S1E20 Changes

The first time I ever met George Tenet was at the Greek festival at Saint George Greek Orthodox Church in Bethesda, Maryland.

“It was the summer time and Greek festivals all around America are major fundraisers for the church.”

So, you go, you buy a needle or some lamb or some vlacky or whatever, and they usually have a band and people are dancing. It's a fun way to, you know, go through 50 bucks. I'm standing in line for a Greek dessert called lukumavis, 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 my 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 lukumavis I ever had were on the island of Heos when I was on my honeymoon with Joanne.

I said, "I have never had lukumavis that were so delicious and so perfectly made as I did in Heos."

And just then this guy turns around and he says, "I agree, the most delicious lukumavis I've ever had were in Heos. I recognize him immediately as Georgetown, the deputy director of the CIA. I said, "Oh, Mr. Tenet, my name is John Kiryaku. I'm one of your analysts, and we shook hands." He said, "Where are your people from?" I said, "Road." 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. About a month later, he did a walk around around the building, where he just went from office to office to office, introducing himself and saying, "Hi, I'm George Tenet. I'm the new deputy director and shaking everybody's hands." It's the only time I ever saw a director or deputy director do something like that. It was a nice gesture.

Now, he had made his bones on Capitol Hill. He was the chief of staff for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. And after more than 20 years there, he went to the White House as the director 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, 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. Tenet. John Kiryaku. We met at the Greek festival in Bethesda."

Right, right, your people are from one of the islands. 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 minor 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.”

I don't because I'm American. I thought he said it jokingly because everybody laughed. Now I 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." He thinks he's better than I am.

And I thought, "Ha ha ha, okay, 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 the 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 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 Tenet, 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. 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 two thousand dollar suits. And the most gorgeous neck ties you've ever seen. General Campbell was wearing his three shiny stars on his uniform.

and Timberland 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. I remember thinking to myself, "That is so incredibly rude, it has to be meant as a personal insult to me."

But 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, minor from the mountains,

and he thinks he's better than I am. I said, "Sir, that is not true. I do not think I'm better than you are."

“He said, "That's what the 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 were so high. They didn't bother to go up there and kill those Greeks. It wasn't worth a trouble. And frankly, the area of, quote unquote, Greece, where George's family is from,

is actually a part of prison day Albania. We got out of it a 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 glomed on to 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 hoop for various reasons, felt and held a grudge against me. In time, George's grudge would seem almost charming. (upbeat music)

Hi, I'm John Kuryakur. Welcome to Dedron. What makes it 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, your ratings, and recommendations, all touch us deeply, and we genuinely thank you for your kindness and for enjoying the podcast. Looking back at my strange experience with George Tenet,

what's always stayed with me,

beyond any insult to me, personally, was George's willingness to demean himself in front of all those other people, just so that he could try to demean me. That is some serious sociopathy.

Well, serious sociopathy is kind of the theme of the next part of this story. 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 president

and the vice president of the United States. He struggled with where he came from. Now, his brother, interestingly enough, was a great hero 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 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,

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 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." 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 tucks, and I went with a buddy of mine from my church. We both belonged to the same men's group,

and he's got his tucks, and he was like a fan boy. 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. I don't know why, and I'm just not going 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 happen. George, I wanted to point this out to you. 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, "Direct or Tenet, I'm such a fan of yours. I did such a wonderful thing for the Greek American community.

Made us all proud, blah, blah, blah. And Tenet says, "You know, you're friend here. I think she's better than I am." I turned around and just walked away. I didn't say a single word.

He didn't need to be like that. He was to 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. We had not even yet captured Khaled Sheikh Muhammad. Ben Laden was running around free. The number two, I'm in his Hawaii, was running around free.

We had caught up as a beta, but we weren't getting anything from him in terms of actionable intelligence.

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 Ben Laden was number one and Zawahadi was number two. That was it.

We knew that the number three had been Muhammad Atef. But we killed Muhammad Atef in Torabura 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 Abu Zabeda 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.

He certainly had done bad things. On al-Qaeda's behalf, he had set up the so-called House of Martyrs Safehouse for al-Qaeda in Peshawar Pakistan. And he had founded and staffed the two training camps

in Kandahar and Helman provinces. But he was not an al-Qaeda leader. He was allied. That was it. He gave us the wiring diagram.

And al-Qaeda, the FBI agent, who was interrogating him, really got to the heart of the information that Abu Zabeda had. Ali was able to draw it out from him.

That wiring diagram was critical.

So Ali would ask things like this. If you were going to do an operation in, let's say, do so-dorf. How would you do that? And Abu Zabeda answered,

"Well, in do so-dorf, 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. So we could go to the Germans and say, "Hey, you have a serious problem in do so-dorf.

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 Do So-dorf, 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 Zawaii.

So that was immensely helpful.

The most important thing he gave us

came in a conversation that he had with Ali Safan. Ali asked him about a terrorist that we had been tracking since the middle 1990s, who was using the known Degare Muhtar. Muhtar was responsible for an operation

that came to be known as the Bogenga 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. 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.

