[00:00] This podcast, it's a casted in touchstone production. The first time I ever met George Tennant was at the Greek Festival at St. George Greek Orthodox Church in Bethesda, Maryland. It was the summertime and Greek festivals all around America are major fundraisers for the church. So you go and you buy a Yuro or some lamb or some Vlaki or whatever and they usually have a band and people are dancing.
[00:30] It's a fun way to go through 50 bucks. I'm standing in line for a Greek dessert called lukumades, which are just fried balls of dough. They put them in a bowl, they slather them with honey and cinnamon and they're the most scrumptious things you've ever had in your life. I'm standing in line with my brother and it's kind of a long line and I said to him, you know the best lukumades I ever had were on the island of Gios when I was on my honeymoon with Joanne. I said, I've never had lukumades that were so delicious and so perfectly made
[01:04] as I did in Gios. And just then this guy turns around and he says, I agree. The most delicious lukumades I've ever had were in Gios. I recognize him immediately as George Tennant, the deputy director of the CIA. I said, oh Mr. Tennant, my name is John Kiriakou. I'm one of your analysts. We shook hands. He said, where are your people from? I said, Rhodes, he said, nice to meet you. I said, this is my brother Emmanuel. I told him that I was one of his analysts and that was the end of the conversation.
[02:08] of intelligence programs at the National Security Council. So he had never worked for the CIA before. He had overseen the CIA as the staff director at SSCI. So he's going around office to office to office. Not randomly. We were told in advance the deputy director's coming to shake hands. So we're all there in the branch, standing there waiting, and he comes in. I said, hello, Mr. Tennant, John Kiriaka. We met at the Greek festival in Bethesda. Right, right. Your people are from one of the islands.
[02:39] Yes, sir. We're from Rhodes. All four of my grandparents came from Rhodes. And then he said something that was funny when he said it and became not at all funny later. He said to everybody else in our little area there, he thinks he's better than I am. Because his people are from the islands and mine are from the mountains. And the island people always look down on the mountain people. Well, the truth is Greek islanders do look down on Greek mountain people.
[03:10] I don't because I'm American. I thought he said it jokingly because everybody laughed. And I said, oh, come on, that's not true. And I just kind of forgot about it. Then he became the director. Eventually I ran into him in the hall and I was standing with a colleague talking in the hall. And he walked past and I said, good morning, sir. And he says, good morning. And he says to my colleague, be careful of him.
[03:40] He thinks he's better than I am. And I thought, ha, ha, ha, OK, you're still doing that. All right, well, it was kind of funny the first time. It's not really funny the second time. And then while the Clinton administration was bombing Iraq every once in a while over a no fly zone violation or a sanctions violation or whatever it happened to be, I got called into the office one Sunday morning. The national intelligence officer for the Near East called me and said, put on
[04:13] a good suit. You have to brief the director. So I put on my best suit. I drive into headquarters. I meet up with the NIO, the national intelligence officer. Together we take this private elevator called the director's elevator up directly into the director's office. We get up there. And it's George Tennant, John McLaughlin, the deputy director of the CIA, General Soup Campbell, Lieutenant General, who was the associate director of central intelligence for military operations and the NIO and me. So I sit down, I give the briefing.
[04:45] One of the things that struck me immediately was I was in my best suit. The NIO was in his best suit. John McLaughlin always had $2,000 suits and the most gorgeous neckties you've ever seen. General Campbell was wearing his three shiny stars on his uniform. And George was wearing a lumberjack shirt, a pair of blue jeans with a tear on the knee and Timberlin boots. And while I'm giving the briefing, he takes his boots off and then he takes his socks off and starts picking his toenails.
[05:19] I remember thinking to myself, that is so incredibly rude. It has to be meant as a personal insult to me. I finished the briefing and when I finished it, I finished with what I always said at every high level briefing. If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them. And he says to this small group of very important people, he thinks he's better than I am. His people are from an island, mine are from the mountains. And he thinks he's better than I am.
