John Kiriakou traces his interest in the world, and ultimately his application to the CIA, to a radio he did not choose. At nine he went with his father to an auction; at the end, everything unsold was swept into a single box which his father bought for fifty cents. “It happened to have a tri-band radio in it — AM, FM, shortwave. We put two batteries in it and it worked.”[1]
Starting with AM
The first night he worked the AM dial, where stations boost to 50,000 watts after sunset. He recalls WRVA Richmond, “the 50,000-watt voice of Virginia, they used to say”; WGN Chicago; WOWO in Fort Wayne, Indiana; and KRLD in Dallas. “And I remember thinking: Dallas, Texas. It’s so far away. I had never been that far away from New Castle, Pennsylvania.”[2]
The next thought was the decisive one: “well, if I could get Dallas, Texas on AM, what could I get on shortwave?” A couple of nights later he caught the Voice of Greece — he can still recite the station identification — “and my grandmother cried when I played it for her. And I thought, wow, this is fun. I’m on to something here.”[3]
The club, and Radio Ulan Bator
In 1978, aged fourteen, he joined the American Shortwave Listeners Club for what he remembers as about twenty dollars a year — “a lot at the time” — which bought a photocopied magazine every month.[4]
“It turned out that in October of 1978 I was one of only two people in the country that was able to log and verify Radio Ulan Bator, Mongolia.” He sent the station a QSL sheet reporting what he thought he had heard — “I think you were speaking Chinese” — and was corrected: “we were not speaking Chinese, we were speaking Mongolian,” along with the signal strength, the propagation disturbance and the overall quality. They also sent him a postcard from Mongolia. He forwarded a copy to the club magazine, “and they put me on the cover of the magazine for Radio Ulan Bator, Mongolia.”[5]
The radio shack
“I had a walk-in closet in my bedroom that I turned into what I called a radio shack. And I had the map of the world on the wall. And every time I would be able to log a station and get confirmation in writing, I would put a pin in the map — and looking at that map every single night for years, it was a real foundation for me.”[6]
He pairs it with a globe he would spin and stop with a finger, “and fantasise about going on vacation wherever my finger happened to stop.” Asked why he went to the agency, he gives two answers and does not rank the second below the first: “sure, public service — my grandparents instilled this real necessity to go into public service. But then at the same time, for selfish reasons, I just wanted to see the world, and I knew that I otherwise didn’t have the money to do it.”[7][8]
The second radio, and the numbers
A later auction with his father produced a Second World War communications receiver, “big tubes in the back of it” which shocked him whenever he forgot to switch it off before touching them. It covered all the shortwave bands and all the military bands, and on the obscure ones he picked up ship-to-shore traffic from cruise ships — passengers who had lost money in the casino asking for more to be wired.[9]
And, occasionally, something else: “every once in a while I would hear — almost always a man’s voice — just say things like ‘eight, five, three … two, six.’ And I’m like, what is that? And it wasn’t until I went to the agency that I realised it was spies reporting back, probably to Moscow, using their one-time pads and speaking in one-time code.”[10]
Still listening
The habit has not left him. Visiting Havana two years before this 2026 recording, he took a radio at the request of a friend who had never been to Cuba and wanted to know what came in on AM. “I could hear everything on AM in Havana that I could hear north of Pittsburgh” — any major-league baseball game, and effectively any South Florida station, the signal having only water to cross.[11][12]
A second telling
Asked in 2023 who he was before any of it, Kiriakou answers with the radio rather than with the agency. “I’m just a normal average guy. I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, nuclear family. My parents were public school teachers and, you know, grew up with baseball and football and church on Sunday and — my dad, when I was 8 years old, my dad bought me a shortwave radio at an auction for 50 cents. I still remember it.”[13]
The consequence is put in one sentence: “that radio, that beat-up old radio opened the entire world to me. As soon as the sun went down, I could listen to the BBC or Radio Moscow or stations in China and Cuba and Europe and all over the world. And I decided then that I wanted to see the world. I wanted to go to school in Washington, D.C. and I wanted to see the world. And that’s what I ended up doing.”[13][14]
The details differ from the fuller account he gives in 2026, and the variance is preserved rather than resolved: here he is eight and the radio is bought for him, where in the later telling he is nine and it arrives incidentally, inside a fifty-cent box of unsold auction junk his father bought at the end of the sale.