Title: S1E8 The James Bond Academy
Show: John Kiriakou's Dead Drop
Date: 2025-12-29
URL: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/68e695c6d798804c9e4bbd13/e/6948511af7567117397d1a93/media.mp3
Duration: 0:44:06

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[06:33] Ever since he was a little kid, he's loved to see and he was in the merchant marines and now he doesn't get to go to see very often. Now it's all business. And for example, there's this ship coming in tomorrow and it has a giant load of hydrodextrochloromethorophan, right? I don't know what the hell that is. Well, one of the things that they were teaching us was if there's something that's particularly good that's coming out of one of these meetings, excuse yourself, go to the restroom and write yourself a note.

[07:05] This is before cell phones could do things like that. So I did, I went up, I went to the restroom, told him I wanted to wash my hands. Got up to the bathroom and wrote myself a note. I wrote the name of this chemical, whatever it was. So we have a conversation, kids. He had grandchildren that were the same age as my children. I noticed that his hand was shaking. I didn't mean to stare, but I was looking at his hand and he said, ah Parkinson's disease. And I said, oh, my father has Parkinson's disease.

[07:35] It runs in my family and the rest of the conversation was about Parkinson's disease. The next day I have lunch with the other guy. He wants to have lunch at the Congressional Country Club, which is this fancy schmancy country club in Bethesda, Maryland. I had thought that it was private until that day and I actually called them and asked them, do I need to be a member? Do I need to pay some kind of fee? They said no, we're public. So I met him there at the country club in the restaurant. When I got there and I was right on time, you could set your watch to it,

[08:06] which is how I've gone through life, something my father instilled in all of us. Timeliness. He had already been there and he was clearly not on just his first drink. He starts speaking to me in ancient Greek again. And I said, wow, you really have a passion for ancient Greece, huh? And he said, yeah, Plato and I've read Homer's Iliad 20 times and The Odyssey. And he said, well, what about Demosthenes and his contributions to oratory? And I made a joke. I still remember the joke. I said, what about mediocrities?

[08:39] His attitude was, meh, good enough. And the guy just looked at me like either he didn't get it or he was offended. I thought it was funny. Mediocrities. He drank and drank and drank through the entire lunch. Well, we had a rule at the agency. When you're on an operational training exercise, they'll pay for one drink. Everything else comes out of your pocket. It's generous that they'll pay for the one. Well, he had six and then he gets up and he walks out. So I'm stuck with his six drinks.

[09:10] I had a Diet Coke. I still recall. These training days were very long because you have to go back to the exercise room and sit at a computer and write your operational cable and then print it and hand it to the instructor. And then all the instructors gather around and they critique your writing and they critique what you did in the meeting and they critique what you're wearing and the whole thing. It's all very comprehensive. I had this very senior instructor. He had been the director of nearest operation, sweet old guy. And I said, may I speak to you privately?

[09:41] And he said, yeah, actually I wanted to speak with you privately. Everything okay? Well, you know, the instructor at lunch today, he had several very pointed complaints about your behavior, your attitude, my behavior and attitude. And yeah, he repeatedly tried to engage you in a conversation about Greece and you just weren't inviting. I said, correction. He tried to draw me into a conversation about ancient Greece, 500 BC in ancient Greek that

[10:12] I know nothing about and have no interest in. And he said, oh, that's not how it was presented to us. I said, I frankly never met anybody who speaks ancient Greek before that I copped an attitude. I was bored. I was dismissive. He said, well, what is it that you wanted to tell me about him? He drank six or seven drinks. He was clearly intoxicated when he left. He got in the car and drove back to the training facility and was so drunk that I couldn't carry

[10:43] on a conversation about operational issues with him. And besides that, he stuck me with a bill and the bill was like 60 bucks and I didn't eat anything. Whoa. Okay. I'm going to take care of that. And then I never saw the guy again and they gave me my 60 bucks back. I wrote my cable and I said he's got this hydrochloro, dextro, whatever shipment. The request headquarters guidance. I don't know what this is. I don't know what it does.

