Title: S1E2 The New Recruit
Show: John Kiriakou's Dead Drop
Date: 2025-10-20
URL: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/68e695c6d798804c9e4bbd13/e/68f68334888566c5b0104f66/media.mp3
Duration: 0:41:24

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[00:01] ACAS powers the world's best podcast. Here's a show that we recommend. A photographer in Texas earns an extra $47,000 a year shooting Star Wars cosplay portraits. A teacher in Maryland turns her woodworking hobby into a five-figure side income without leaving the classroom. And a couple in Pennsylvania will rent you backyard chickens for the season so you can try the egg laying life without commitment. My name is Chris Gillibow. I'm the host of Side Hustle School.

[01:32] Where would we be without each other? It really is an honor having you at the other end of these sound waves, so thank you. If you're enjoying the podcast, would you please do us the kindness of making that fact known? When you like, subscribe to, share, or comment on podcasts that please you, it really does help the podcast find more listeners. So if you wouldn't mind, we'd be incredibly appreciative. As I've said here, spies are human beings first and foremost.

[02:03] The kind of human being we are, good, bad, or indifferent, will usually dictate a lot of what we're like as spies. In our last episode, we left off at the moment of my recruitment into the CIA. I had written a psychological evaluation of my boss at the labor union where I worked, documenting and analyzing his racist sociopathic behavior. My paper came back with an A grade and a note from my professor saying, please see me. So I went to his tiny office

[02:33] and there he told me a secret. I was in a program called the Legislative Affairs Program, but my focus was on foreign policy analysis. And I was the only person in the program who did not work on Capitol Hill. I was also the youngest by at least six years. Everybody else was mid-career, looking to make that big jump to staff director or legislative director in some congressman's office or some senator's office.

[03:05] And I was just looking to start my adult life with a master's degree. All of my graduate school classes were in a building called the Hall of States building on Capitol Hill. It's the same building that houses Fox News, NBC, MSNBC, One American Network, but on the top are classrooms and down on the bottom are these little teeny tiny offices no bigger than a cubicle. It was in one of those offices. And he laid it out.

[03:38] My job is to find people who might fit into the CIA's culture. I believe that you would fit into the CIA's culture. Would you like to be a CIA officer? If you don't run screaming from the room, they know they've got you. He had read me correctly indeed. I was very intrigued. I later learned that's called breaking cover. Now that's illegal today, but in 1988 it was commonplace.

[04:09] In 1993, Congress passed a law called the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. It created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and it said, you can't have these old boy networks. Everybody has to have a level playing field. And so if you want to apply to the CIA, you write to them or call them and have them send you an application. You may or may not remember what a Rolodex is. A Rolodex back in the days before computers.

[04:39] It was a collection of little cards, little like two by four cards or three by five, I suppose. And they were on a spool. And so you could write somebody's name and contact information on them because we didn't have cell phones, we didn't have computers. When he asked me if I was interested in pursuing this and I said yes, he started going through his Rolodex and I remember briefly seeing the name Oliver North, home and it had a telephone number. I thought to myself, who is this guy?

[05:10] That he has Oliver North's home phone number. Oliver North of course had been a senior director at the National Security Council who was in up to his neck in Iran Contra and was as famous in the 1980s as anybody in Washington. He finally came to a number, he picks up the phone, he dials the number and he says, Bob, this is Jerry and these are their real names. I've got a good one for you. Do you have a couple of minutes? And then he hung up the phone. He scribbles an address on a piece of paper

[05:41] that was in Roslyn, Virginia, which is a very close in neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia, one subway stop from George Washington University. He says, go to this address and ask for Bob. So I thanked him, I shook his hand and I walked out. I'm on the subway, I'm there in 10 minutes. In my head, I'm thinking this is really happening. Now, Dr. Post was always clear. He couldn't wave a magic wand and grant a CIA career upon me.

[06:12] He said, it's up to you. You have to pass the tests. I can facilitate things, but it's up to you. And I said, I understand, I'm gonna do my best. He changed the course of my life. I ended up getting hired into the office that Dr. Post created at the CIA called LDA Leadership Development Analysis, or later on the Office of Leadership Analysis.

