Title: S1E22 The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
Show: John Kiriakou's Dead Drop
Date: 2026-04-06
URL: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/68e695c6d798804c9e4bbd13/e/69c2ea847878605e11fa280c/media.mp3
Duration: 0:29:42

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[06:35] We appreciate it more than you know. Since we're rolling in the good, let's stay there for a little while longer. Deloitte had me do two things that were really, really fun. They told me one day, listen, we want you to go to Hyderabad, India for six weeks and we want you to identify a couple of open source intelligence companies that we might be interested in purchasing. And I said, cool, I get in the plane, fly to Hyderabad, India. They had hired a driver for me.

[07:06] They gave me an office in the Deloitte offices in Hyderabad and I started collecting. There were six open source intelligence companies doing business there at the time. I narrowed it down to two and I said, I would recommend that the firm purchase India Tiger analysis. I said, everybody's highly educated and where in DC we're charging out our time at an average of $1,000 an hour. We're going to pay the Indians $5 an hour and we can still charge out the time at $1,000. It may need a little bit of editing because maybe their English isn't as good as ours,

[07:41] but I mean, this is a serious revenue boost. They bought the firm. They paid something like $50 million for it and they bought it just based on my recommendation. And then something happened that was literally the most fun I ever had outside the CIA. I had a source call me. He was a new partner. He and I just hit it off. He was fascinated that I was from the CIA and then even more fascinated that all of my colleagues were from the CIA. So he had come from a firm called KPMG Consulting that had later changed its name to Bering Point.

[08:17] He called me and he said, something's up at Bering Point. Like what? And he said, I don't know, but it's big. They sent an email to every partner around the world and said, mandatory global partners meeting at the convention center in Orlando, Florida next week. Be there. I said, what do you think it could be? He said, honest to God, I have no idea. So I told my partner, he said, pick somebody, anybody and get down to Orlando convention

[08:48] centers attached to two hotels. There's one hotel on each side, the Ritz Carlton, and they took every room in the Ritz Carlton and the Marriott on the other side. So my colleague and I, a young new hire woman, she and I were on the Marriott side. She was the least experienced out of all of us, which was good in a way because I could sort of mold her as to how things like this are done. And it was bad in that she took risks that were utterly unacceptable. And I'll tell you about

[09:19] that in a second. I had to go to New York first to meet with the general counsel of Deloitte. And he said, here are the rules, the laws that you have to operate under. You can walk into their meetings so long as the door stays open. If the door is closed, that's a private meeting and you have to leave. I flew down there. The first thing I did was I went to Radio Shack. You remember Radio Shack. They would sell radios and phones and batteries and gadgets and this and that. I bought an earpiece with one of those curly Q wires attached to

[09:55] it and I put it in my ear and I ran it down my shirt, but it wasn't attached to anything. So it looked like I was security or secret service. On the first day of this conference, they're all in the giant ballroom of the convention center. And I'm standing in the very back with this earpiece hanging out of my ear. If you put 600 people in a room, it gets hot in there. So they left all the doors open. Okay, this is a public meeting. Well, I also bought one of those little pocket recorders, little digital recorders,

[10:27] and I recorded everything. The CEO of the company gets up. He says, people, we're going bankrupt and we have to sell the company. We can't keep this up. Well, as it so happened, they had the biggest federal practice of any one of the big four or the little eight consulting firms. Deloitte, as it so happened, had the smallest federal practice of any of them. So Deloitte would be very interested in purchasing bearing point. Everybody's like, oh my God, what are we going to do? We're all going to lose our jobs. Oh, this is a catastrophe.

[11:02] Then they take a break. I run into the men's room. I go into a stall and close the door. And I sit down on the toilet seat and I just hold my recorder up. All these guys come in. They're all standing at the urinals saying, this is bullshit. I just booked $150 million deal with the Department of Agriculture, blah, blah, blah, just spilling their guts in them. 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

[11:36] of quince pieces going with you. 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

[12:08] has all kinds of new challenges that impact how you pack. 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

[19:25] doctor supervised diet and in the next nine months I lost 77 pounds just by sheer willpower. It was when I was at my thinnest, my happiest and my most successful that I got a call one day from Brian Ross of ABC News. Still using the tournament with an online sports book time to ditch the app and join Kalshee America's number one prediction market platform. Kalshee is live and regulated in all 50 states. On Kalshee you're trading against peers in a live market

[26:26] who later became CIA director during President Trump's first term, oversaw the project to destroy the tapes. She had a bit more skin in the game than most people having been the commandant at Site Green. The tapes were destroyed. They were actually ground up in an industrial grinder, but an awareness of their existence had come into being. Now the question became what was on the tapes that the CIA felt so compelled to destroy, to cover up. Then bits and pieces of the CIA's torture memos, its tortured arguments, justifying and legalizing torture

[26:59] started to surface and the news media's feeding frenzy intensified. They'd gone from doubting the story to pursuing it relentlessly. As the CIA had been entirely closed about the subject, other than to deny that America ever did such a thing, and as they destroyed evidence, which would have clarified who exactly did what to whom, members of the press did what they could to fill in the most obvious blanks. At some point, my name came up in their investigations. It was one of the few that they had and so they made several assumptions. In December 2007,

[27:33] my life was really going great. I loved my job. My second marriage was happy. I was able to see my kids. I had stopped following news about al-Qaeda after I left the CIA and really to a larger degree, I had stopped thinking about it altogether. Then I got a call at the office from Brian Ross, a senior investigative journalist at ABC News. I felt a slight rush of apprehension, really, when I took that call. Brian was polite, professional and direct. He said that he had a source who told him that I had tortured Abu Zubeda. In the next episode of Dead Drop,

[28:09] What Makes a Spy Tick, we'll talk about what happened next. To say things were about to get out of control, well, that's an understatement. If you enjoy the podcast and we sure hope you do, please remember to like, share, comment on and review us. It really helps. And if you want to hear more from me, please check out my other podcasts. There's Deep Program that I do with Ted Rawl that drops Monday to Friday at 9am Eastern time on both YouTube and Rumble. And there's also Deep Focus that drops about twice a week on YouTube. Until next time, thanks for listening.

[28:44] I'm John Kiriakou. Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costard 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. Still using the tournament with an online sports book, time to ditch the app and join Kalshee, America's
