S3E1 Whistleblowers & Spies

John Kiriakou's Dead Drop

John Kiriakou opens Season 3 of Dead Drop by reflecting on the profound challenges of rebuilding a life after imprisonment. He details the p

Key takeaways

• Kiriakou faced extreme difficulty finding employment at even basic service jobs like McDonald's or Uber due to his criminal record.
• He alleges that the CIA continued to target and harass him through surveillance long after he had served his sentence.

Main topics

• Whistleblowing
• Post-prison reintegration

Notable quotes

Whistleblowing is the cure for corruption.

Conclusion

A deeply personal introduction that establishes the high stakes and pe

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production. As we start season three, I wanted to tell a quick story about how doing this podcast has changed my life and in the most unexpected ways, all for the good. Literally the biggest superstar in Greece is this singer named Konstantin Argyros. I call him the Frank Sinatra of Greece. And somebody said, oh, no, no, that's not right. He's more the Justin Bieber of Greece. And I was like, okay, but he's very manly, a manly man, right? With a beautiful man's voice singing manly songs. Speaker 1 (0:38) I was in the Hamptons for four days of events. There were four billionaires there and three congressmen, and it was a big, big deal. All of a sudden, I'm the featured speaker. Nobody told me I was going to speak, but I get up and I give this off-the-cuff speech, and these titles don't mean anything to you, but they're really important to me. The International Commander of the Archons of the Order of St. Andrew, the protectors of the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople. runs up to me, gives me his card. Three congressmen were in this group hug. One of them told me to come up on Thursday. We're going to call Trump together on the cell phone. I can ask him directly for a pardon. Big. So I'm like a little fangirl with Adiriros. He sings this one song. Do you remember when we were kids, You Light Up My Life was number one for 11 weeks? That's what this song is. It's been number one since the beginning of the year. I mean, there hasn't been a song this... popular in a hundred years in Greece. The song is called Athena. It means my Athens. Oddly enough, it's just a song about the neighborhoods of Athens and why he loves them so much. But it's just such a touching, beautiful song. They hired him to perform at this event for all the billionaires. So I'm there. And I kept saying, I can't believe I'm seeing Argyros. I'm like standing there next to the stage looking at Argyros singing this song that I've loved for so long. One of the billionaires says, you want to meet him? And I said, I'd frigging love to meet him. I go in the green room. I never saw so many guys with machine guns in one place in the United States in my life. It was nuts. So I go through all the machine guns. and into the green room. And one of the billionaires says to him, I want to introduce you to one of your biggest fans. And I said, I said to him, I'm like a fad girl. I'm old enough to be your father. And I'm like a fad girl. And he goes, are you John Kiriakou? And I said, yes, I love everything you've done. He said, I've watched your interviews in English, in Greek. I read your book. I listened to your podcast. Can I tell you, for a guy used to toiling in the shadows, whose work mostly had to be kept secret, having an artist, a singer, whose work I greatly admire, greatly admire my work, I must be dreaming. To be fair, though, the more dreamy part of my post-prison life took a long, long time to actually come around. It's been a decade. during which there were long stretches where I seriously wondered what would become of me, what would become of my family. Serving time in prison cuts you off from a lot of higher income generating jobs. To tell you the truth, it cuts you off from getting most jobs. I got turned down by everybody from McDonald's and Safeway to Uber and as a baggage handler at Reagan National Airport. If you can't pay your bills or meet your obligations, you can't get your life back. Speaker 1 (3:58) The biggest obstacle to me getting my life back was the CIA. Though I had served my sentence and I had quote unquote paid for my crime, the CIA simply was not done fucking with me. That would never stop, not even to this day. If the agency could have had its way, I would still be in prison, serving the full 45 years that prosecutors had first put forward as a deal. Why was the agency so vindictive toward me? Because I told the truth? In a moral world, the CIA would have looked deeply at itself and understood how badly it had compromised its own mission and many of its best people. But instead of confronting its own behavior, the agency felt compelled to punish me for mine. For whistleblowing. In this third season of the podcast, in addition to returning the storytelling focus to spies and spying, we're going to focus on whistleblowers and whistleblowing. Spies make great whistleblowers, and whistleblowers make great spies. In the episodes ahead, you will meet some of the best-known and most important whistleblowers in the world. Yes, we'll continue to investigate what makes spies tick. But in season three, we're going to ask what makes whistleblowers tick too. If ever we needed