[06:43] He created a subgroup, a division called the Political Psychology Division. Once I got hired, and I'm jumping ahead here, but once I got hired, my job was to be Saddam Hussein's intelligence community psychologist. I had to immerse myself in everything Saddam Hussein so that if the White House called and said, if we do A, what's Saddam Hussein gonna do? I could say, oh, if you do A, he's gonna do B. That's really what it came to. You become the Saddam Whisperer.

[07:15] So I get on the subway and I go to Rosalind and I look at the address. It takes me to a completely non-descript office building that no longer exists. It has since been torn down and a skyscraper has been built in its place. I went up to the sixth floor and there was a security guard sitting in a chair next to the office that I had been instructed to go to. The guard says, you here for Bob? And I said, yes, I am. He said, ring the buzzer. So I ring the buzzer and the door buzzes and I go in. Well, I can only go into like a six by six foot

[07:48] little entry way. And they did it for security reasons because the interior door then had a spin lock that looked like it belonged on a bank vault. So I buzzed at that door. And a secretary whom in my memory looked to be 80 years old, she was probably 50. She opens the door, a crack, and she says, are you here for Bob? Yes, I am. She says, come in. I go in. I sit down in a seat for a moment and then this gigantic six, five, 350 pound

[08:22] garrulous, happy, loud guy comes out. John, how the hell are you? I'm Bob. I've thought about this meeting for years. I don't know who Bob was. I don't know if his name was Bob. I mean, I always assumed that it was because Jerry said, Bob, this is Jerry. I've come to the conclusion that Bob was the actual director of HR for the entire CIA. So this was an incredibly senior officer reporting literally to the deputy director

[08:55] for administration. My recruiter, Dr. Post, I later learned was one of the most highly decorated officers in the history of the CIA. Dr. Post had, he had a bachelor's degree in psychology from Yale. He had a master's degree in psychology from Yale. He had a PhD in psychology from Yale, a PhD in political science from Yale, and an MD from Harvard, wrote a dozen books on the psychology of world leaders

[09:26] and the psychology of terrorists and was the go-to guy on how to thwart terrorist attacks using psychology. I later learned that what he saw in me, besides the fact that I was halfway intelligent, I was a good writer. That's something I've always been very proud of. I've written eight books. I'm working on my ninth. Writing has always come very easily to me. But another thing that he saw, and I'm not necessarily proud of this,

[09:56] I'm just saying it as an observation, was that I have what are called sociopathic tendencies. I'm not a sociopath. And he made that very clear when I blew the whistle. He called to congratulate me. He said, you did the right thing. I said, Dr. Post, I've always feared that I'm a sociopath. He said, you're not a sociopath. That's why you blew the whistle. Now, the difference between a sociopath and someone with sociopathic tendencies is that sociopaths don't have consciences. They're unable to feel guilt. They'll blow right through a polygraph exam

[10:29] because nothing weighs on them. They're impossible to control because they know that they're not gonna get tripped up in the polygraph. Someone with sociopathic tendencies does have a conscience that conscience does register in a polygraph exam, but they're still willing to work in moral, legal, and ethical gray areas. And I'll give you an example. There was one point in the hiring process where I was in a room with four other applicants, three men and a woman.

[10:59] And the instructor said, imagine that you are a CIA case officer serving overseas and you get a cable from headquarters telling you that headquarters really needs the latest Indonesian economic data. You've just met the Indonesian Second Secretary for Economic Affairs. Go. So everybody agreed, you go meet the guy, you invite him for a cup of coffee, you invite him for lunch, you have a great time, you invite him for dinner, you have a great time there, you introduce your wives, the wives hit it off,

[11:31] you spend some weekends together, you're spending plenty of money, you find out that he likes fishing, so you charter a boat, you go out deep sea fishing, he has a great time, he mentions to you that he's never been in a helicopter, so you buy everybody a helicopter tour of the capital city, you're having an awesome time. You do this for six months and you come to the conclusion that he is not recruitable. You can't identify any vulnerabilities. So what do you do? Headquarters really needs the data.