[05:50] I said, sir, that is not true. I do not think I'm better than you are. He said, that's what all the islanders say. They pretend that they're not bigoted against the mountain people. The truth of the matter? Yeah, he's right. Island people do think they're better than mountain people. We were seafaring people in olden times. We had exposure to foreign cultures, which kind of made our own culture richer. The mountain people often never had exposure to any foreign culture. Even when the Ottoman Turks occupied Greece from roughly 1450 AD until 1917, those mountains
[06:28] were so high they didn't bother to go up there and kill those Greeks. It wasn't worth the trouble. And frankly, the area of quote unquote Greece where Georgia's family is from is actually a part of present day Albania. We got out of the meeting, got back in the elevator, and the NIO, very senior officer who was an old friend of mine says to me, what the fuck was that all about? And I said, Ben, he has been doing that to me since the day he walked into the office. And I don't understand it because there are other Greek Americans that he has
[07:00] glommed onto and he's promoting all of them. The NIO said to me, do you think he's joking? And it's just gone a little too far. I said, I used to think he's joking. There was something strangely off kilter about the director of the CIA maintaining a long term personal grudge for completely Greek cultural reasons against another member of the CIA community. As I was going to learn, George wasn't the only person above me in the food chain who for various reasons felt and held a grudge against me.
[07:32] In time, Georgia's grudge would seem almost charming. Hi, I'm John Kiriaki. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick? This is another episode in the series, What Makes This Spy Tick? Before we get back to Grudge Match Central, I first want to thank you for not holding a grudge either against me or this podcast. In fact, in all seriousness, your generosity toward us, your likes, kind comments and reviews,
[08:42] Sociopathy, by the way, is a personality disorder characterized by a long-term pattern of disregard for the rights, emotions, feelings and safety of others. Now where George Tenet was concerned, maybe we can understand a little where his sociopathy sprang from. George wrote in his own memoir, which I've read twice, that he often struggled with imposter syndrome. He was just a kid who grew up in an apartment above a grocery store. And here he is, the director of the CIA meeting every single morning with the
[09:16] president and the vice president of the United States. He struggled with where he came from. Now his brother, interestingly enough, is a great hero. George Tenet, in the Greek-American community, did not have a similar struggle. His brother became one of the most prominent and important cardiac surgeons in New York City and has been incredibly generous with his wealth in funding the church and church programs and religious education and anything else that the archdiocese of North America happens
[09:49] to need. I decided there was nothing I could do about this. I was just going to have to lump it. And I went about my business. This came up a couple more times. Later on when the Iraq War finally started and I became his principal Iraq briefere, every once in a while when there was an important audience, he would raise it. There was one time we were meeting with the deputy national security advisor, Hadley. I was a little bit intimidated by Hadley because he was going to be the national
[10:19] security advisor. He had the ear of the president and the vice president, which was probably even more important. We're sitting there. I give this very important Iraq briefing in that, you know, here's all the crazy shit that's happened overnight. And this is what the Iraqi intelligence service is doing. And this is what the Iraqi military is doing. And this is what Saddam Hussein is thinking today. And then Tenet looks at Hadley and says, he thinks he's better than I am. And I said, no, sir, I do not think I'm better than you are.
[10:51] Like please fucking stop this. Years after I left the agency and even after I blew the whistle, I went to this major black tie Greek American event in New York City. So I'm wearing a tux and I went with a buddy of mine from my church. We both belong to the same men's group and he's got his tux and he was like a fanboy. He said, oh my God, there's George Tenet. You have to introduce me to George Tenet. And I said, Dean, I really don't want to say hi to him. I don't like him. He doesn't like me.
[11:22] I don't know why. And I'm just not in the mood to be abused again tonight. Come on. This is my only opportunity. Please, you've got to introduce me. I don't want to just walk up to him and shake my hand. I'm going to look like a little kid. All right. So we walk over. I would never call him George. Other people did. People around me, my peers would call him George. He never said to me, ever call me George. So I always called him Mr. Director. Even when others were saying, George, you should take note that such and such happened. George, I wanted to point this out to you.
[11:52] I would say Mr. Director. So we go up to him. He and I are just two used to be CIA guys. We're peers now as far as I'm concerned. But I walked up to him and I said, not George, Mr. Director, I'd like for you to meet my friend, Dean. He says, nice to meet you, Dean. He shakes my buddy's hand. Dean says, Director Tenet, I'm such a fan of yours. You did such a wonderful thing for the Greek American community. You made us all proud, blah, blah, blah. And Tenet says, you know, your friend here thinks he's better than I am. I turned around and just walked away.
