S1E23 Good Company, Bad Company
John Kiriakou's Dead Drop
Costard & Touchstone Productions
4.9 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 13 April 2026
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
THE BLURB: John wasn't the only CIA officer who refused training in the CIA's new "enhanced interrogation" techniques - despite assurances from the CIA's legal team. This episode's guest, author and former CIA officer Glenn Carle spent two decades in the agency. Like John, Glenn broke with the CIA over the subject of torture. Glenn was part of a team interrogating another high value Al Qaeda target, and, like John, came to appreciate that torture was completely ineffectiv"The Interrogator" heree as a way to procure information from a detainee.
SHOW NOTES
You can learn more about Glenn's book "The Interrogator" here and you can purchase it here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production. |
| 0:09.6 | Hi, I'm John Kirooku. |
| 0:11.9 | Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick. |
| 0:15.1 | As always, we thank you for listening, and especially we thank you for liking, rating, reviewing, commenting on, and sharing |
| 0:21.9 | the podcast with your friends, your family. |
| 0:24.1 | Hey, share it with total strangers too. I appreciate that. |
| 0:27.6 | We're on a mission here to make the world a better place through storytelling. |
| 0:31.1 | The truth we believe will absolutely set you free. |
| 0:34.6 | And if ever the world needed some truth tellingtelling, well, it's right now. |
| 0:39.6 | In this episode, I'm going to introduce you to a columnist, commentator, and national security |
| 0:44.3 | and foreign policy expert by the name of Glenn Carl. Glenn's another former CIA officer, |
| 0:49.8 | who, like me, was involved in counterterrorism operations during the war on terror. |
| 0:55.0 | Glenn spent two decades working clandestine assignments for the agency. |
| 0:59.0 | Also like me, Glenn opposed the enhanced interrogation techniques that the CIA insisted were legal, |
| 1:05.0 | and he refused to participate in them. |
| 1:07.0 | What's more, Glenn insisted, we were deliberately misrepresenting our opponents to ourselves. |
| 1:12.2 | In a piece that he wrote for the Washington Post back in 2008, Glenn wrote that jihadists are, |
| 1:17.1 | quote, small, lethal, disjointed, and miserable opponents, unquote. And that, quote, we do not |
| 1:24.1 | face a global jihadist movement, but a series of disparate ethnic and religious conflicts |
| 1:29.4 | involving Muslim populations, each of which remains fundamentally regional in nature, and almost |
| 1:35.1 | all of which long predate the existence of al-Qaeda." In 2011, Glenn wrote The Interrogator, |
| 1:42.5 | an Education. While Abbas Zabeda is part of that story, |
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