AI Summary
5 min readJohn Kiriakou opens this episode of Dead Drop with a story about his own near-catastrophic failure to spot a liar. During the first week of the COVID-19 pandemic, he received an unsolicited email from a man calling himself David Sassoon, who claimed to be the heir to a $1.5 billion family fortune. The job offer was a gift: a generous salary to lead an investment arm focused on Greece and Israel. Kiriakou began flying between Athens and Washington every two weeks. There were problems — payroll didn't arrive, the CEO sounded suspiciously like David Sassoon, and then the CEO supposedly committed suicide by jumping out of a hospital window. A Google search turned up nothing. Kiriakou kept telling himself the man couldn't be lying because he hadn't asked for money. In the end, everything was a lie. The man's name wasn't David Sassoon. He was half-Egyptian, half-Sudanese, not Jewish, not Greek. He had fooled Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, too. Kiriakou had ignored every warning sign the CIA had taught him to see.
What a lie actually is
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Episode Introduction & Host's Personal Lying Story** - John Kiriakou opens with a personal anecdote about being conned by a man calling himself "David Sassoon," who claimed to be a billionaire heir and hired Kiriakou for a fake investment firm.
- 2 (04:56) **Defining the Liar's Landscape** - Kiriakou establishes that the secret world is a world of lies, and introduces the key distinction between sociopaths (untrustworthy) and people with sociopathic tendencies (useful for navigating gray areas).
- 3 (07:09) **The Taxonomy of Lies: From White Lies to Bold-Faced Lies** - Kiriakou breaks down the spectrum of dishonesty, from benevolent white lies to dangerous fabrications and manipulative lies, providing a spy's framework for categorizing deception.
- 4 (10:42) **Hybrid Lies, Self-Protective Lies, and Manipulative Lies** - Kiriakou explains how lies often mix truth and falsehood, and details the specific tactics of blame-shifting, gaslighting, and playing the victim.
- 5 (15:23) **False Flag Operations and the Bold-Faced Lie** - Kiriakou scales up manipulative lying to the national level, then contrasts it with the risky but powerful "big lie" used by public figures.
- 6 (17:19) **Why Spotting Liars is a Life-and-Death Skill for Spies** - Kiriakou connects the taxonomy back to the core mission: a spy must identify a lie as soon as it crosses the liar's lips to survive.
- 7 (19:06) **The Trojan Horse & the Lesson of Skepticism** - Kiriakou presents the Trojan Horse as history's greatest lie, using the story of Sinon, the "explainer" who sold the lie, and Laocoön and Cassandra, who were ignored.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
IN THIS EPISODE Welcome to John Kiriakou's Spy Academy! Whether chatting with someone informally or conducting a full-on interrogation, every spy needs to know whether or not the person they're talking to is being truthful with them. To get to the bottom of that, we'll start with defining our terms: what do we even mean by "lies" and "liars"? Whether we call them white lies, fibs, fabrications or whoppers, lies cover a lot of psychological territory. Before we can interrogate our liar, we need to understand just how many kinds of liars - and lies - we could encounter.
SHOW NOTES
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