[12:23] I didn't say a single word. He didn't need to be like that. He was the dick. How much energy did he expend doing that? For what reason? I went down from the Near East Operations Office back to my office, having been read into these compartments. And my mind was spinning. I just couldn't believe that we were, as an organization, willing to move on from the 9-11 attacks so quickly when, for all intents and purposes, nobody had yet been brought to justice.
[12:53] We had not even yet captured Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. Bin Laden was running around free. The number two, Ayman Zawari, was running around free. We had caught Abuz-e-Beta, but we weren't getting anything from him in terms of actionable intelligence. Not really. He gave us two things that were critical. Number one, he gave us the Al-Qaeda wiring diagram. We had no idea how this organization was structured. We knew that Bin Laden was number one, and Zawari was number two. That was it. We knew that the number three had been Muhammad Atef,
[13:26] but we killed Muhammad Atef in Toribora in October, 2001. We bombed his house. He was taking cover, and when the bomb hit, it just splintered his kitchen table, and one of the giant splinters pierced his heart. It was just a crazy coincidence. So the number three was dead. Our belief was that Abuz-e-Beta had stepped in as the number three. He had not. As it turned out, not only was he not the number three in Al-Qaeda, he had never even joined him ever.
[13:56] He certainly had done bad things on Al-Qaeda's behalf. He had set up the so-called House of Martyrs safe house for Al-Qaeda in Peshawar, Pakistan, and he had founded and staffed the two training camps in Kandahar and Helmand provinces, but he was not an Al-Qaeda leader. He was allied. That was it. He gave us the wiring diagram, and Ali Sufan, the FBI agent who was interrogating him, really got to the heart of the information that Abuz-e-Beta had. Ali was able to draw it out from him.
[14:27] That wiring diagram was critical. So Ali would ask things like this, if you were going to do an operation in, let's say, Dusseldorf, how would you do that? And Abuz-e-Beta answered, well, in Dusseldorf, we have a man, Muhammad, and here's Muhammad's phone number. And Muhammad has a cousin named Abdullah, and Abdullah has access to weapons. And here's Abdullah's email address. And Abdullah shares an apartment with Rashid, and Rashid has access to explosives. And here's his address.
[14:58] So we could go to the Germans and say, hey, you have a serious problem in Dusseldorf. Here's the information. And then the German police raid the safe house and take everybody down. So this was actionable intelligence that disrupted attacks and saved American lives. Critically important. The second thing that he gave us that was critically important is we had no idea how these groups operated either with each other or independently of each other. For example, if there's a group in Dusseldorf
[15:29] and there's a group in Berlin and there's a group in Munich, do they know that there are groups in these other cities? Are they acquainted with the members of these other groups? Do they coordinate operations? And the answer was no. Everything goes through what we came to call core al-Qaeda, which was bin Laden and Zawahidi. So that was immensely helpful. The most important thing he gave us came in a conversation that he had with Ali Sufan. Ali asked him about a terrorist
[16:01] that we had been tracking since the middle 1990s who was using the nom de guerre, Muhtar. Muhtar was responsible for an operation that came to be known as the Bojinka operation. This was based in Manila, Philippines. And it was a plan to simultaneously hijack 14 747 jumbo jets and to fly them into buildings all up and down the West Coast of the United States from San Diego to Seattle.
[16:32] In 1996, Muhtar was laying out this plan, literally laying it out on a table with notes and maps and ideas and he decided to go out and have lunch. And when he left the apartment, it just so happened that the cleaning lady came in to clean the apartment. She sees all of these documents and maps laid out on the dining room table. And she says, this looks like the planning for a terrorist operation.
[17:03] I better call the police. And she calls the Manila police department. They come and they look at the documentation and they say, this looks like the plans for a terrorist attack. We better call the Philippine intelligence service. He came back at some point, saw there was an adieu in his house and he fled. The Philippine intelligence service comes, they recognize it as the planning for a terrorist attack and they call the CIA. And the CIA comes and seals off the apartment, confiscates everything.