I'd 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'd better call the Philippine intelligence service.

He came back at some point, and 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. 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 Alisufan recounted this story to Abu Zabeda, he chuckled. And he said, "You don't know who Muhtar is." And Alis said,

"No, who is he?" And Abu Zabeda said, "His name is Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.

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 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 Muhammad?

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 going to 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 Muhammad published, he looks dazed, confused, his hair is all a skew. That was by design. The head of the Assama bin Laden group

at the time, Alec 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.

said, I'm not going to give that picture to the president.

“So one of the officers punched him in the stomach”

and tussled his hair, and that was the picture that was released to the public. If you're enjoying dead drop and of course we hope you are,

then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great granular story podcast from the cost-art and touchstone family. Just the photographer with David Swanson

does for photojournalism, what dead drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Swanson

tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't.

What it felt like being in all those dangerous places like war zones and natural disasters, doing his job taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this.

Just the photographer will put you right there on the ground, right next to David. Inside is head in fact. It's a hell of a podcast

“and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts”

or at cost-art and touchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at cost-art and touchstone. Like the donor, a DNA horror story,

the hall closet, sage wellness within, and the how not to make a movie podcast. Who knows, your next favorite podcast might be just a click away.

Now back to Dead Drop. This whole Iraq war issue is so unnecessarily complicated. I'll lay out the facts directly. Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government

had no repeat, no connection to 9/11 whatsoever. There was nothing Muslim about Saddam Hussein. In fact, there's a famous story from 1988 where Saddam and his vice president is at Ibrahim Aduri.

Went to make the minor pilgrimage called the Umrah. They went to Mecca and Medina.

“Is that Ibrahim was a very devout Sufi Muslim.”

Kind of a mystic. Saddam didn't even know the prayers that were necessary when you arrived for the Umrah. Is that Ibrahim knelt just behind Saddam so that he could whisper the prayers rather loudly

and Saddam could repeat them

a half of the second later.

It was a source of real amusement for the Saudis. But this guy is a major Arab leader. He doesn't even know the most basic prayers that every Muslim school child knows because there was nothing Muslim about him.

My point being a Salma bin Laden hated Saddam Hussein as much as he hated us. The very notion that the Iraqi government was conspiring with al-Qaeda to attack the United States was laughable.

It was so preposterous. We received a piece of intelligence that a representative of the Iraqi intelligence service. Specifically the Iraqi intelligence service station chief in Prague had met with an al-Qaeda leader

in Prague. That was demonstrably untrue. We even asked the Czech intelligence service to look at CCTV cameras just to see if such a meeting ever took place.

It never took place. But Vice President Cheney and his staff of Neocons decided that it did take place. And because it took place, it proved that Iraq was a clear and present danger

to the United States and by God we were going to attack. Cheney was convinced that Saddam Hussein was pursuing a nuclear option. Cheney was convinced that he was pursuing biological weapons.

Cheney was convinced that he already had chemical weapons. Literally every CIA analyst and not just CIA analyst but every Department of Energy analyst every British intelligence analyst

all of the analysts of our allies said no, that's just simply not true. The Iraqis have not had a nuclear weapons program since the 1980s. They did away with it.

Now when you look at a BW program there's a little bit of gray there because you only need somebody's kitchen frankly to make a biological weapons program. You have a hundred square feet.

You can produce something. So it's impossible to know if a country has a biological weapons program.

Chemical weapons were always a possibility

but we couldn't find any proof that there were chemical weapons. Saddam had used chemical weapons against his own people in the past. During the Iranian rock war he used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers.

He had used chemical weapons in the southern swamps

She muslim swamped dwellers.

“And he had most infamously used chemical weapons”

against the Kurds in northern Iraq. To the point where his cousin Ali Hassanal Majeed became known as chemical Ali and the butcher of Kurdistan. There's another issue here too.

There's kind of a famous, when I say famous, I mean, Washington famous story that Richard Pearl, one of the neocons who was in the orbit of Dick Cheney with Scooter Libby and David Addington.

And this whole cast of characters Paul Wolfowitz and Dovesachheim. They had all worked for a Democratic former senator by the name of Scoop Jackson.

Scoop Jackson was the definition of the neoliberal neoconservative let's pound him hard kind of cold war democrat. Although most of these guys migrated to the Republican party

during the Reagan presidency,

Richard Pearl never switched parties.

He remained a democrat. But he was very, very conservative.

“And he wanted nothing more than to destroy Saddam Hussein”

and to destroy Iraq and make it so that we could put Iraq back into the 5th century. So the famous story is that the day after the 9/11 attacks Richard Pearl went to the White House.

He was always welcome at the White House. But he went to the White House on September 12th and told his former colleagues there, "You know we have to attack Iraq, right?" And that's where the idea started.

We're going to 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, forced our 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

when he was a senior Pentagon official were now members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They too had gotten their 4th 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 9 countries.

Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Syria, Libya." It was every enemy that the United States had in the region. And Clark was like, "What is this 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 Neary Stoperations 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?"