whistleblowers, my God, it is right now. They are the cure for corruption, and we seem to be living through corruption's golden age. Our mission this season is bigger than just telling whistleblower stories, though. By telling these stories, including the processes that whistleblowers can use to operate as safely as possible, we hope to encourage present and future whistleblowers to step forward. Corruption's golden age should become whistleblowing's golden age. Every whistleblower needs to believe in their core that the truth will set them and everybody free. We have so much in store this season. Let's get this show on the road. Welcome to Season 3 of Dead Drop. Speaker 1 (6:02) I'm John Kiriakou, and I'm free at last, free at last, and truly happy that we're starting a third season, which we're doing because so many of you have told us in your reviews and comments that you wanted the story to continue. This season will be a little different from the previous two seasons. Whereas the others told what happened to me, this season ultimately will be about what's happening to me. These are truly exciting times and I want to share as much of it with you as I can. What I'm especially excited about is the series of whistleblower roundtables we're going to hold. You'll get to meet some of the whistleblowers that you've heard of in the news and you'll meet a few that you haven't. Like I said, we want to nurture an environment that inspires whistleblowers to come forward and share what they know without fear of reprisal or personal retribution. Think of it as how to be a whistleblower. We'll also tell you some stories I've been dying to tell. As many of you probably know, I do another podcast called Briefing Room, where I talk about what's on my mind right now, right here, mostly around the news. This podcast, meanwhile, will continue to be the space for deeper dives into stories, whether they're stories about me or stories that, like I said, I've wanted to tell for a long time. They'll all have elements of spying or whistleblowing or both. First up, starting a couple of weeks from now, and I'm very excited about this, is the story of the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme in 1986, pretty much forgotten by most Americans, if they ever even knew it to begin with. But America and the world should remember that story. The events, like the Cold War itself, may have happened in the past, but they continue to ripple across our present and into our future. As we stand here today, one could argue that, in fact, the Cold War never really ended. It went into hibernation, and then it changed form. A few new players have come to the table, but the divisions created and driven by the Cold War remain divisions today. We no longer frame the divide as capitalism versus communism. Now, right-wing and populist movements often frame politics as a defense of traditional national identity versus global integration and EU-style liberal internationalism. Immigration, LGBTQ rights, Reproductive freedom and gender policies trigger intense legislative and societal pushback, championed by conservative forces in countries like Poland, Spain, Italy, France, and Germany. The assassination of Olaf Palma helped put us on the road to this terrible place. It was a giant canary in a coal mine squawking its head off, but to no avail. The CIA won't be happy with us telling you this story because in telling it, I'm blowing another whistle on them. Did they have something to do with the cold-blooded execution of a foreign head of state? Were they in any way involved? I'm going to let you be the judge. Also, we'll tell you the story of notorious political terrorist Carlos the Jackal. He was protected and supported by the KGB and the Stasi, despite having led the 1975 raid on OPEC headquarters in Vienna, which killed three people. And we'll give an intelligence officer performance review of Vladimir Putin. The question we'll be asking isn't, is he a good guy or a bad guy, but rather, as a highly trained spy, and that's what he is. He was a colonel in the KGB. How is he performing? He's hardly the first former spy to run a country. But, as people say, and I hate, hate, hate this, in many cases, once a spy, always a spy. The answers might surprise you. No, I'm pretty sure that the answers are going to surprise you. It's another whistle that we'll be blowing across season three. In spying, preparation can be the difference between life and death. The same is true of whistleblowing, except with whistleblowing, you don't necessarily know how prepared you need to be or even how exactly to prepare for what's about to happen. I was a total knafe walking into the whistleblowing door. I hadn't put together a trove of information proving my point. I hadn't collected any data. Most importantly, I hadn't even hired an attorney. I simply confirmed what I knew to be true. The CIA had twisted itself into legalistic pretzels to justify torturing detainees. For comparison's sake, Ed Snowden knew the kind of fire with which he was playing. He saw what was happening and collected proof. He wasn't surprised when the CIA and its friends went after him, although I suspect he was surprised by their relentlessness and their total willingness to play dirty. The same goes for my friend Tom Drake, who we just spoke with on the podcast. Tom