This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production.

Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick. I'm John Kiriaku.

In this episode, I'm going to revisit my visit to the James Bond Academy,

my four months or so of intensive

counterterrorism training. But before class begins, I want to thank you, as always, for listening.

It means a lot. And if you could be just so kind as to like, review, comment, or share the podcast

on whatever platform you listen to, I would appreciate it greatly.

I told you in an earlier episode how I knew when I was nine years old that I wanted to be a

spy. When I was nine, spies were very hip and cool. They went great places. They did exciting

things. They had these bitch and gadgets to play with. Who wouldn't want to be a part of that?

If you had told me when I was nine years old that I would actually be a spy, I would get to go to great places, I would do exciting things and play with bitch and gadgets, I think my head would have exploded.

It's probably better that I found out by living it instead.

And my CIA career did zig and zag in very unusual ways that put me in the right place

at exactly the right time. My boss actually tried rather hard to dissuade me.

Analysts and field agents tend to be different animals with different

skill sets, different personalities. But when I turned away from sitting at a desk for the rest of my

career, I knew that I had done the right thing. Counterterrorism training is damned hard.

That's because the thing they're training you for is damned hard. And training people

how to do it and how to do it right takes time. If you're a brand new hire in the CIA, it's 18

months. I was mid-career, so I didn't need all the CIA 101 things. And so my training was about

four months or four and a half months. It was

very, very intensive. After the introductory surveillance and surveillance detection, which they

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