And 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. 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 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 literally since my very first day

in the CIA. We met on my first day. We sat next to each other for years. He walked up to me and he said, "So how's this new job?"

And I said, "It's good. It's really good." So you're working for the ADDO, 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, "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.

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 Counterterrorism Center. So he was very senior, exceedingly capable, and trusted by just about everybody. He chose me to be as 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.

I'm happy to joke and 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 Alex Station, the Osama Bin Laden Group,

meaning that it was my job to try to hunt al-Qaeda moles or probes 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 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. 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 going to 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 three puff 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 more than a year,

because it takes so much out of you. I was at my desk six days a week at 345AM. 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. Counterintelligence, policy support, this one, that one, the other one, budget, etc., at 7 o'clock. And then at 730, 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 7 o'clock in the morning, and make sure I didn't make a mistake.

I would stay from 345AM until 5PM. I would go home, eat something, and go to sleep at 6.

Bob finally said, "You work way longer hours than I do."

Bob would come in like a minute before 7, 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 345. Well, time you get up to 15.

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 it one?" That helped a lot. Joanna and I separated as we left Athens in August of 2000, 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. 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. 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 215am, 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 sack." Or when she would get to work at 730 in the morning,

she would come up with a Starbucks. She knew that Starbucks had just opened it seven. I've been there since 345. 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, she could convince me

to move back to Warnohio and sell life insurance with her cousin Dean. And finally, I told her, "I would rather cut my own throat than move back to Warnohio. 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 continued to grow. She didn't want to grow.

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 Youngstown, Ohio. And her mother was a, you know, homemaker,

stayed home, I've never had worked outside to home.

And Joanne wanted exactly the same life married to me. So for the most part, she was a stayed home mom. She taught ballet part time for a while, but she was mostly stayed 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 Warnohio 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, I'll be happy." Warnohio, my hometown of Newcastle, Pennsylvania,

which is only 30 minutes away. We used to get that lake effect snow off of Lake Eerie.

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

when I were earlier to shovel the sidewalk. I didn't want to 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 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 swed it through a master's program in legislative affairs and policy analysis. I had finished my PhD coursework in international affairs,

And I'm going to go work for all state. No, thank you. Not doing it. Not doing it.

“I was seeing my sons every other weekend.”

So every other weekend on Friday, I would leave, drive to Wano, Hio, 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. 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 Warn and then have to double back. So it added an hour and a half on to my travel time. I had to actually take her to court.

And the judge, who was really a wonderful, wonderful, compassionate judge. She said, "Wait a minute. You drive all the way from Washington, D.C. 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 that she ordered that Joanne take the kids to my mom and dad's house. This was working very, very well. And at the end of my year, working for Bob,

I asked for a transfer, a domestic transfer. And the DDO, Jim Pavit, Mr. Pavit took a real liking to me. We had similar senses of humor. And as important as he was,

as a foritative 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, I woke up one Sunday morning, quarter to six a.m. And I said, "Dog on it, we're out of coffee."

But Starbucks opens at six. I go to Starbucks just as they open at six a.m. I buy the coffee and I'm turning around to leave and there's Studio Pavit, 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." And I walked out and I was like, "Hi, yeah. Yeah, man. Here's almost 70 years old, and you still haven't changed.

I liked Pavit. 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, "Oh, 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 in a gigantic station.

I said, "My boys are young. At the time they were nine and six. That 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 of station 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 Joanne Hor. And Mr. Pavit said, "This is the guy that I've chosen." He's not asking her. He's telling her. Curiosity was coming up. He's going to 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 Wastah as they say in the Middle East.

“That personal power in that I had become friends with very important people”

to force her to make the change in her own policy.

Then 9/11 came. I went to Pakistan.

“After Pakistan, I went to the 7th floor.”

And after the 7th 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. 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 analyst. It's called a reports officer.

That was her job. But in the 1990s, while the 80s, 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 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 GS-14 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 GS-14 at the time. And the next day after that, you're running the place. Listen, I understand the decision you want to 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 under qualified. 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 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. 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 the 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. But we're competing against other officers all around the world who don't have to come up with five. They're not 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, 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. And then the other three, I'm going to hold for next month, which then makes the intelligence dated and useless.

Or God forbid it encourages people to just make it out. Which happens. He 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 going to make it up.

you can set your own rules.

“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, but I really believe 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 CI 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 CI officer 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, a 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, "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 CI-A guy just approached him. 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." 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 going to win this battle. But just because I wasn't going to win the battle,

it means I intended the least quietly. I was a train 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, it was a young lacare 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. Heck, share the whole podcast while you're at it.

And thank you in advance.

“If you want to hear more from me, please check out my two other podcasts.”

There's deep program with Ted Rawl. 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 Kiriaku.

Dead Drop is written by John Kiriaku and Alan Katz. Costart and touched on productions produces the podcast and John Kiriaku and Alan Katz and Nick mechanic are its executive producers. This podcast, it's a cost-eaten touchstone production.