[17:33] But while all these people were cycling in and out of the apartment, Muhtar came back at some point. He sees that the authorities are in his apartment and he flees. So we never saw him. We never found him. We never identified him, but we knew that this was a very bad man who was planning a major terrorist attack against the United States. Arguably the biggest terror attack in the history of the world. When Ali Sufan recounted this story to Abu Zubaydah,
[18:04] he chuckled and he said, you don't know who Muhtar is? And Ali said, no, who is he? And Abu Zubaydah said, his name is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We had never heard that name before. And indeed, when Ali sent the information back to Washington and we did the initial name trace on him, we found literally no documents. The FBI eventually said, wait a minute, wait a minute. This guy spent a year living with an American family
[18:37] in North Carolina as an exchange student and then he graduated from North Carolina State University. Like how could we not know that this guy who must have self-radicalized was planning to attack the United States? He must be the number three in al-Qaeda. And so the hunt for KSM began. We went out to literally every source that we had in the world who had any connection, however peripheral it might have been with al-Qaeda to ask them, how do we find Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
[19:11] We finally found one man. I can't really give any details on who he was or where he was, but he gave us very specific information on where KSM was, what time he arrived and how long he was gonna be there. In the middle of the night, we broke down the door and a group of my colleagues grabbed him and immediately sent him to a secret prison. The pictures of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were published. He looks dazed, confused, his hair is all a skew.
[19:47] That was by design. The head of the Asama Bin Laden group at the time, Alex Station, was an old friend of mine. When we raided the place, our colleagues who had participated in the raid caught him, cuffed him, and he was standing there looking defiantly into the camera. And my friend who was head of Alex Station said, I'm not gonna give that picture to the president. So one of the officers punched him in the stomach and tousled his hair. And that was the picture that was released to the public.
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[28:18] and told his former colleagues there, you know we have to attack Iraq, right? And that's where the idea started. We're gonna attack Afghanistan anyway. We might as well take out all of our enemies. We later learned that General Wesley Clark, who was a major player in the Clinton administration, four star general, in the days after the 9-11 attacks, went to the Pentagon to say, hey guys, if you need any help, I'm here, let me know what you need from me. Some of the people who had worked for him
[28:49] when he was a senior Pentagon official were now members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They too had gotten their fourth star. They said, General Clark, you've got to see this memo. And they handed him a classified memo, which was probably a security violation. General Clark was no longer cleared for the information. But the memo was from the Secretary of Defense, Don Rumsfeld, saying, we're going to attack these nine countries, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Syria, Libya. It was every enemy that the United States had in the region.
[29:21] And Clark was like, is this a joke? Are they joking or are they crazy? And these generals, according to Clark's telling of the story, they said, that's what we thought, but they're not joking. So when I came down from the office of nearest operations that day, and I went back down to see Bob Grenier, Bob said, so you signed the documents? I did. Are they out of their minds? He said, yes, but it's not for us to judge. Our mission now is to support the invasion of Iraq. And that's what we have to do.
[29:54] Very quietly, literally one man at a time, people were being pulled out of Afghanistan, pulled out of Pakistan, sent to training classes at the farm or elsewhere, and then very discreetly being put into Northern Iraq. This thing was still so secret at the time that you couldn't tell the guy next to you where you were going or what was happening. I remember going to a briefing where they told us, if you're going to Iraq
[30:24] and you happen to have Iraqi money that you forgot to throw away or give away or whatever, you have to burn it. Nobody can see you with Iraqi money. And I thought, boy, this just has disaster written all over it. One of my oldest agency friends came up to me in the hall one day. We had been friends for, I mean, literally since my very first day in the CIA, we met on my first day and we sat next to each other for years. He walked up to me and he said,
[30:55] so how's this new job? And I said, it's good, it's really good. So you're working for the ADDO. Yeah, which one? Policy support. He says, what the heck is that supposed to mean? I said, I can't talk about it. They've created a new ADDO spot associate deputy director for operations for policy support. Yeah, he said, that's a euphemism, right? Yeah, he said, what are you involved in? Dude, please do not press me. I can't talk about this. And then he whispers,
[31:26] tell me we're not going to attack Iraq. I seriously cannot talk about this. And he says, oh my God. And then he just walks away. So shout out to Mike. I wish I could have been more transparent, but I wasn't able. Bob Grenier was one of the most highly respected officers to come out of the office of Near Eastern operations in his generation. He was a very young member of the senior intelligence service. He had a string of very high level positions,
[32:00] most of which I'm not able to relate here. But once he got to the upper levels of the senior intelligence service, he took on a series of positions like he was the station chief in Islamabad before, during and after 9-11. You can imagine the kind of work that he was responsible for there. He later became the ADDO for policy support. After that he became the director of the counter-terrorism center.
