Title: S1E6 A Failure Of Analysis
Show: John Kiriakou's Dead Drop
Date: 2025-12-08
URL: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/68e695c6d798804c9e4bbd13/e/693491aceab4d846e0e4beb4/media.mp3
Duration: 0:39:10

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[00:00] This podcast is a casted in touchstone production. I'm John Purieopu. 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

[00:32] 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.

[01:03] Fortunately for me, though, that backwater was right next to Saudi Arabia, where terrorists blew up the Kobar Towers. That killed some of the US 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.

[01:34] 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 Kobar Tower bombing took place on June 25th, and I went back on August the 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

[02:08] 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.

[02:40] 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 the 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

[03:14] 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 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

[03:44] 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 Air operated. And so it came to an agreement with American Airlines so that 60 seats on the plane were technically American Airlines ticketed seats

[04:14] 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 Gulf 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

[04:44] 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.

[05:15] 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. 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

[05:46] 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.

[06:17] 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

[06:47] that they would be turned away, that they thought, oh, we'll go one better than just the fake US passport. We'll put fake US 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

[07:17] 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 gonna 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 gonna be one of many thousands at CIA headquarters again. Just another drone and another cubicle.

[07:48] 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 and again, assuming that I was gonna go work on Iraq, the deputy director of the office said,

[08:19] 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 gonna 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. And he said, I promise, I won't forget you. So I'm doing Bahrain. And I was very proud to say, literally no one

[08:50] 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.

[09:22] 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 that 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 Emirates where nothing ever happens. It's a great place to just get your footing. She did that for about six months.

[09:54] 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 Tumb and Lesser Tumb. T-U-N-B, it's hard to pronounce. The Greater and Lesser Tumbah Islands were owned by the United Arab Emirates. There is nothing on the Tumbah Islands but sand. Just sand. Iran sent a couple of boats and they put five or six guys on each island

[10:25] 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 gonna take these islands. What are you gonna do about it? Probably nothing. The intentions behind this, I'm gonna call it occupation of these two islands, was not meaningless.

[10:57] 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 nine o'clock and she was very excited. This was a big deal. She was gonna 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 gonna do anything for these islands. They're just gonna let them go.

[11:28] 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 gonna have the support of Abu Dhabi or Dubai, Emirate, they're not gonna be able to fight the Iranians over this. So the Iranians are gonna keep these islands and the Emirates are just gonna walk away.

[12:00] 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 PDB, 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

[12:30] 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 Sharjah, comma, which is unlikely to be able to defend them. Dot, dot, dot. No help expected from Dubai or Abu Dhabi. You've conveyed the entire story and the president is not gonna read a page or two or 10 about the greater and lesser Tunba Islands.

[13:03] 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 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 Tunb and you explained why the Iranians would not be forced to give up the Tunbs, I realized that I will never know the Middle East

[13:33] as well as you do. And so I resigned and I'm gonna 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.

[14:06] 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 gonna nip it in the bud and get out early. She didn't have the desire to learn it. That's exactly what it was.

[14:37] There's more to life than driving to CIA headquarters every day and sitting in your cubicle year after year after year, there's gotta 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. 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 quints pieces going with you. They are as relaxed and comfortable as I wanna feel.

[15:10] That's why whether I'm traveling or staying at home, I reach for the same quints go anywhere pieces again and again. A 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.

[15:42] You gotta pack smart like a spy. 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,

[22:33] 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 Bain. 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 nowhere to get home. And I lived 25 miles outside of Washington. There was one night that I said to Dave, if I'm gonna catch the last train out, I gotta get out of here.

[23:04] 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 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,

[23:35] 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 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.

[24:07] Some of them had been four, five years sitting in this stack. So I thought, well, if I'm gonna do anything that's worth anything, I'm gonna 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 Lapson, she went on to really great things at ThinkTanks 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 requests?

[24:40] 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 gonna have to write a great paper. I want you to write the next national intelligence estimate on Iraq.

[25:12] Now, a national intelligence estimate, NIE, or special national intelligence estimate, SNE, 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, SOCM. 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.

[25:44] It can be 10 pages. It can be a hundred 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 Berger 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 gonna say it was 24, 25 pages. It took me a couple of weeks, which is fast,

[26:15] 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.

[26:48] And then the National Intelligence Officer convenes the community in his conference room. We're all sitting around this big 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 wanna change happy to glad. I wanna change will to will probably. Seriously.

[27:18] 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.

[27:51] 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, 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.

[28:23] 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 gonna 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 was just change the date

[28:55] 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 US policy toward Iraq than it was a failure of analysis. The analysis was exactly right, actually, in historical retrospect.

[29:25] 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. I was, 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. Your phone is your lifeline, calling your kid to say goodnight, waiting on a job callback, or just sending a meme to your best friend when it's been that kind of day.

[36:17] because there's a natural bias in operations against the eggheads on the analytic side. He said, it's gonna 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-911, 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 policy maker to make the best informed policy. I checked in with him a couple of times

[36:48] 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 gonna go to London, that would be one thing because you're not gonna do any operations in London. But Athens, bulletproof vest, strapped on two guns, a buck knife in my back pocket just in case. That changed on 9-11. We're gonna talk about that later. But they needed to teach me how to recruit spies to steal secrets.

[37:20] And then besides that, they needed to teach me how to use a myriad of weapons, how to build and to diffuse 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.

[37:51] Man, they're not gonna 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.

[38:21] 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 counter-terrorism 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 Kiriakou.

[38:52] Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costart and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast and John Kiriakou, Alan Katz and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers. This podcast, it's a Costart and Touchstone production.
