John Kiriakou's Dead Drop

IN THIS EPISODE In the previous two Spy Academy episodes, we talked about liars and how to spot them. Now it's time to put all that knowledge to good use as we deep dive into interrogating a true psychopath, the former leader of Iraq Saddam Hussein. While it would be easy to see Saddam as an unsophisticated bumpkin, it also would be a profound mistake. Saddam may have struggled to understand A...

IN THIS EPISODE SHOW NOTES If you're enjoying Dead Drop, podcast, please check out the rest of Costard & Touchstone' s family of podcasts. They cover everything from journalism to Chinese medicine to culture to self help. Your next great podcast obsession is just a click away! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

IN THIS EPISODE Welcome to John Kiriakou's Spy Academy! Whether chatting with someone informally or conducting a full-on interrogation, every spy needs to know whether or not the person they're talking to is being truthful with them. To get to the bottom of that, we'll start with defining our terms: what do we even mean by "lies" and "liars"? Whether we call them wh...

IN THIS EPISODE Every whistleblower should know one thing before they step forward with their secrets that demand exposing - at some point, the legal system will engage with you. When that happens, each and every whistleblowerl will need a lawyer. John was fortunate enough to meet Jesselyn Radack early in his whistleblower journey. A whistleblower herself, Jesselyn has spent her career working for...

IN THIS EPISODE Welcome to Season 3! As the title of this episode suggests, season 3 will refocus the podcast on spying and, this season, on whistleblowing, too. We may be in a Golden Age of Corruption, but that's a future Golden Age of Whistleblowing. Whistleblowing is the cure for corruption and one of our goals this season is to make the podcast a safe space for whistleblowers - especially if t...

IN THIS EPISODE We draw the curtain on season 2 with a preview of season 3 wherein we'll ask "What Makes A Whistleblower Tick?" To get us kicked off, John roundtables with whistleblower Tom Drake. A longtime member of America's intelligence community, Tom had just become an official at NSA when 9-11 happened - literally on Tom's first day. But, as America's "War On Terror" ramped up, Tom noticed N...

IN THIS EPISODE We join with another podcast in the Costard & Touchstone Family - The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast - to explore how NOT to make a SPY movie. John and Alan Katz (he's both the host of The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast and the co-writer/executive producer of this the Dead Drop podcast) talk about the spy TV series and movies that inspired them both when they were kids, in Jo...

IN THIS EPISODE John's time at Loretto finally comes to an end - but not without a near hiccup. Though he's free of Loretto, he's not free from the federal Bureau of Prisons; John must report every day to "Hope Village", a halfway house - a situation loaded with ways to trip up and land back at Loretto. John begins the process of shaking off the prison persona he had to adopt in order to survive a...

IN THIS EPISODE When John first entered the gates of Loretto Federal Prison, his goal was to use all his training as a spy to survive prison. But, just as with spying, prison can be very unpredictable. In fact, John found that he'd been fooled by one of his roommates - who'd been betraying him from the jump. As he enters the home stretch of his sentence, John doubles down on his mission to use eve...

IN THIS EPISODE At Loretto Federal Prison, John can almost see the light of his release date in the not-too-distant future. Returning to the Outside World will mean having to shed the prison persona John worked so hard to create - if only for survival purposes. Meanwhile in the outside world, the suibject of John's whistleblowing - the CIA's torture program - is finally getting its day in the cour...

IN THIS EPISODE John was hardly the first person to point out corruption in America's penal system. Paul Wright was serving a 17 year sentence for murdering a drug dealer when, in May 1990, he started The Prison Legal News. Prison changes people; it changed Paul profoundly. He transformed from a rudderless young man into a veritable crusader for prison amd legal reform. SHOW NOTES Learn more about...

IN THIS EPISODE When he first arrived at Loretto Federal Prison to start serving his 30 month term, John expected to serve that term where the judge and prosecutor both advocated that John be in the minimum security camp. But someone at the Federal Bureau of Prisons decided that John was too dangerous - and assigned him to the actual prison instead. John was not even remotely dangerous. Not nearly...