[12:01] What do you do? One guy raises his hand, he said, you have to double down, bring him in closer, spend more money on him, keep doing what you're doing, maybe it's gonna take another six months. Another guy raises his hand, maybe you get the wives involved, maybe the wives become even closer, you can work it through them, and one or two other people had ideas. Finally I raised my hand. You break into the embassy and you steal it. And the instructor says, that's exactly what you do.

[12:32] You break into the embassy and steal it. Okay, look, a normal person is not gonna advocate breaking into a foreign embassy and stealing classified documents, but someone with sociopathic tendencies will. It's a means to an end. And remember, we all believed deeply that we were the good guys. Most people actually can't color outside the lines. Their brains just won't allow them to do it. And that's why so many people wash out of the training and say, this is not what I thought it was gonna be.

[13:03] I thought it was gonna be all shooting and car chases. They want me to betray friendships and they want me to lie to people. Mike Pompeo, who was the CIA director for a couple of years and then secretary of state, famously said wherever it was he said at the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institute or whatever it was, that we lie, we cheat, we steal, and then we go to work the next day and do it all over again. Yeah, that's the job. He got a chuckle out of it and a really bad Facebook meme, but the truth is that's exactly

[13:35] what a CIA operations officer does every single day for democracy, for the country, for the American people to keep our country safe. Bob talked to me for five minutes and he says, you know what, I like you. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go to George Washington University medical school auditorium Saturday morning at eight o'clock. Don't be late, you're gonna take some tests, all right? And he puts out his hand and I shook his hand. He slaps me on the back and I walk out and I thought, I like that guy. I don't have any idea who he is, but I like him.

[14:09] So Saturday morning, my wife dropped me off at the George Washington University medical school auditorium. My wife knew almost nothing about what I was doing. My wife was a ballet teacher. It was traumatic enough that she had to move from Warren, Ohio to Washington, D.C. Moving to the big city was like a punch in the face. But now I'm applying for a job that I really can't talk about. She knew I was applying for a job at the CIA and that was it. That was the extent of what I was able to tell her.

[14:41] I honestly believe that she believed that eventually she could convince me to move back to Ohio and sell life insurance with her cousin Dean, which she would bring up with regularity. And I told her that I would rather cut my own throat than move back home. I said, look, my life is here. Our life is here. It's gonna either remain here or take us overseas. She accepted that for a while, but not really. Not really.

[15:11] I think that she secretly hoped the whole thing would just fall apart. She liked going to the little window at the back of the grocery store that doubled as the local post office and chat with the lady there. You know, living an ordinary life. Me on the other hand, well, I wanted to be out in the world. Meeting with presidents and senators and kings and prime ministers. We were both Greek. We met at a Greek wedding and our parents pushed us into each other. She's great for you. He's great for you.

[15:43] You guys need to get married. When we got engaged, I was 22, too young. And so was she. And we had literally nothing in common other than the fact that we were both Greek. That was it. She drops me off at the GW Medical School Auditorium. There were easily 250, 300 people there to take the tests in the auditorium. The Proctors told us that there were three tests we were gonna have to take. The first one was a multiple choice current events test.

[16:13] It was laughably easy. I remember saying to friends afterwards, you don't even have to read the paper. If you just happen to walk past a newspaper box and glance at the headline, you're gonna ace this thing. I remember actually one of the questions. It said, Andreas Papandreou is the prime minister of A, Bangladesh, B, Russia, C, Canada, D, Greece. You've gotta be kidding me. And people are like scratching their heads.

[16:44] I see them erasing their answers. Come on, people. So I just blew right through that. The next test was a fold out map of the world with none of the countries identified. I was always a map nut when I was a kid. You just had to write the names of all the countries on the map. I remember having like momentary trouble with some of those West African countries, Sotomay and Principe, Ghana, Upper Volta was becoming Burkina Faso at the time

[17:14] and whatever. I aced it. And then we got the third test. It was thousands of questions long. So you had to fill in an oval, agree or disagree. I enjoy fixing car engines. Disagree. I don't know anything about car. I can change my oil and that's about all I can change. Maybe, maybe a spark plug. I would like to conduct a symphony orchestra. Okay, why not? Sure. And about 300 questions in it says, I like boxing.

