This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production.

Hi, I'm John Kirooku, and welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick.

In this episode, I'm going to pick up with what makes this spy tick in an episode that we're calling singing in Bahrain.

But before I start singing, I want to say, wow, and thank you for the amazing response that we've gotten so far to this podcast.

I said before that this is above all a labor of love, that you have taken my story to your hearts as you have,

coming as it does from my heart.

Well, that's the kind of response that spies love.

It makes us feel like our work was not in vain.

To that end, here's the quid pro quo part.

That's definitely how spying works.

Whatever you can do to spread the word about this podcast would be very much appreciated. It really does make a difference when you like,

subscribe to, comment on, or review the podcast. So thank you for that too. If you haven't listened to

the earlier podcasts of this series, what makes this spy tick,

I recommend it.

Highly.

This is one of those stories where details matter and one event really does build on the

events that came before it.

I knew from when I was nine that I wanted to be a spy. Whatever exactly that was.

In college, I attracted the attention of a CIA recruiter, a legendary officer whose recommendation and mentoring set in motion my entire CIA career.

That plus a facility for languages put me in the right place at the right time when Saddam Hussein turned the

Iraq-Kuwait border from Dahlsville into the center of world attention. You see, one of my first

jobs at the agency was essentially to be Saddam's intelligence community shrink. We started by

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