IN THIS EPISODE With his out date - the end of his prison sentence - now starting to come into view (albeit still in the distance), John would have been best served by keeping his head down. But there remained unfinished business - with sevveral fellow prisoners and especially with the Soretto Prison authorities. And then there was all the unfinished business - all related to torture - happening o...

IN THIS EPISODE, meet Joey Casolo. These days, Joey owns a great pizzaria in South Carolina. But, back in the day, Joey was one of the greatest prison chefs ever at Loretto. If you remember from the movie Goodfellas, the Italians weren't interested in the prison chow. Instead they cooked their own food - gourmet Italian meals - all prepared using a rudimentary (and incredibly dangerous) cooking sy...

IN THIS EPISODE: How do you fight corruption when most of the corrupt deck is stacked against you? In John's case, he used his words - and the fact that becoming a federal prisoner does not mean you surrender your rights - like the one to free speech. The prison authorities genuinely feared John's power to expose them and their corruption and plotted endlessly to find ways to silence John and cut...

THE BLURB: While John was serving his sentence, the American government faced the consequences of other whistleblowers speaking their truths about the corruption they'd encountered inside the government. One of the more prominent was Edward Snowden who blew the whistle on the NSA - the National Security Agency - and the fact that it was breaking the law, violating its charter and spying on America...

THE BLURB: In this bonus episode, John tells the story of a legal case in which he testified as an expert witness - against the FBI in a case against an accused terrorist. As John learned from personal experience, democracy and secrecy don't always play well together. The people holding the secrets tend to disregard democracy in order to protect their secrets. In this instance, the FBI went after...

THE BLURB: John arrived at Loretto Federal Prison having promised to write about his experiences for various independent news media outlets. He had no idea just how powerful that connection - John's prison experiences and the news media - would prove. In this episode, John tells the story of how his prison blog - "Letters From Loretto" - became a national sensation and an ever-more-damning indictm...

THE BLURB: Already a succesful, best-selling author when the CIA put John in prison, he quickly realized that his writing - his words - were going to be his super power. John wasn't worried about his fellow prisoners; his training as a spy gave him advantages over them. But the prison authorities - corrupt to their marrow - did pose problems to John. Until they realized just how much of a super po...

THE BLURB: Frederich Nietsche warned us about staring into the abyss and becoming the monster we most feared. He could have been talking about being in prison. Or being a spy. In this episode, John tells how he increasingly relied on the rules of spying to navitage prison life. But, in becoming a monster in order to survive, the question becomes: when John's sentence ends, will he be able to separ...

THE BLURB: While, on the one hand prison is NOT the place you go to make friends, once you're there, you need to have (and be able to rely on) a tight circle of friends just to survive. In the last episode, John introduced you to some of that tight circle. In this episode, John dives a little deeper into those relationships plus a few others that were essential parts of his prison experience. But,...

THE BLURB: In prison, nobody helps anybody. Except their friends. In this episode, John will introduce you to his circle of friends, some of whom remained his friend long after they all got out of prison. Relationships that would probably never have happened except for prison can become some of the most profound, satisfying relationships one has. As you'lll hear... SHOW NOTES If you enjoy this pod...

THE BLURB: One thing about prison, there are rules upon rules. Upon rules. In this episode, John realizes that he's going to have to live by his own rules in order to survive. Those rules will be entirely based on the rules John learned - and had to live by - as a spy. As John keeps learning, there's an amazing amount of similarity between living life as a federal prisoner and living life as a spy...

THE BLURB: In season one, we told the story of how CIA counter terrorism officer John Kiriakou chose to tell ABC journalist Jonathan Ross the truth - that the CIA had tortured and waterboarded detainees like Abu Zubaydah. The CIA went on the warpath against John, finally forcing him to accept a plea deal of thirty months reducible to 23 months in federal prison. In season two, John arrives at Lore...

THE BLURB: Having been a prisoner despite not deserving that fate, John is extremely interested in others similarly incarcerated. To that end, back before the 2024 election, we put together an episode of a podcast called "Prisoner Ex" where we told the story of Donnie Reynolds, Jr, a young, ambitious Black entrepreneur who got swept up in the US government's failed attempt to catch and prosecute M...