write the paper. I send it to all 17 intelligence agencies. And I mean everything from NSA and DIA to the Coast Guard, to the Department of Energy Office of Intelligence, to the Department of Commerce Office of Intelligence, to little organizations you've never heard of. And then the National Intelligence Officer convenes the community in his conference room. We're all sitting around this big conference.

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

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

You don't want those in the paper because it looks like you guys don't know what the heck you're talking about. If you can't even agree amongst yourself, how are you going to advise the president? So much to my shock, six hours later, we came out of this meeting. And the National Intelligence Officer says to me, honest to God, that was the fastest coordination session I have ever sat through in my entire career. And I said, I'm ashamed of this paper. It's exactly the same as last year's paper. All we really needed to do is just change the date and put this year's date on it.

What the paper said in the end was Saddam could threaten the Kurds, Saddam could threaten the Shia, Saddam could threaten Kuwait, and Saddam will probably try to evade sanctions. That was far more a reflection on the failure of U.S. policy toward Iraq than it was a failure of analysis. The analysis was exactly right, actually, in historical retrospect. What was bad was American policy toward Iraq. The analysis was that we were continuing to fail. That's really what it came down to.

I've said over the years that I hated the paper, and that's really not true. Actually, I was proud to have written an NIE. Very, very few CIA analysts ever have the opportunity or the honor to write an NIE. So it wasn't the paper that I was ashamed of. It was that I was unable, through no fault of my own, to say anything that was really new or cutting edge or deeply insightful because there was nothing really to look into. The paper was bound. They give it a fancy cover. They send it to the president and the vice president and the national security advisor, the secretaries of state and defense.

And then the National Intelligence Officer comes down to my little cubicle and he says, I want to congratulate you. And he hands me a letter from Sandy Berger. Berger said that it was one of the most insightful and valuable analyses that he had read on Iraq. And it was that day because of that letter that I decided I was going to leave analysis. I remember thinking that night that if I have to do this for another 20 years, years, I am going to cut my throat. It was clear to me by 1997 that nobody was going to do anything about Saddam Hussein. Look, either Saddam Hussein is a danger to the free world, either he's a genocidal maniac slaughtering his own people and you're going to do something about it,

or you're not. There was one incident that I cannot divulge the details around, but it involved an intercept, which by its very nature would be classified at the top secret level. I remember reading this intercept and thinking to myself, this is a policymaker. This is an American government policymaker, and they're fudging it to make it look like it's either a foreign national or somebody who's not important enough to pay very close attention to. And I realized then that nobody in any position of authority, whether it was at the White House, the State Department, or the Defense Department was going to do anything about Iraq. And so I thought, why should I waste my career recycling year-old analysis

when I can be doing something fun? I remember in the car on the way home that night, I thought, well, what else can I do? I don't want to really transfer on to another country. I'll have to start back at the beginning again. I could go overseas again, but convincing my wife to go anywhere but Athens would be practically impossible. She told me in Bahrain. The only other place that she would ever be willing to go would be Athens.

And I said, yeah, but I don't cover Greek issues. I'm a Middle East person. And even if I switch to operations, I would still be a Middle East person. We could go to Cairo, we could go to Jerusalem, we could go to Amman or Riyadh, but we're not going to Athens. I went to church that Sunday. I lit my candle and I sat down in the pew. I always just sit there and look around and admire the beautiful icons and the mosaics. I just love the beauty of the place.

And I remember thinking a prayer, thinking, come on, give me a sign, any kind of sign. Let me know what to do, because I genuinely don't know what to do. I remember thinking that. Next day, I went to work, and there was an internal database of Java. openings, which I never accessed. I never had any reason to access it. But that day, I accessed it. And sure enough, what pops up a position as a counterterrorism operations officer in Athens. I remember laughing out loud. There was a woman who sat just on the other side of the partition from me. She said, what's so funny? I said, oh, no, I was just thinking about a joke, nothing.

and I thought, this can't be. So I looked at the bottom of the job listing. It said that they're looking for an experienced operations officer to do counterterrorism operations in Athens in conjunction with the Greek government. And it said, the chosen candidate should have either Greek or Arabic. Well, I had Greek and Arabic. It had the hiring officer's name and phone number at the bottom.

I recognized his name. He was a very important guy, a multiple-time chief of station from big stations. And he was a real sweetheart of a guy. I knew where he sat. So I went down and knocked on his door and he said, hi. And I said, hi, I don't know if you remember me. We met once before in the Middle East.

He didn't remember me, but I reintroduced myself. I said, I see that you're advertising this job in Athens. I have no operational experience whatsoever, but I'm fluent in both Arabic and Greek. And he said, are you kidding me? And I said, no. And I might be the only person in the entire CIA who is. I was, actually.

He said, are you willing to be tested? Of course. In fact, I just tested Arabic a couple of weeks ago, but I'll test again if you want. He said, no, no, if you're a tester, that current, that's fine. What about Greek? And I said, I've never bothered to test in Greek just because I didn't need to use it operationally. But my grandparents were all from the island of Rhodes. I learned Greek at home and then I studied Greek at Georgetown.

He says, Rhodes, my secretary's from Rhodes. She was born in Rhodes. Helen, come on out here. Helen, he says, this young man says his family is from Rhodes and he speaks Greek. She immediately launches into a conversation in Greek. What village are your people from? When was the last time you were there? Are you married?

Do you have kids? What church do you go to? And then she turns to him and she says, He's good with me and she gives me the thumbs up. And then he says, look, buddy, it's a lot easier and a lot cheaper for me to take a linguist and teach him operations than it would be to take an operations officer and teach him how to speak Greek and Arabic. It's going to take a little convincing because there's a natural bias in operations against the eggheads on the analytic side. He said, it's going to take a little convincing, but let me work my magic. I'll be in touch. What is meant by operations in the CIA is very, this definition is pre-9-11, but it's,

really very simple. It's to recruit spies, to steal secrets, so that the analysts can analyze those secrets to then allow the policymaker to make the best informed policy. I checked in with him a couple of times over the next two months, and it did take a little bit of convincing, because these career operations guys did not want to work with an analyst. If I was going to go to London, that would be one thing, because you're not going to do any operations in London. But Athens, bulletproof vest, strapped on two guns, a buckknife in my back pocket just in case. That changed on 9-11. We're going to talk about that later.

But they needed to teach me how to recruit spies to steal secrets. And then besides that, they needed to teach me how to use a myriad of weapons, how to build and to defuse several different kinds of bombs, and how to drive in such a way that I am not followed and cannot be ambushed and killed. I had been waiting two months. Finally, he called me and he said, the panel approved you. Thank God. Okay, I'm going to quit this job and tell him that I'm transferring over to operations.

Man, they're not going to like it one bit. My immediate boss, who funny enough ended up working for me five years later, My immediate boss was so angry, he said to me, don't even think about coming back here. I said, oh, I'm not coming back. He said, I mean it. Don't come back, hat in hand, and ask for your job back. I said, Ben, you're not hearing me. I'm not coming back. Assignment to Athens would mean going to James Bond School, in essence. One more reason to leave boring desks and musty cubicles behind forever. We'll get there soon. I'll tell you what training was like, and don't get me wrong. It was hard. It was challenging as hell. But all the counterterrorism training I was about to receive

would make it clear that I had found my dream job. Or maybe my dream job had found me. Till next time, don't forget to review, rate, comment on, like, and or share the podcast. I'm John Kariaku. Dead Drop is written by John Kirooku and Alan Katz. Costart and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kiriaku, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers. This podcast, it's a custard and Touchstone production.