[11:14] I don't know why it's important or if it's important, please advise, et cetera, et cetera. I'm sent me a cable. The instructor in the next room typed one out and this just came in from headquarters and it's the precursor chemical to make cocaine. Okay. I got it now. So then we go to dinner. He's clearly not my target because he doesn't know how you make cocaine. He's just some old guy who owns an import-export company. And I said, that was so interesting what you told me the other day about this hydrochloro,

[11:46] dextro, whatever. What's that for? He said, I have no idea. The ship comes in, we unload it, the ship goes out and we just wait for the next ship. There's a Turkish woman that is waiting for the shipment to come. She's very sweet. I said, isn't it weird? You're Cypriot and she's Turkish. And he said, no, no, it never comes up in conversation. Why do you want to meet her? And I said, I would love to meet her. Well, this is exactly what they wanted me to say. So I meet her. She's a Turkish American who speaks Turkish, but she's also a senior CIA officer.

[12:18] Her parents were Turkish immigrants. I meet with her and she's very nice. And we have tea and we talk and she says that she fears for her safety. I said, really? Why? I work for my brother in this import-export company. He imports all these things, but these shady characters come to pick it up. And why would you pick something up at two o'clock in the morning? Why wouldn't you pick it up at two o'clock in the afternoon? So I see what the exercise is. So to make a long story short, I recruit her. I intercept the shipment of Dextro-Hydrochloro-Methorophane and am able to protect her from the bad drug dealers.

[12:55] This takes weeks and I'm wearing disguises and I'm doing surveillance detection routes and sometimes I'm being followed and sometimes I'm not being followed. So all of the skills that they're teaching me, I'm using. There are other things. For example, for every meeting, two and from every meeting, you have to plan out a surveillance detection route. That takes hours. And back then there was no such thing as Google Earth. There was no such thing as a GPS. We had these big map books, McNally map books, whatever they were called.

[13:30] And you have to make photocopies of the pages and tape them together. Some of them were like six feet by four feet and you plot out in different color highlighters your first leg, your second leg, your third leg, your fourth leg, your three stops between each of the legs. You have to submit it to the instructors. They approve it. They disapprove it. They tell you why this is a good one, why this is a bad one. And then you have to go out and practice them. So you're not in some neighborhood you've never been in and you don't know that

[14:02] you can't make a left here. It's a no left turn. Well, on your map you have yourself making a left. Or this road has been closed for six months because they're going to repave it. So there's a lot of legwork that goes into something like this. For the first several weeks that I was in Athens, I would work my regular eight, nine, ten hour day. And then I would just drive around the city just randomly looking for a good route, looking for a good stop, looking for a pickup place or a place that can bump somebody or dead drop or whatever.

[14:34] So in the end, the Cypriot guy was an access agent. In the end, the Turkish woman was the actual target. I successfully elicited the intelligence from her, which I wrote in two forms in the form of an intelligence report and in the form of an operational cable. To headquarters, I disrupted the shipment of cocaine, precursor chemical and I saved the day. They would introduce different things on different days. Like today we're going to do everything that we normally do, but in disguises.

[15:09] Or today, instead of your regular briefcase, you're going to use this briefcase that we've invented that has secret compartments in it. Every day it was something different or it was a skill that they would add on top of the other skills. And then we did something very, very interesting. This was a real learning experience for me. They said, OK, bad news people. Tomorrow's day is going to begin at 4 a.m. at Dulles Airport. And I raised my hand and I said, Dulles Airport is closed at 4 a.m.

[15:42] And he says, exactly. OK, here we go. I have to get up at 2 30 in the morning because I live in Timbuktu, Gathersburg, Maryland at the time. It was like 45 miles. I drive to Dulles Airport and it's closed. It opens at five. You can't get in. But they were there waiting for us with a couple of cops or whatever it was before TSA was invented, FAA, and they let us in. And they said, today we are going to do an exercise called the hostile border crossing.

[16:16] You have just flown into the Republic of Victoria and the Republic of Victoria has very bad diplomatic relations with the United States. It's unusual for an American to fly to Victoria. They don't like us and we don't like them. So let's go. Well, as I've said before, I'm not a complete and total idiot. So I know how to cross a border. I've crossed many borders. I've been to 72 countries. Rule number one, don't draw attention to yourself.