[32:32] So he was very senior, exceedingly capable and trusted by just about everybody. He chose me to be his executive assistant because I had done a bang-up job for him in Islamabad. We just hit it off. I like to pride myself on the fact that I'm good at what I do. I work very hard and I work extremely long hours if that's what needs to be done to get the job completed, but I never lose my sense of humor.
[33:02] I'm happy to joke in Josh with the guys in the office. I always smile. I'm a glass half full kind of guy, but I get the job done. You don't have to be an asshole to be an effective operations officer. There are a lot of guys at the agency who don't realize that. And so he just kind of took to me. When I got back from Islamabad, I was immediately named chief of the counterintelligence branch of Alec Station, the Osama bin Laden group, meaning that it was my job to try to hunt al-Qaeda moles or probes
[33:35] trying to worm their way into the CIA. It was a dangerous job and it was important, but at the same time, I didn't feel like I had the resources necessary to actually conduct mole hunts against terrorists. I once told my boss in that group that my position should be renamed instead of chief of counterintelligence, chief of the walk-in branch. We knew that al-Qaeda, like many of our enemies
[34:05] around the world, would send walk-ins to American embassies all around the globe, pretending to have intelligence that they wanted to share with the United States, but really wanting to get inside an American embassy just to see where the cameras are, how thick the glass is, whether the door is armored, who's carrying guns, who's wearing a disguise, so that if they make a decision to actually attack an American embassy, they know where the weak link is. Literally every day in countries around the world,
[34:37] multiple times a day, al-Qaeda fighters or al-Qaeda sympathizers were walking into American embassies and pretending to want to share intelligence with us. They were gathering intelligence. I only did that job for six weeks. At six weeks, Bob came back and called me and said, hey, I'm getting a bump up and I'm gonna be an ADDO. I said, oh my God, that's fantastic. Congratulations, I can't imagine a better person for a position like this. God knows you've earned it.
[35:07] Three tough years in Islamabad and because we had no presence in Afghanistan during the Taliban, he was essentially the chief of Afghanistan as well. He said, I want you to come up as my assistant. I said, done, I'll take it. I immediately pulled my superiors. I've gotten a request from the seventh floor. It's a request that I can't turn down and so I put in my notice. I have to tell you, I thoroughly enjoyed working with Bob Grenier every single day that I did it. I spent a year on that job and you really can't do an executive assistant position
[35:39] more than a year because it takes so much out of you. I was at my desk six days a week at 3.45 a.m. You've got to get through between 10 and 20,000 cables that have come in from all over the world and boil them down to the five or six most important cables that you need to brief to the DDO, the deputy director for operations, the ADDO, the principal ADDO, and all of the ADDO's four different things,
[36:10] counterintelligence, policy support, this one, that one, the other one, budget, et cetera, at seven o'clock. And then at 7.30, you all get up and you walk into the director's conference room and you give the same briefing to the director of the CIA. And so I had to be on my game six days a week at seven o'clock in the morning and make sure I didn't make a mistake. I would stay from 3.45 a.m. until 5 p.m. I would go home, eat something and go to sleep at six. Bob finally said, you work way longer hours than I do.
[36:44] Bob would come in like a minute before seven and we would run up to the deputy director's office together for the briefing. So Bob said, you're coming in every day at 3.45. So time do you get up 2.15? There was a leadership meeting every day at noon. He said, I'll come back from the leadership meeting which would always end by one. If there's a tasking, I'll give you the tasking. And if there's not a tasking, why don't you leave at one? That helped a lot. Joanne and I separated as we left Athens in August of 2000.
[37:16] And I started dating a woman I'll call Catherine. She was a senior CIA analyst. Beautiful, brilliant. I felt an immediate attraction to her, especially her intellect. Hands down, she was the most brilliant person I had ever met. Not just most brilliant woman, she was the most brilliant person we started dating casually. My divorce was final in the summer of 2002. When I got back from Pakistan that summer, Catherine and I decided to move in together.
[37:49] I was very fortunate in that I had made so much money in overtime in Pakistan. You put in for your 80 hour two week period and I would routinely have 110, 115, 120 hours of overtime. It was ridiculous. I can't tell you how many nights I slept underneath my desk with a jacket balled up to use as a pillow. I had outrageous amounts of overtime, plus danger pay, plus post differential, plus Arabic differential, plus Greek differential.
