Mini Episode 4: Grave Concerns
John Kiriakou's Dead Drop
Costard & Touchstone Productions
4.9 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 15 December 2025
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
THE BLURB: Both spying and the subject of this episode - cemeteries - piqued John's youthful curiosity at roughly the same age. Spying, of course, became John's vocation. But John's love for cemeteries - especially for the people buried in them - became a very happy ridealong. Working around the world for the CIA meant visiting cemeteries around the world. In this episode, we preview "GRAVE CONCERNS", a new podcast series that we'll begin dropping in March 2026 (that's soon)! The podcast is based on a brand new book John's written - "REMAINS OF THE DAY: The Definitive Guide to the Historic Cemeteries of Washington, DC" which also will drop in March 2026. As we hope you'll agree, graveyards should have no secrets!
SHOW NOTES
In this episode, John visits The Rock Creek Cemetery in northewest Washington, DC. Among the graves he'll visit: John Harlan Marshall, Alice Longworth, Arkady Nikolayevich Shevchenko and Gore Vidal.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast, it's a costod and Touchstone production. |
| 0:03.9 | Hi, I'm John Kariak. |
| 0:06.1 | Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick. |
| 0:09.3 | This mini episode is another backdoor pilot for a brand new podcast we have planned for March of |
| 0:14.9 | 26 called Grave Concerns, which is all about my lifelong, deep down fascination with cemeteries and especially |
| 0:23.6 | with the people buried in them. We're making grave concerns to accompany a book I'll be publishing |
| 0:29.7 | in March of 26 called Remains of the Day, a definitive guide to the historic cemeteries of |
| 0:35.7 | Washington, D.C. Shout out to the people at Simon & Schuster. |
| 0:39.3 | Remains of the day is the first in a series of books I'm writing about my favorite cemeteries. |
| 0:44.8 | Check out the show notes for ways to pre-order a copy of the book, and even an autographed copy. |
| 0:52.3 | I first started exploring cemeteries at the age of eight or nine in Newcastle, Pennsylvania. |
| 0:57.6 | Actually, I wasn't necessarily exploring so much as I was looking for salamanders. |
| 1:03.0 | I distinctly remember finding one under a rock. |
| 1:06.4 | But I also remember that day at Oak Park Cemetery in Newcastle, |
| 1:10.4 | stumbling upon the grave of somebody named |
| 1:12.5 | Joseph B. Chambers. His marker was simple, and it indicated that he had died in my hometown in |
| 1:19.0 | 2008. But what was fascinating to my eight-year-old mind was that he had won the Congressional Medal of |
| 1:25.6 | Honor. I knew that only the bravest heroes in American history had won the Congressional Medal of Honor. I knew that only the bravest heroes in American |
| 1:28.6 | history had won the Congressional Medal of Honor. The inscription on Chambers marker read, |
| 1:33.9 | Capture of Colors of First Virginia Infantry Confederate States of America. When I got home, I mentioned to my |
| 1:41.1 | mom what I had found. She said, oh, he's a hero. We should go to the library |
| 1:45.2 | and see if we can find his story. What we found was that Chambers was a lowly private, |
... |
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