[16:49] So I go to the border and these border guards, other instructors are openly hostile. Who are you? My name is John Kiriakou. What are you doing here? Actually, I have a business meeting with one of your business leaders here in the Republic of Victoria. How long are you staying? Only a couple of days. I have a meeting tomorrow, so I'll be here tonight. Finish my meeting late tomorrow. I'll have dinner and leave the following morning. What is that in your pocket? Then that's a ballpoint pen. Let me see it.

[17:20] As soon as I pulled the pen out of my pocket, I said, oh, my God, it was a pen that I had picked up off my desk. And it said US government on it. And I thought afterwards, I wonder if they planted that on my desk. I just grabbed the pen like I might need a pen, put it in my pocket, didn't pay any attention to it. And he says US government. And I said, right. He said it says US government on it. And I said, that's funny. I found it in the glove compartment of my rental car. I wonder if there was somebody from the US government that had the car

[17:50] before I did. And he winks at me like, excellent answer. And he says, pass. And he gets me my passport back and I pass through. As I pass through, I happen to turn and I see an open door. There's a room off to the side. There was one guy in our class who was like the class clown. He was this big, loud, always inappropriate, laughing, joking.

[18:21] And they had him stripped down to his underwear. He wasn't laughing then. So I passed through and at the end of the exercise, of course, we had to wrap it up in an hour because the airport opens. They called all of us together and one of the instructors pointed at him and said, don't draw attention to yourself. Summertime and the living is easy. Am I right, John? That is one of the best parts of summer, Alan. Living really does feel easier. You're about to travel. Good thing you've got a couple of quince pieces going with you.

[18:52] They are as relaxed and comfortable as I want to feel. That's why whether I'm traveling or staying at home, 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.

[19:25] So versatility really matters. You got to pack smart like a spy. That's why a pair of quince is 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.

[26:25] And we ended up doing that blindfolded. They gave us these really heavy leather belts with holsters on them. And they gave us our guns. At first they were brownings. And we had to wear these things for every moment that we weren't either in bed or in the shower. It was actually kind of exciting to me to handle a gun because I thought, wow, this is gonna be some real James Bond shit that we're gonna start doing now. This is gonna be fun. And I was determined to be good at it. We would go out to the range, you shoot from seven meters

[26:56] and then you shoot from 12 meters and then you shoot from 25 meters. And you do that for day after day after day. To the point where I actually got a callus on my thumb just from loading the gun, loading the magazines. And then you do it at night. You'd be surprised how bad you are at shooting. I mean, you're hitting every bullseye. You're trying to hit the head, the face, and the neck or the heart. At night you're like at risk of shooting the guy, standing next to you. That's how hard it is at night. It got very sophisticated rather quickly.

[27:28] We went into something called the shooting house. You've seen this on TV where you go in, you look around the corner, you look up in the air, somebody comes to the window, maybe it's a guy with a machine gun or maybe it's a woman holding a baby. You have literally three quarters of a second before they shoot you with a paintball. If you miss one, you're dead, right? That's it, you're dead. And if you shoot the woman holding the baby or shoot the little kid that pops up in the window to see what's going on out there,

[27:58] you're as good as dead. You might as well be dead. I aced it every single time. I just have a very steady hand and it only takes me half a second to see if it's a hostile or a civilian. It's all about just being steady. You remember we talked about sociopathic tendencies. I'm in a situation like that and my heart is not racing at all. One step at a time, one day at a time, you're gonna be fine. Then we started doing it from a car.

[28:31] You're on this track. They disable your car remotely. They kill the engine remotely. And then there's a beat up van about 100 feet away and the side door slides open and there's a robot in there and it starts firing at you. Now it's firing blank. You're not. So you're trained to bend over so you're out of sight of the robot. You take your seatbelt off, you crawl across the seat and get out of the car on the passenger side,

[29:03] remaining on your belly. You get a shot at the robot and you disable the robot. It just so happened I couldn't get a clear shot and so I shot out the windows of my own car and I was able to hit the robot and I disabled the robot and the instructors run out onto the range. Damn it, Carriacou! That was the last decent car we had. It was a Ford Taurus. I said I couldn't get a clear shot. You're the ones that taught us to do anything we need to do to get the clear shot.

