Title: S1E0 Coming Very Soon
Show: John Kiriakou's Dead Drop
Date: 2025-10-08
URL: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/68e695c6d798804c9e4bbd13/e/68e6970853a5e2858f5ca021/media.mp3
Duration: 0:05:35

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[00:02] Coming very soon to a podcast provider near you, a deep deep dive into the world of espionage, spine and tradecraft, seen through the lens of one of the best known spies in the whole wide world. In Dead Drop, his new podcast former CIA officer John Kiriakou will tell you what makes a spy tick. And the first spy he'll tell you about on a granular emotional, nuts and bolts

[00:34] level is himself. You never lose the tradecraft skills that the CIA teaches you. You always look for surveillance. You always question whether you're being developed by a foreign intelligence officer. You always wonder whether the FBI is looking at you for whatever reason. Most importantly, this podcast is going to tell you how I tick as a human being. That's always been a core element of spying, the human element. Though popular culture might imagine spies lurking silently in the shadows, wearing trench coats, a good spy is actually a people

[01:08] person. The more they can relate to people and get people to relate to them, the more people they'll be able to spy on or recruit as spies in essence. I said to the Archbishop, our family name really is Christodulu and my grandmother used to tell me this story, that we were descended from a very wealthy man who was very, very religious. And he owned a lot of land on the island of Platmos and he traded the land in the 17th century to the emperor in Constantinople. And in exchange the emperor gave him

[01:45] the cave where Saint John received the book of Revelation. And he said, wait a minute, you're talking about Saint Christodulus. I'm descended from Saint Christodulus? He said, that would account for the name Christodulu, the sons of Christodulus. And I said, you know, funny thing, my wife is descended from Jesse James and she's been bragging about it. I'd rather be descended from a saint. It's because we came from a long line of priests. There was one, my great, great grandfather on my mother's mother's side,

[02:19] who was a priest. And I found his death record in the Greek Orthodox Church in our little village in Southern Rhodes. And it says that he was killed by a shark while he was sponge diving. My grandmother said, that's not true. The Turks killed him and threw his body into the sea. And when it finally washed up, sharks had taken bites out of it. But she said he was murdered because he would not stop teaching children how to speak Greek.

[02:49] My grandfather got his citizenship in the twenties, but he said, if you want your wife to be American, you need to come back right now. He literally walked out of the field, left his tools, abandoned his trees, collected my grandmother, took her to Athens, got her an American visa, which is funny because when I worked in the American Embassy 80 years later, they had a framed visa on the wall from 1930, 1940. And I said, oh, I can beat you.

[03:24] I have my grandmother's visa from 1930. They said, are you kidding me? I gave them a copy. They framed it and put it in the consulate. So they got on a ship called the MN Saturnia. Ironically, it was the ship that brought all four of my grandparents to America. I have a picture of my dad in a Greek band in Sharon, Pennsylvania from when he was 16 years old. The picture was taken 1950. It's the earliest one I was able to find. He insisted that we all be musical in our family. I took 12 years of classical piano lessons. I played

[03:58] the clarinet and the saxophone, and I played clarinet in his Greek band. When I was nine years old, I told my parents that when I grew up, I wanted to be a spy. And they thought that was cute. And so for Christmas that year, they bought me walkie-talkies and they bought me a little box that had disappearing ink and a little code reader. Well, I was serious. And so when I was 16, I told my dad, I still remember the conversation. We were driving

[04:30] down Old Plank Road as we were passing Frazier's Pond. And he was adamant that I get a degree in some sort of science. I said, but dad, I'm not interested in science. I want to be a spy in the Middle East. And he said, why? After all these years, can't you just get this out of your system? And I said, no, I want to be a spy. You know, there were James Bond movies on TV and there were comedies, Get Smart. And I just thought it was

[05:02] so cool. I really believed I was going to be James Bond. And in a lot of ways I was. We all were. I had a very good idea of what spies did. And later on in my career, well into my career, I was the executive assistant to the deputy director of operations. He used to have this mantra. He would say it almost every day, the job of the CIA is to recruit spies to steal secrets and to analyze those secrets to provide the best informed analysis to the policymaker. I knew when I was 16, that's what the CIA did. And

[05:35] I knew that that's what I wanted to do.