[38:20] I made a joke at the time that they had to bring me my paychecks in a wheelbarrow because I was making so much money. So when I got back from Pakistan, Catherine and I bought a house and we moved in together. She understood the pressures that I was under. Like when the alarm goes off at 2.15 a.m., six days a week, sorry about that, go back to sleep. Or she'd look at the clock and she'd say, honey, it's six o'clock, you probably should hit the sat. Or when she would get to work at 7.30 in the morning, she would come up with a Starbucks. She knew that Starbucks had just opened at 7.
[38:52] I've been there since 3.45. I've probably been so busy pouring through these 20,000 cables, I haven't had a chance to go to the CIA Starbucks. And so she would bring me a coffee. She understood, which was exactly the opposite of Joanne. Joanne didn't understand, didn't try to understand. She resented the fact that many times I put the CIA first. Joanne really believed in her heart when we were dating and when we were engaged, that once we got married,
[39:23] she could convince me to move back to Warren, Ohio and sell life insurance with her cousin, Dean. And finally I told her, I would rather cut my own throat than move back to Warren, Ohio. I'm not doing it. I used to think kind of arrogantly that as I got older and farther into my adult years, I continued to grow. In retrospect, I did very much continue to grow. She didn't, she didn't want to grow.
[39:56] She liked her life just the way it was. She told me once that she had an idyllic childhood. Her parents were very much in love with each other. They were married for 58 years, 60 years. Her father was an airplane mechanic for the, he was a civilian employee of the Air Force. There was a small Air Force base at Youngstone, Ohio. And her mother was a homemaker, stay-at-home mom. Never had worked outside the home. And Joanne wanted exactly the same life, married to me.
[40:28] So for the most part, she was a stay-at-home mom. She taught ballet part-time for a while, but she was mostly stay-at-home, which is exactly what she wanted. And she was appalled by the cost of living in the Washington, DC area. We could get a magnificent home in Warren, Ohio for 150,000 bucks. And she just could not understand why I wasn't willing to do that. I said to her one time, if I never see a flake of snow again as long as I live,
[41:01] I'll be happy. Warren, Ohio, my hometown of Newcastle, Pennsylvania, which is only 30 minutes away, we used to get that lake effect snow off of Lake Erie. And we never measured snow in inches. We measured it in feet. And even when it was feet of snow, they wouldn't even close the schools. You might get a one-hour delay, maybe, which meant you just woke up one hour earlier to shovel the sidewalk. I didn't wanna live in that kind of environment again. And then she said, well, I have family in Tampa. We could move to Tampa. And I said, what in the world would I do
[41:33] for a living in Tampa, Florida of all places? And she said, again, you could sell insurance. My cousin Dean makes a lot of money. And I said, I am not selling insurance. I have a degree in Middle Eastern studies. I sweated through a master's program in legislative affairs and policy analysis. I had finished my PhD coursework in international affairs focusing on the Middle East. And I'm gonna go work for all state. No, thank you, not doing it, not doing it.
[42:07] I was seeing my sons every other weekend. So every other weekend on Friday, I would leave, drive to Warren, Ohio, pick them up and take them back to my mom and dad's house in Newcastle, Pennsylvania. It was a godsend that my parents were still in Newcastle. I never missed a weekend, except for the time that I was in Pakistan. And when I was in Pakistan, I was able to speak with them on the phone and my parents had them for the weekend. I went through three cars making those trips every other weekend for 11 years.
[42:39] I put more than half a million miles on my cars. I spent more than a quarter of a million dollars making those trips, but I would do it again in a heartbeat because they were young and kids need to have their fathers in their lives. And the situation worked for us. Joanne was unhelpful. She would not let my parents pick up the kids and take them to the house. She insisted that I go all the way to Warren and then have to double back. So it added an hour and a half onto my travel time. I had to actually take her to court.
[43:10] And the judge who was really a wonderful, wonderful, compassionate judge, she said, wait a minute, you drive all the way from Washington, DC every other weekend? Yes, judge. And you drive past your parents' house to pick up the boys and then drive back to your parents' house. Yes, judge. It adds an hour and a half onto my trip. That's all I need to hear. And then she ordered that Joanne take the kids to my mom and dad's house. This was working very, very well.