[29:34] You keep saying get off the X, get off the X. Okay, well I can't get off the X because you disabled my car. The way I can get off the X is to disable the robot and the only way to do that is to shoot out my own windows. I apologize, I shot out the windows. Then we went to the Remington Pump Action 12 gauge. I had never fired a rifle or a shotgun. The Remington only holds two cartridges. What if you need to fire three shots or five shots? There was this old timer who was one of the instructors.

[30:06] This guy had to be really close, I would say to his 80th birthday. And he always had a cheek bulging with chew tobacco and he was a deep southerner. He says, okay, youngster. So you're the one who ain't never touched a gun before. Huh? I said, yeah, I'm the one. He never fired a Remington Pump Action before. I said, nope. He says, you know why we use the Remington Pump Action? I actually know, I don't. Three reasons. Number one, you can use buckshot,

[30:36] which will kill anybody if they're trying to break into your house. Number two, they're easy to load, fire, and clean. What's number three? I said, I don't have the foggiest idea. And he cocks it. He says, it makes that bitchin' sound. I still laugh when I think about it. They've got these steel plates about the size of a pie plate and you have to hit them. We weren't using buckshot, but we weren't using birdshot either. It was something in the middle. Enough to make the pie plate fall back,

[31:07] which indicates that you hit it. So I go, ch-ch-pff, hit him both. Now let's go to 12 meters, okay? Ch-ch-pff, hit him both. Okay, you can't do it from 25. I did him both. He says, okay, okay, smart guy. Now we're gonna do three at a time. I said, well, how do you load it? How do you load the third? And he shows me that you keep one cartridge in between your two fingers on your left hand.

[31:40] And then you go, ch-ch-boom, ch-ch-boom. And then when it opens with your two fingers, you just move your two fingers over the barrel, load it, and then do ch-ch-again. I was like, okay, I can do that. So I did three, then I did four. Never missed. He pulled me aside after dinner. And he said, this is gonna sound crazy, but I think you could be a competitive skeet shooter. And that is how I became a competitive skeet shooter. And I was darn good at it. There are shooting clubs all around the Washington area.

[32:12] And I did it as far away as Warm Springs, Virginia on the border with West Virginia. And I didn't miss. It was so much fun. Clay pigeons and all kinds of stuff. I was just good at it. Then we started doing exercises at night. The farm is an absolutely enormous facility. It's well over a thousand acres. It's got driving tracks, and you're driving through the woods. It has mock-ups of little towns or villages. It's got everything.

[32:43] There might be 50 analysts there, and you would never encounter them. They would never encounter you, unless you all end up in the officers club afterwards drinking yourself silly, which we did most nights. They're dormitories. But because we had weapons, we got our own rooms. The analysts had to share rooms. The ops guys got their own rooms, which I enjoyed very much. We would do these exercises where you're in a car and you're driving down some country road and there's a van broken down on the side. Is it just a van broken down? Or is it an IED?

[33:15] Or is it a car bomb? Because it can be any of those things. And then you come to a stop and you're looking at the van and you don't see anybody around. You're sitting there idling, trying to assess what is it? You don't see anybody around. The van's not running. And as you're sitting there, somebody opens your driver's side door, which you forgot to lock and puts a gun against your head and says, "'Congratulations, you've just been kidnapped.' "'Damn it!' "'That's how I learned the hard way to keep my door locked.'