[17:45] The honest to God's truth is I just didn't have a position on boxing, but you have to say either agree or disagree. And I thought to myself, you know, I like this Tyson kid who just came out. If I'm flipping through the channels, these were the days when boxing was actually broadcast on TV. If I'm flipping through the channels and Mike Tyson is fighting, yes. Okay, I'm gonna watch the Tyson fight. So I think I wrote yes, but then 565 questions later, it says I like boxing.

[18:15] And I'm thinking, dang it. What did I say the first time? I don't remember. I think I said, yes, I think. And then a thousand questions later, it says I like boxing. And I'm like, God, God, I see what they're doing. They don't care about boxing. They're looking to see if I'm trying to beat the test to make it look like I'm consistent because I really want this job, right? Consistency is the key word.

[18:46] I was the first person to finish the three tests by 45 minutes. And it's because the first two were so easy for me. It very well may have been part of the point, just to see who was confident enough in his or her answers. So I got up and I handed my tests to the proctor and he goes, are you kidding me? You're done already? And I said, yeah. He said, do you wanna take some time and take a second look at things? And I said, no, I don't. And he said, okay, thanks. And I handed it in. And I remember other people looking up like that

[19:17] guy can't be finished already. And I walked out and I went to a pay phone. I called my wife. She came and picked me up. She said, how'd you do? I said, I have no idea. I'm not sure what they want. Summertime and the living is easy, am I right, John? That is one of the best parts of Summer Allen. Living really does feel easier. You're about to travel. Good thing you've got a couple of quince pieces going with you. They are as relaxed and comfortable as I wanna feel. That's why whether I'm traveling or staying at home,

[19:49] I reach for the same quince go anywhere pieces again and again. Quince focuses on well made essential. They're the t-shirt I reach for first every time. In all seriousness, I just bought another one today. They're my favorite t-shirts too. And when the ocean breeze kicks in at night, as it does here in LA, a quince lightweight cotton sweater is sublime. And perfect for travel too, which these days has all kinds of new challenges that impact how you pack. So versatility really matters. You gotta pack smart like a spy.

[20:20] That's why a pair of quince's 100% European linen pants and a couple of linen shirts are coming with me. They're breathable and easy to throw on. Sometimes I add a t-shirt underneath for a whole other look. They're the summer upgrade anyone's rotation needs. Starting at just $34. That's not a typo. No, it's not. Everything at quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middleman. So you're paying for exceptional quality, not for brand markup.

[27:10] Be honest and focus on the speck. That's it, just answer the question. A couple of weeks later, I go in for the polygraph. I didn't realize it at the time, but I really lucked out with the polygrapher that I got rather than a grizzled gnarly old man who I got three years later from my first repoly. I got a young black woman in her, I'd say late 20s. She was so respectful and so soft-spoken

[27:40] and she knew I had never taken a polygraph exam before. So she explained to me what she was gonna do. And it was exactly what Dr. Post had told me was going to happen. I'm hooked up to the machine and my heart is absolutely racing. She says very softly, I'm going to unhook you for a moment because I'm afraid you may have a stroke. So I want you to just relax. You're not having any problem. She said, I want you to pass.

[28:10] Just keep that in mind. Okay, take a deep breath and here we go. Sure enough, I see a speck on the wall right in front of me. And I thought, God bless Jerry Post. So I'm looking at the speck. There's a pre-interview. So they say, have you ever stolen anything worth more than $50? You say no. Have you ever stolen anything worth more than $20? No. Have you ever stolen anything? I said no. I mean, the only thing I ever stole in my life, I was six. I took a toy pistol from a neighbor's house.

[28:41] I went over to play with a kid there. When I went home, my mom was like, where'd you get that? I said, it's Brian's. And we walked back to Brian's house and gave it back to him. That's literally the only thing I had ever stolen in my life and I was six years old. So what they say in the polygraph is, other than what we've talked about, have you ever stolen anything? No. Have you ever had sex with a man? No. Have you ever had sex with a boy as in childhood experimentation? No. In the pre-interview, how much money do you normally spend a month on your credit cards?

