Dead drop
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A dead drop is the tradecraft technique of passing material between an officer and an agent through a concealed location, with no meeting, and the namesake of John Kiriakou's podcast. It belongs to the set of skills, disguises, dead drops, brush passes, that make up the popular image of the job, and that Kiriakou describes himself as having been entirely taken with on entering it.

Training

Dead drops entered the syllabus at the Farm alongside weapons, explosives, counterterrorism driving, bomb disposal and parachuting. One exercise required trainees to swim across a swamp, covered in leeches, fighting off cottonmouths swimming across the bog, in order to make a dead drop on an island.

Asked what he had been taught that turned out to be surprisingly ineffective in real time, Kiriakou answered: dead drops. They were the only thing in training he struggled with, and he was bad at them for a while.

How it actually works

The naive version, put the message under a footbridge, or under a rock, is not the job. In a country with a sophisticated intelligence service, the United States, Russia, China, Cuba, Israel, even France, merely identifying a viable dead drop site is very, very difficult.

Then comes the choreography. A two-to-three-hour surveillance detection route precedes the drop, eight hours in Russia or China, then the drop itself, then another route back to the house or the office. That alone is a full working day for a single document. But the agent still has to be told the drop exists, which takes a further surveillance detection route to a separate, predetermined site to leave a chalk mark as the tip-off. Delivering one document, one piece of microfilm or one photograph can therefore consume a sixteen-hour day.

Concealment is its own art: one colleague put a drop inside a condom, "because who's going to touch a condom?" Objects, not just information, move this way, money, passports, whatever an agent needs.

The Tysons Corner failure

The signalling step is what defeated Kiriakou in training, in the only exercise he was ever criticized for. Training in Northern Virginia, he had picked a site well out in the suburbs and concealed the message in a fake key-rock of the kind homeowners leave by their front doors, matched in colour and shape to the real rocks in an office-building parking lot, by his own account a perfect site. He ran the surveillance detection route, laid the rock down clean, and set off for the place he was to leave the chalk mark: a door between a level and a stairwell in an underground parking garage in Tysons Corner.

In the week between his choosing the site and his going to mark it, the doors had been repainted, yellow to blue, which did not matter, in glossy paint, which did. The chalk would not adhere; it crumbled against the door. The agent never learned the drop had been made. The verdict was that he had not merely failed: surveillance had watched him scraping at a door "like a crazy person," and in a hostile environment he would probably have been arrested and expelled. Three decades later Kiriakou describes it as the most valuable lesson of his training, and as an illustration of the variables no syllabus can anticipate and that an officer is simply expected to solve in the field.

Dead drops in counterintelligence

The technique is also how the people using it are caught. The FBI ended its hunt for the mole inside its own ranks by placing a recording device at a dead drop site under a small pedestrian footbridge in a park in Vienna, Virginia. The drop was made, the mole made the pickup, and the tape was carried back to FBI headquarters, where officers gathered around a recorder expecting to hear Brian Kelley, the colleague already accused, fired and threatened with the death penalty. The voice on the tape was their own boss, Robert Hanssen.

See also

- Dead Drop (podcast)
- Surveillance detection route
- Sofia Bulgaria dead drop
- The Farm
- Robert Hanssen