[43:41] And at the end of my year working for Bob, I asked for a transfer, a domestic transfer. And the DDO, Jim Pavett, Mr. Pavett took a real liking to me. We had similar senses of humor. And as important as he was, as authoritative as he was where he could pick up the phone and get directly to the vice president. He never lost his sense of humor. I thought he was a great guy. In fact, years later after I left the agency,
[44:12] I woke up one Sunday morning, quarter to 6 a.m. And I said, dog gone, we're out of coffee. But Starbucks opens at six. I go to Starbucks just as they open at 6 a.m. I buy the coffee and I'm turning around to leave and there's DDO Pavett wearing yesterday's suit. And I said, Jim, hi. Hi, what are you doing here? I said, I live here. What are you doing here? Visiting a friend. And I said, okay, have a great weekend.
[44:44] And I walked out and I was like, ay, yay, man, you're almost 70 years old and you still haven't changed. I liked Pavett. He told me at the end of my year, he said, listen, pick any job in the world that you want. I'll give it to you. Any job in the world. I really want this domestic assignment. And he said, ooh, that is really not career enhancing. He offered me three very specific positions. Two chief of station positions in the Middle East. And one deputy chief of station position
[45:15] in a gigantic station. I said, my boys are young. At the time they were nine and six. But I really need to be there on the weekends. And he said, okay, if that's what you want, I'll give it to you. And so he gave me this domestic assignment. Literally everybody told me, buddy, you're making a mistake. And I said, I know I probably am, but I really need to be with my kids. And then I left for this domestic assignment. And the chief, the chief of station
[45:46] was a woman named Mary Margaret Graham. I had a history with Mary Margaret. Mary Margaret was the chief of European operations when I was in Athens. And she knew the whole story of the pastry chef. That I had beaten into a coma because he insulted my first wife. That she did not want me in this assignment because I had used a heavy hand in my operations. Well, I had never used a heavy hand in my operations. I was always the good cop. I used a very heavy hand with this guy who had called Joanna Hor. And Mr. Pavett said, this is the guy that I've chosen.
[46:20] He's not asking her. He's telling her, Kiriaku's coming up. He's gonna be working for you. She didn't like that. She didn't like it one bit. She had said that I would never work for her. And indeed, when I had first gotten back from Athens, I tried to get myself assigned to this position. My home office of CTC, the Counterterrorism Center, approved me for transfer and then she rejected it. This was before 9-11, so I didn't have that wasta, as they say in the Middle East.
[46:50] That personal power in that I had become friends with very important people to force her to make the change in her own policy. So I just waited. Then 9-11 came, I went to Pakistan, after Pakistan I went to the seventh floor and after the seventh floor I said, no, I want this assignment. One of the reasons why I had such utter disrespect for Mary Margaret was that she was a member of the Senior Intelligence Service, yet she had literally never recruited a source, ever. She was not an operations officer.
[47:21] She was a paper pusher. When an operations officer went out to meet with a source and then would come back to the station with all this raw intelligence, he would write it up in a series of cables, send it to headquarters, and then she would put it in the proper format. She would take out of it what she thought the analyst needed to know, put it in an even more sanitized format, and then send it around to the analysts. It's called a reports officer. That was her job. But in the 1990s, well, the 80s,
[47:54] the late 80s and the 1990s, there was a class action suit by every female CIA officer versus the CIA saying that the CIA had systematically discriminated against women just because they were women. Well, the truth is that it had a judge in the Eastern District of Virginia said in his decision for the women that he had never seen a case where the respondent had so clearly documented
[48:25] his own crimes. And so as the settlement, every woman, every woman in the CIA got a settlement in cash and a two grade raise, a two grade promotion. So if you were a GS14 or 15, you become Senior Intelligence Service Level One or Level Two. All of a sudden, you're running the place. Yesterday, you're sitting next to John. I was a GS14 at the time. And the next day after that, you're running the place.
[48:55] Listen, I understand the decision. You wanna make the playing field level. But what they did is they put a whole lot of unqualified people in very sensitive positions of import, like Mary Margaret Graham. I think Mary Margaret knew that she was underqualified. She did things to try to make up for that. For example, your job as an operations officer is to successfully carry out operations. It's to recruit spies to steal secrets, as Jim Pavett used to say every single day. The job of the CIA is to recruit spies to steal secrets
[49:29] and to analyze those secrets so that the president can make the best informed policy. Mary Margaret said that is not entirely true. The job of the operations officer is to collect intelligence so that each officer can publish five intelligence reports a month. And if you publish less than five, you do not meet expectations and you will not be promoted. I get to my assignment in the middle of August. And at the end of August, I have two intelligence reports.