[33:45] "'And the first thing I do, still, "'every time I get in the car, I put my seatbelt on, "'I lock the door and then I start the car in that order.' "'So you learn the hard way.' "'Then we would do things like pit maneuvers, "'which was just fascinating.' "'Pit maneuver is there's a car ahead of you, "'he's speeding away, you're trying to get to him. "'You can't get him to stop, so you hit him.' "'Right at his rear wheel.' "'And if you hit him just perfectly at the rear wheel,

[34:16] "'his car will spin out and stall. "'And that's how you get him.' "'But then, if you know how to do a pit maneuver, "'you have to learn how to stay out of a pit maneuver. "'Is somebody's trying to do it to you? "'You keep a completely unreliable speed. "'You go 50, 30, 60, 30, 75, 25.' "'He'll hit you a couple of times. "'He'll hit you behind the rear wheel, "'he'll hit you in front of the rear wheel. "'It won't make you spin out. "'It'll just be like you've been in a minor fender bender.' "'I injured myself pretty severely

[34:48] "'in one of these exercises.' "'One of the things they taught us was "'when to crash through a roadblock "'and when to not crash through a roadblock.' "'The first thing that they teach you is "'the weight of the car is, of course, at the engine, right? "'So if there are two cars and the fronts of the cars "'are touching each other and blocking the road, "'you want to hit the trunk of the car "'because that's the light part of the car "'and it'll flip the car out of your way "'and you can take off and avoid being assassinated. "'If the car is in a V with the bottom of the V

[35:19] "'pointing toward you and you can't hit the rear "'of either side, maybe there are trees, "'maybe there are concrete jersey barriers, "'you learn very quickly how to go 60 miles an hour "'in reverse and then spin it around, "'put it in, drive as quickly as possible and take off. "'I can't tell you how many transmissions "'we completely ruined. "'They had a fleet of cars just for us to wreck. "'Beaters that they bought from the junkyard "'or for some auction for $250. "'We were going through cars like crazy. "'So they gave me this beater car "'and I had to crash through a roadblock.

[35:51] "'I'm about 100 feet away, I see the roadblock, "'there are these guys dressed as irregular militia. "'The guy's got his hand up telling me to halt "'and I just gas it and I'm going straight for him. "'He jumps out of the way and I smash the rear of the car "'and I get through the roadblock. "'But because this car was a beater piece of junk, "'my seat became detached from the floor of the car "'and I smashed my knees against the dashboard. "'Then you gotta go to the hospital emergency room.' "'And I ended up wearing a knee brace for months after that.

[36:24] "'But it ended up leading to a condition "'called spontaneous osteonecrosis. "'It killed my knee joint to the point where in an MRI "'my knee looked like a sponge with a thousand "'little holes in it. "'The doctor said, you must have been "'in a serious car accident. "'And I said, yeah, actually I was. "'It was a long time ago. "'And he said, that's what spontaneous osteonecrosis is. "'It'll take 10 or 20 years.' "'I said, yeah, actually it's been 16 years.' "'He says, that knee's gotta come out right now.

[36:55] "'And so I've got a titanium knee now "'and a nasty wicked scar to prove it.' "'Other than that, this was the best training course "'I ever had in my life.' "'The graduation ceremony was so much fun. "'We all wore complete disguises "'to the graduation ceremony. "'And that's how we took our graduation picture, "'all in disguises. "'It was hilarious. "'I still have the pictures. "'You get a nice little certificate "'that of course is classified, "'so you can't display it anywhere. "'It stays in your personnel file. "'That you are a graduate of the operations course "'accelerated.'

[37:26] "'Oh, I was very proud. "'Like, wow, I'm actually a spy now. "'I'm a spy and I have the certificate to prove it.'" Listen to this ACAST show. Add free on Amazon Music with your Prime Membership or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. It opened my eyes in so many ways. Listen, I've been out of the CIA for 21 years and I still have my head on a swivel

[37:56] looking at the side view mirrors and the rear view mirror to make sure I'm not under surveillance. That training changed my life and it wasn't quite over yet. There's still one more course that I needed to take and it was called the bomb course. The CIA has another facility in a different state and you have to fly to get there. So they flew us down on this private jet that the CIA used to own. In an ill-advised period of cost cutting, we actually donated it to the FBI, so it's theirs now. We borrow it. Anyway, we flew down on the plane. A van picks us up and takes us to,

[38:29] we just called it the base. It's a week-long course and they start with the basics. There's a little bit of chemistry so we're gonna go over the basics again and we start off with the most basic weapon, which is the Molotov cocktail. Coke bottle, Pepsi bottle. You fill it with gasoline, roll up a rag, you stick the rag in to act as a wick, you light the wick and you just heave it at the wall. And when it hits the wall, it breaks, igniting the gasoline and it makes a gigantic fireball that lasts about two seconds.