[29:13] And mind you, this is the 80s so these numbers would be inflated now. But I said, I never spend more than $500 a month and I pay it all off. And so most of these questions were related to lifestyle. In fact, I learned later they call it the lifestyle polygraph. Later on in your career, it's the counterintelligence polygraph. They care about the vulnerability. When you're an applicant, the vulnerabilities are, are you secretly gay? Are you deeply in debt? Are you a drug addict? Are you addicted to gambling?

[29:44] That's what they're worried about. I finished in about 45 minutes and she said, I'm going to show my supervisor the little heartbeat thing on this long, long piece of paper that's like a hundred feet long and I'll be right back. So I knew what they were doing. They were just looking to see how I would react. There's a two way mirror. So I just sat there and then she came back in about 10 minutes later and she said, you're reacting to one of the questions. And I remember thinking to myself, God, please don't let it be the gay question

[30:16] because how in blazes am I going to explain this to my wife and to my friends, right? And I said, well, what am I reacting to? I had never even tried weed. I'd never drank to excess. I don't do drugs. I don't steal. I don't whore around. I don't gamble. I don't do anything. So she said, you're reacting to the question about credit card debt. And I said, are you kidding me? I said, let's do it again. So she hooked me back up and she asked me the credit card question. Do you ever find yourself unable to pay your credit cards?

[30:47] No. And I passed a week later. Sure enough, Bob calls, buddy, you're in. And there are already three offices fighting over you. And I said, you're kidding me. Here's the next step. In two weeks, I want you to come in in your best suit and tie and you're gonna have three interviews that are gonna change the course of the rest of your life. Keep hearing podcast ads like this one, for example, but always wonder how you actually get involved with them

[31:48] So I said, what are the offices that are interested in me? He said, two in the Directorate of Intelligence and one in the Directorate of Operation. In the Directorate of Intelligence, the North Korea Political Analysis Branch. So in the Directorate of Intelligence, one of them was the North Korea Political Analysis Branch. I could find North Korea on a map. I knew that Kim Il-sung was the dictator back in those days, the grandfather of the current one. And that's the extent of my knowledge of North Korea. The other was to be the Iraq Analyst

[32:20] in the Office of Leadership Analysis, which Dr. Post had created. And then the third was to be an operations officer, also called a case officer, also called a category B officer, cat B officer in the Office of Near Eastern Operations. I blew that interview in the first 10 seconds. They said, how does the prospect of spending the rest of your adult life in the Middle East sound to you? And I said, it sounds awesome, but my wife would either leave me or kill herself.

[32:53] And they cut me immediately. Okay, thanks for coming in. I was like, oh, shit, thanks for your time. Hate to say, I meant it. I'm already pushing the envelope because she doesn't like this CIA idea in the first place. But then to say, honey, great news, we're moving to Yemen. Yeah, that wasn't gonna work. They did me a favor. So then I went to North Korea and they were like, well, what do you know about North Korea? And I said, literally nothing. I'm willing to learn. I understand how important it is to American foreign policy,

[33:26] but I wouldn't come in here with any kind of expertise. Then I went to the Office of Leadership Analysis. What do you know about the Middle East? I said, I know a lot about the Middle East. I studied Islam under Said Hossein Nasser, one of the greatest thinkers in modern times on Islamic theology. I studied Middle Eastern politics under Bernie Reich, who not only was one of the most important writers on contemporary Middle Eastern politics, he was also at George Washington University. Bernie was so highly respected that he was actually called into the State Department

[33:57] at one point in 1982 to help head off a coup in Saudi Arabia. And I know a lot about Iraq, I said. And I got a letter in the mail a couple of weeks later saying, I still have it. I'm saying, congratulations. The organization with which you have been interviewing hereby offers you the following position. Instead of the seal of the CIA, it just says Office of Personnel at the top. There's no indication at all that this letter came from the CIA. I negotiated a start date, which was January the 7th.