[50:01] I didn't inherit a single source from the outgoing officer that I replaced. He hadn't recruited anybody. So I'm starting from scratch. It takes a year to recruit somebody. I have two weeks to start producing. And I actually collected some intelligence from a talkative Eastern European ambassador who liked my face for some reason. I got two intelligence reports. She said, you don't meet expectations. You're not eligible for promotion next year. Mary Margaret, with all due respect, we're the only station in the world that has this requirement. We're competing against other officers
[50:33] all around the world who don't have to come up with five. They don't have to come up with any intelligence reports. In fact, when I was in Athens, I wrote an intelligence report one time and my chief came up to me and said, hey, that was a great report. But listen, just so you know, you don't have to write those things. We do ops here. So get out on the street and do ops. We're not here to babysit the analysts. An operation is anything in furtherance of the CIA's operating directive. An operation can be about Russia, China, Iran, Korea,
[51:04] North Korea rather, Cuba, narcotics, nuclear proliferation, whatever is on the list of what's called the OD, the operating directive that we get from the White House every year in December. And Mary Margaret said, that's not true. Our job is to push paper. I said to her, with all due respect, this policy encourages people to either bank intelligence, like, wow, I had a really great month. I made eight intelligence reports. I'll write up five of them.
[51:34] And then the other three I'm gonna hold for next month, which then makes the intelligence dated and useless. Or God forbid, it encourages people to just make it up. Which happens, you just make it up. Oh my God, I have four this month. I need five, it's the end of the month. The organization that we're covering is out of session. I can't come up with a fifth. I'm just gonna make it up. She said, well, when you become the chief, you can set your own rules.
[52:05] In the meantime, you need to get to work because you have five intelligence reports to write for me. When I took this assignment, I knew that I'd be working for her. She had been in this position for going on four years at that point, which was highly, highly unusual. Usually you're in a position for two years and you have the option to extend for a third. If you're a friend of the director or a friend of the president, yeah, you can stretch it to four, maybe five. She was at least five in that position. So I knew that I would be working for her,
[52:37] but I really believed that I could win her over with my warm and engaging personality. There was a moment when I realized that I could not win this battle. I was one of several CIA officers invited to a diplomatic event. The diplomatic event included representatives from the government of North Korea. Now this is the crown jewel in the career of any CIA officer
[53:08] to recruit a North Korean government official. Most people go through their 30 year career and never meet a North Korean. You're never in the same room with a North Korean, let alone to be at the same dinner with one or four, as was the case. There was an officer who was visiting town. He and I were old friends. We had taken a long trip, month-long trip through the Middle East together when we were junior analysts. He was at the party and I went up to one of the North Koreans and I said,
[53:39] hey, I happened to see you fishing the other day in the river, which was true. I was stalking him. I was surveilling him and I saw him fishing. I said, I saw you fishing in the river. Did you catch anything? And he looked at me and then he and his colleague both walked away very quickly because damn you, now he has to report himself to the North Korean Ministry of Intelligence that probably a CIA guy just approached it. That's all I said was, did you catch any fish? Somebody ratted me out to Mary Margaret that I had tried to engage the North Korean in conversation.
[54:12] She called me unhinged. Now, remember, I've been in the room with presidents multiple times. I've briefed presidents. She never briefed a president. I've associated with kings and prime ministers. I recruited five people in two years and she has the nerve to call me unhinged. That was when I knew there was no way I was gonna win this battle. But just because I wasn't going to win the battle didn't mean I intended to lose quietly.
[54:42] I was a trained spy after all, not a sociopath, but someone with sociopathic tendencies who saw things in terms of the bigger picture. A picture I could do something about or put another way, here was a Jean Le Carré moment I could create for myself. Sound intriguing? Mission accomplished, as some people like to say back then. That's all in the next episode of Dead Drop, what makes a spy tick. Don't forget to like, review, rate or share the episode.
[55:13] Heck, share the whole podcast while you're at it and thank you in advance. If you wanna hear more from me, please check out my two other podcasts. There's Deep Program with Ted Rahl. That drops Monday to Friday at 9 a.m. Eastern time on both YouTube and Rumble. And there's also Deep Focus, which drops about twice a week on YouTube. Until next time, thanks for listening. I'm John Kiriakou. Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costart and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast
[55:45] and John Kiriakou, Alan Katz and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers. This podcast, it's a Costart and Touchstone production.