Dead Drop (podcast)
===================

Dead Drop is John Kiriakou's narrative podcast, a season-long retelling of his intelligence career, named for the tradecraft technique.

Format and credits

Season 1 launched in October 2025 with "What Makes This Spy Tick," followed by episodes tracing his path chronologically, "The New Recruit," "Golden Boy" (Athens, "a beautiful, almost kind of surreal place, while a guy named Osama bin Laden begins to make his first moves against America"), "Good Spies, Bad Endings," "A Failure of Analysis," and onward into the post-9/11 hunt. Mini-episodes fill the gaps between chapters, among them "A Spy's Guide to Sofia."

Every episode carries the same credits: written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz; produced by Costard & Touchstone Productions; executive producers Kiriakou, Katz, and Nick Mechanic.

The pitch

The show's stated ambition: "to give you the deepest possible perspective on the world of spying and what makes any spy tick, it's like living life with an additional layer to it, a layer only you and a handful of other people know about." The sign-off leans into the conceit: "Now that you know where the drop box is, you might as well take advantage. Who knows what secrets you'll learn."

Reach

By July 2026 John Kiriakou put Dead Drop at number six in the world in the history category and 238th overall out of some six million podcasts, finishing its second season. He has separately given the download figure as three million, describing himself as "crazy grateful" for it.

He distinguishes it from Briefing Room by genre rather than by status: Dead Drop is the storytelling programme, Briefing Room the news show. The distinction arose because he had described Briefing Room on air as his only official podcast, and an emailed correction from a listener prompted him to clarify that he had simply been thinking about news rather than storytelling.

Format and credits

Each episode opens with Kiriakou's own framing of the show, "Welcome to Dead Drop, what makes a spy tick?", and an address to the listener "from storyteller to storyteller", followed by a request to like, review, share or comment, on the reasoning that for podcasts and podcasters reaching the widest possible audience is the mission. The closing credits name it as written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz, produced by Cosdar and Touchstone Productions, with Kiriakou, Katz and Nick Mechanic as executive producers.

See also

- Dead drop
- John Kiriakou
- Tora Bora
