A spy’s guide to a city is the organising idea behind the third season of John Kiriakou’s audio podcast Dead Drop, which he described in July 2026.[1]
The premise
The contrast Kiriakou draws is between two ways of standing in the same street. A tourist arriving in Athens, London, Stockholm or Paris reacts to the landmarks: there is the Eiffel Tower, let us go to the top of it; there is a popular restaurant on the left bank.[2]
A CIA officer looks at the same city completely differently. In Athens, he says, “you’re not going to even pay attention to the Parthenon because you’re worried about somebody coming out from behind this building and shooting you in the head.” The attention goes to surveillance, counter-surveillance, surveillance detection and keeping yourself safe.[2]
Stockholm as the test case
The idea was sharpened by a visit to a city he had never before given a second thought. Kiriakou had not been to Stockholm, and had no professional reason to think about it — Sweden being, in the mental filing he later described as mistaken, one of the good places.[3]
What changed his mind was the Olof Palme assassination, which his hosts walked him through minute by minute along the actual route. His conclusion: when the prime minister himself can be murdered on the street in the centre of the city, and over forty years nobody has been conclusively identified either as the shooter or even as a participant, “then we’re probably looking at Stockholm wrong.”[3][4]
The season was planned to cover Athens, London, Paris, Rome, Bangkok, Abu Dhabi and Dubai — places Americans go on holiday or for business and, in his view, look at in the wrong way.[4]