This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production.

Welcome to Dead Drop. I'm John Kirooku, and always, thank you for joining us.

In this mini episode, we'll be previewing a brand new podcast series that we're going to start

dropping in the spring of 2026. It's called a spies guide to, and the things we'll be guiding

you to are the great cities of the world, but from a spy's perspective, tourists see a city one way,

locals see it quite another. Spies, on the other hand, we see a city or a town

or any place, really, in a way that's entirely unique to it and to us. Of course, spies got to eat

and spies got to sleep, so our spy guides will appreciate each city's livability. Spies like to be entertained, too, and plenty

of us want all the local culture we can get. So that's also a part of the spies' guide to calculus.

But from a spy's POV, a city is a workplace, filled with potential agents to recruit,

safe houses to suss out, and clandestine rendezvous to choreograph.

Some cities have been home to spies and spying forever, while others are a little newer to the game.

Of course, we'll cover the obvious.

Cities like London, Vienna, New York, Washington, D.C., Moscow, Jerusalem.

We'll cover less obvious places too. Think Miami, Brussels,

Berlin, Beirut, Amsterdam, and Beijing. And we'll cover what are perhaps entirely unexpected

places like the city I'm going to tell you about in this episode. So without any further ado,

welcome to a spy's guide to Sophia Bulgaria.

When I was stationed in Athens, one of the things that I loved about my job was the accompanying

analysis that went with planning for operations.

I was an analyst at heart.

I loved doing deep dives into these terrorism issues.

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