[34:29] It was really January the 6th, but that was a Sunday, 1990. Again, wearing my very best suit. I went into the CIA auditorium to start the onboarding process. And I was at Langley, just outside what's called the Old Headquarters Building, OHP, is a domed theater that's the CIA's event space. That's where all the new hires were brought to onboard. As funny as it might sound, and maybe as silly as it might sound, being a junior, junior, the junior-most employee,

[35:00] I had to park out in the North 40, literally a third of a mile, a half a mile away. I would walk all the way around the compound so that I could come in the front door of the old building and walk across the seal that's in the floor and see the statue of Patrick Henry. And to read, you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. That's on a plaque. And to pass the wall of honor, which honors all of the CIA employees killed in the line of duty, 40% of whom are undercover

[35:31] even in death. I have chills thinking about it. All these years later, that's how important it was to me. I made it. But the funny thing is, they told me on that very first day, you're gonna have to start telling people that that CIA thing didn't work out for you and you decided to go to the State Department instead. My wife knew that I worked at the CIA and had no idea what I was doing there. That created a problem that became so big

[36:01] that it cost me my marriage. Not right away. She was willing to sort of play the game with me. But I'd go home at the end of the day and she'd say, how was work? I'd say, great, what'd you do? Nothing, well, who'd you see? No one, nothing, you just sat there. I wrote a lot about what? The news and I'd say, how was your day? That was it, that's all I could tell her. Now, when I was sitting in that auditorium that first day, it was revelatory to me. There was a man on my left and a woman on my right.

[36:31] We were all the same age and we were friends all through my 15 years at the CIA. This sort of encapsulates what the CIA is. The woman on my right was a recent graduate of the Falls Church, Virginia Academy of Beauty. She did makeup and hair and whatever. And they made her a master disguise maker. She and I did an operation together. 10 years later, she was brilliant. We both won awards for it. I got a medal where the director of disguises

[37:04] flew out to Athens to give me a medal for this operation I did because of her jeans. The guy on my left, I said, so what do you do? What'd they hire you for? He said, oh, I draw a cartoon for the college newspaper at Georgetown. I said, you're a cartoonist? And he said, yeah, I said, that's cool. What are you gonna do here? They made him into a master forger. 10 years later, he and I worked on a case together in which he forged something. I can't tell you what it is, but I was holding it up

[37:36] and I was holding up an actual one. And I was like, dude, I said, you are freaking brilliant. And he said, who'd have thought, right? And I said, yeah, for all of us, who'd have thought? I was in a conversation once, we were getting ready to attack Iraq in 2003. All the usual cast of characters are there. I was there because I was the deputy director's executive assistant by then. And there's this guy that I didn't recognize. It was his turn to brief the director. And the director of George Tennant didn't recognize him and said, who are you?

[38:06] And he said, I'm your meteorologist. You're my meteorologist? Yes, sir. And George was kind of a rough, crude guy. And he said, what the fuck are you talking about? Well, sir, I have bachelor's and master's degrees in meteorology from Penn State University, which is acknowledged as the best meteorology school in America. And what are you here to tell me? The skies are gonna be clearing Baghdad tomorrow and there's no chance of a sandstorm. And I was like, holy shit. We can do everything here.

[38:36] Everything. In time, of course, I would learn how extensive everything could be. Ah, but we have so much story yet to tell before we get there. On the next episode of Dead Drop, we'll get into the training process. How does an institution train a person to spy? It turns out the training process is really the vetting process, continued, albeit in a different form. Those above are always looking for weaknesses

[39:07] in those below and for reasons to call them before they get out into the field. But the training process also delivers small, sustained doses of all the James Bond and John Le Carré espionage experience that made us want to be spies to begin with. So there's that. What I hope you'll begin to appreciate is how spies aren't so much built as they are layered. Like I said, we have so much more story to tell. With that in mind, I wanna update you

[39:37] on our upcoming release schedule. As we hope you appreciate, this podcast is above all a labor of love. Like all laborers of love, they take time. If you wanna do them the right way. Our ultimate goal is to put episodes out on a weekly basis for as long as we have a story to tell. But for now, in order to make every episode the best we possibly can, we're going to release new episodes every two weeks. That's even more reason to follow us and to subscribe.

[40:07] That way you'll know exactly when new episodes drop. Even better, tell your friends. If they're really your friends, they'll remind you that we're coming. Until then, thanks again for listening. It really does mean a lot. I'm John Kiriakou. Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costart and Touchstone produce the podcast and John Kiriakou, Alan Katz and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.
