John Kiriakou's Dead Drop

IN THIS EPISODE So, what happened - or seemed to happen - the night of February 28, 1986, the night someone shot Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme to death on a Stockholm street corner as he walked beside his wife Lizbeth after a night at the cinema? There were a number of eyewitnesses - but not all of their stories align. Especially problematic: the story told by eyewitness Lizbeth, the victim's wife. She seems to have attended a different assassination. How one of the most important investigations in Sweden's history went off the rails as the list of suspects grew.

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IN THIS EPISODE As the hot war - WW2 - ended, a "cooler" but equally fervent Cold War replaced it. The stay-behind networks described in episode one quickly became a whole subset of cold warriors. How the Cold War happened - and why - and how that set the stage for the life and death struggle that would pit old allies against each other. Walking onto that stage as Sweden's Prime Minister, Olof Palme (judging by his social class) should have been a safe bet. He was anything but. A committed socialist, Palme drove Sweden to the left - making it both prosperous and happpy. But he also wanted to negotiate with the Soviets and halt all nuclear proliferation. That made some Western leaders nervous. It made others angry enough to do something about it. Like set an assassination plot in motion.

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IN THIS EPISODE One of the most remarkable stories that no one knows - which is remarkable in itself - is the assassinatioin of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme on a Stockholm street on February 28, 1986. Palme's murder is to Sweden what JFK's is to America: a demarcation point between a sense of goodness and integrity, and corruption. As of now, the crime still remains unsolved - though much work has gone into trying to figure out who did this terrible thing and why. Though we may think the Cold War is a museum piece, we still live in the darkest part of its shadow. The assassination of Olof Palme wasn't just a dark day in Sweden's history. It was a dark day in lots of other places, too - including the United States - because the US may have been guilty of helping that assassination happen. In episode 1 of this 7 part series, we'll introduce you to the "Stay-Behinds", a secret, anti-fascist army made for World War Two but repurposed - and rebranded as anti-Communist - for the Cold War, with branches and combatants all over Western Europe.

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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 American motives and actions in the lead up to the American invasion of Iraq, but he understood his corner of the world as well as if not better than anyone. As he stared across the table at his interrogator, Saddam believed he was the host and that the Americans were his guests. In fact, Saddam was so cagey that he managed to interrogate his interrogators even as they were interrogating him. This episode's guest, former intelligence officer John Nixon, had studied Saddam, for years; getting the chance to interrogate the man himself, truly a monster metaphorically speaking, was not just a career-defining moment, it was a personal triumph.

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IN THIS EPISODE

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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 white lies, fibs, fabrications or whoppers, lies cover a lot of psychological territory. Before we can interrogate our liar, we need to understand just how many kinds of liars - and lies - we could encounter.

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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!

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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 whistleblowers (all of them pro bono), making sure that government over-reach and corruption do not trample a whistleblower's legal rights or the important truth they're trying to convey. Having been a whistleblower herself, Jesselyn understands on a mitochoncrial level the run of emotions and thoughts every whistleblower experiences.

This is another episode in our "Whistleblower's Roundtable" series.

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To learn more about Jesselyn Radack and WHISPeR'S important work - or to contribute to Jesselyn and WHISPeR's work, please click on this link! By the same token, if you believe you have information that the public has a right to know - especially if it pertains to American national security - please reach out. We can help put you in touch with the right people who can help you - and keep you safe while doing it.

If you enjoy this podcast, please check out the other podcasts in the Costard & Touchstone family! Your next podcast obsession may be just a click away!

https://whisper.exposefacts.org/

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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 they need to unburden themselves. While whistleblowing will eventually lead to John's re-emergence, when fresh out of prison, all anyone saw when John walked in the room was an ex convict. Rebuilding a life after prison is hard for everyone. John had the CIA and the FBI undermining him constantly. For John, that meant the rebuild of his life would be extra challenging.

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If you enjoy Dead Drop, please check out our other podcasts at Costard & Touchstone Productions. Your next favorite podcast is just a click away!

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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 NSA was gathering intelligence that it shouldn't - information pertaining to American citizens. NSA doing that was both outside its charter and flat out illegal. Tom chose to go through authorized channels to report what he saw. When, a decade later, the problem was still a problem, Tom finally took what he knew to the news media. What makes a whistleblower tick? Judging by Tom Drake - the right stuff.

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If you're enjoying Dead Drop, please sample our other podcasts at Costard & Touchstone Productions. Your next great podcast obsession is just a click away!

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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 John's case, to become a spy, and in Alan's case, to want to write about them. And, they'll discuss the process of turning real life spy stories - like John's - into a movie or TV series.

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You can find The How NOT To Make a Movie Podcast everywhere you find your favorite podcasts or here. If you enjoy Dead Drop - and The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast, please check out the rest of our podcasts at Costard & Touchstone. Your next podcast obsession is just a click away!

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