[39:00] We've all seen Molotov cocktails on TV. But then we got serious. The next day they introduced us to detonators. I had never seen a detonator before. I had seen pictures of them, you see them on TV, but you hold one in your hands and you're like, this thing is so small. How much damage could this really do? Oh, it'll blow off both your hands and probably at least one of your eyes. Just the detonator. So what we did is with debt cord, detonation cord, we attached the detonator to debt cord. We put it about 100 feet away.

[39:31] We'd go into a bunker. There was a bunker where only just at, right there at ceiling level was above ground and it had really thick bulletproof glass. So 95% of your body is underground. Just your eyes are above ground and then you can watch the explosion. The detonator does far more damage than you might think. The purpose of the detonator is to set off the rest of the bomb. The rest of the, whatever the explosive is that you happen to be using. It's in most cases commercially it's TNT, but it can be anything. So then we start on the third day with anfo,

[40:04] ammonium nitrate. This is the bomb that Timothy McVeigh used in Oklahoma City to take down the Murrah building, the federal building. I was surprised at how easy it was to make that bomb. It's just fertilizer and diesel fuel. It's as simple as that. In fact, for my final exam, I made an ammonium nitrate bomb. It was a paper grocery bag and I filled it about two thirds of the way with fertilizer that you would buy at Home Depot and then with a wooden spoon,

[40:36] I very slowly mixed in diesel fuel that you can buy at any gas station. The fertilizer that I used was commercial fertilizer. So it's ammonium nitrate, ammonia, nitrogen and diesel fuel. It's as simple as that. The way they taught me, you have to mix it with a wooden spoon very slowly. All the little fertilizer pellets absorb some of the diesel fuel. Again, this is just in a paper grocery store bag and then I stuck a detonator in.

[41:07] I ran debt court out of it. For my final exam, I put it under a van and I hit the bomb. They found the transmission 300 yards away in the woods. That's what a massive explosion it was. So much fun. I know it sounds silly, but really what all of us wanted to do was just push the button, blow shit up. The sound of the explosion is deafening for all of these bombs. And I said to one of the instructors,

[41:37] surely there are people living around here. And he said, yeah, and they bitch all the time because they're constantly blowing things up, big things. In addition to the ammonium nitrate bomb, we did sticks of dynamite and all different kinds of things. At the end, you just chose which bomb you wanted to build and then you got to blow a car or van up. We all passed, we all did well. Blowing things up is fun. Not blowing things up is nerve wracking. The hard part was learning how to diffuse them. They made things safe by just not attaching a detonator.

[42:11] So there was nothing to cause the explosion to occur in the first place. You know how on TV it's, do I cut the red wire? Do I cut the green wire? What did they teach me? What about that black wire? I never saw a black wire before. That's not it at all. That's just in the movies. But there's a science to it. You can't risk a spark or static electricity or an errant signal from a garage door opener or whatever. I mean, it's really dangerous. But they taught us how to do it. And I came out of that thing a week later,

[42:42] really feeling smart. I felt transformed by this training. And I only took two other classes over the course of the next year or two. I took advanced counter-terrorist driving, which was out west in the desert, going over sand dunes and breaking the axle, the car and that kind of thing. And then I was one of only a dozen officers in the entire CIA who was chosen to take a six-week course called Advanced Counter-Terrorism Operations. And I took that course

[43:12] and finished it just in time for 9-11. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before we get to 9-11, I have to finish my tour in Athens, where some of my counter-terrorism training would absolutely come in handy. Next time, we'll return to Athens, where things were about to heat up hotter than they already were. That's in my work and unfortunately at home. As always, thanks for listening. Please don't forget to like, subscribe, review or comment.

[43:42] It really does help. Until next time, I'm John Kiriakou. 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 costard and touchstone production.
