You're Hello and welcome to Spycast from the Secret Files of the International Spy Museum in

Washington, D.C. I'm Mark Stout, historian of the museum. I'm a PhD author and historian who served for 13 years as an analyst in the U.S. Intelligence Committee.

Every month, the museum brings you interesting talks with authors,

scholars, and practitioners who have something to do with the world of

intelligence and espionage.

We're very fortunate today to be joined by Aras Pappas, who is a career CIA officer on the analytics side and the Directorate of Intelligence

at CIA.

He worked for the agency from 1975 to 2003, and since 2004 now he's been working with Microsoft here in the Washington area.

But the topic of our discussion today will be Aris's time as an analyst in the 1970s in the early 1980s and in particular

dealing as an analyst with the reporting and the person, Richard Kuklinski, one of the most famous and most important

penetrations that the CIA had of the communist world.

And we'll get in a little bit more in a minute to who Richard Kuklinski was exactly but first

off Aris Pampas welcome to the International Spy Museum.

Thank you very much. It's my great pleasure to be here. Can you tell us a little

bit about how you came to work for the CIA in 1975?

I was an army officer serving in Europe.

My job was to estimate the activities of the Soviet military forces that were facing US Army Europe.

And during that time I made a simple decision that intelligence work was very much up my alley.

I enjoyed it a great deal and I recognize that probably the pinnacle of that

profession was at CIA. I left the Army and made an application to CIA and was fortunate enough to

been accepted. Do I understand that you were initially offered a job in the

clandestine service and declined? That's close to being exactly right. I was offered my job as a result of my

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