"The CIA Is a Criminal Organization" Ex-CIA Agent @Andrew-Bustamante Explains #241

Espionage is a crime. And I don't think people realize that CIA is a criminal organization.

Okay.

I don't think people realize that in what they do. Yeah. By nature of what they do, loyalty has a positive connotation.

Right?

Right. Like who doesn't want loyal friends and who doesn't want to be loyal to something.

Right.

Nobody thinks about the abusive side of loyalty, specifically the manipulative side of loyalty. That's the relationship that CIA creates with its officers. An unhealthy loyalty, an addiction, a need to a master. So CIA, if there's anything that they do really, really well that people do not give them credit for, people don't even recognize, it's their.

Welcome to the unemployable podcast. I'm Jeff Duden. If you've traded the safety of a small town upbringing for the discipline of the United States Air Force. If you've been tapped by the CIA, shipped across the globe and trained to read people, shape outcomes, and operate in the shadows, implementing an innovative operating model to expose a mole. If you've walked away from COVID life to rebuild your identity as a husband, father and entrepreneur, including authoring with your wife Jihee, the best selling book Shadow Sell. And if you've now taken the tradecraft that once protected national security and turned it into Everyday Spy, a platform teaching leaders how to think, decide, and win with the precision of an intelligence officer, your name can only be Andrew Bustamante. Welcome.

Thanks for having me, man. What a great intro.

Yeah.

And I'm actually really excited for this conversation because I have not had a chance to speak to many franchise owners.

Okay.

But now that I've built a multimillion dollar business, if I had to do it all again, I would much rather go down a franchise road.

Really?

Because it's so risky. It's so exhausting. When you build from scratch, you put everything on the line. Like, it's not just financial. I remember the stress I put my wife through, my kids, business partners, peers. You have to call in every favor and you're always on the verge of collapse until it works.

Yeah. And that's.

That's why so many entrepreneurs fail, because they try to do it on their own. And there is no school out there for how to do this. I went, I went to CIA, went to the. One of the best training establishments in the world. And all it really taught me was to accept the risk. It. It's just. I'm sorry, man. It was just one of those things I had to tell you right out of the gates. What year did you start your business 2019? Technically, the business was formed in 2014, as soon as I left CIA. But I didn't really start building in earnest until 19.

Okay. Would you consider it a consulting business or an education business?

So we are education first, right? Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. That's a learning that I had as I expanded my portfolio. Always building direct businesses, but the importance of building an education business alongside of it. Question for you about the business since we started there. Everybody wants to hear what you have to say. Everybody wants to learn from your experiences, but getting people to pay you for.

It, it's so hard.

That's the second thing. I was on your website this morning. You got me for $11. Okay, we've bought a bunch of books, but you got me for $11. I'm a mastermind spy, by the way. So if you go to everydayspy.com, you can find out what kind of spy you would be. And then I did buy a resource to understand more about it, because I was fascinated by it. But how long did it take you to come up with a way to monetize your training and your experiences in the CIA?

It took a long time. I think there's two reasons why. So, first, I was not business savvy, okay? There. I have an mba. I went to a prestigious university. I mean, CIA runs operations that are what's known as a commercial operation, which is an undercover business operation. Right. So they have a way of teaching us not the fundamentals of business, but the fundamentals of making it look like a legitimate business.

Right.

So that we can travel the world and do what we need to do. So, of course, I went to that school, too. So I had all this education, all this structure that made me feel like, oh, I must understand business.

Right?

But understanding business is really about understanding people. It's not about understanding balance sheets and accounting and all this other stuff. The balance sheets and the accounting will kill your business. Cash flow will kill your business. But the blood of the business is really just being able to understand people. And it took me such a long time to understand that.

Yeah.

And what I learned is that trying to get people to understand the value of education is shockingly difficult, considering the fact that we all go to grade school and we all know we have to go to college, and we all know that there's a million and a half books out there on the shelf that you can buy that will teach you anything from basket weaving to, you know, sniper school, sniper shooting. We all understand the value of business. We think but when it comes to actually putting a price tag on education, it's super difficult. It's like the perception of value is completely misaligned.

Right. And staying close to revenue is a business owner's credo. If you are the face of the business, then you need to be either working on revenue or going somewhere to work on revenue. And another 10 in the business building that I've learned over the last 35 years is I need to do the things that only I can do, and then other people need to do the things that anybody can do or other people can do or maybe even other people do better. So when you started your business, it was you, was the wife in the business at the time?

Correct. My wife is the co owner of the business. And that's because we learned at CIA that we are a very good team. We are capable individuals, but we're a very good team.

Yeah.

So when the time came to start the business, I knew that if I started a business without her, I was absolutely going to fail. Now, I say that, but we weren't equal partners in the effort. We were equal partners in the ownership. But what happened is my wife very early on realized she did not have the patience or the tolerance for all the entrepreneurial stress.

Really.

And my wife has an anxiety disorder. She's. I. She's got general anxiety disorder. She has. She struggles with depression. She has mental health challenges that, you know, we openly talk about in our book and in our personal story. But when those were mounted, on top of the financial strain of trying to make payroll and trying to make rent and trying to do everything else that came on with the early stages of the business, I had to pick up a lot of that kind of chaos because that's the world I thrive in, where I needed to kind of put her into the world of routine, predictability and repetition, which is not a world where I do.

Okay, here's why I find that so fascinating, because I've read the book, or as full disclosure, most of the book. You know, I love when you come out, people like, I read your book. Oh, what'd you like about it? Right. But I've read the book, so understand she was a targeter.

Yes.

Okay. Which to me was analytical, almost like an engineer chasing loose threads, using logic to exclude things, looking at facts, creating patterns and stuff like that. So to me, that is what makes a great business builder. It's systemization. And it's, you know, it's almost important is what you go for is what you avoid. Because looking at, looking for Risk inside of business deals and understanding the different value. This speaking opportunity for you is worth this. And it might be worth this in dollars, but it's kind of off topic where this community is going to be potential client base for you. So sorting these things out, I would think that she would be an amazing business partner.

This is why I started the conversation by saying if I were to do it all again, it would be in a franchise.

Ah.

Because when you're a startup, you have none of that. You have no system, you have no process, you have no proven market. You have no idea what your target applicable market size could be. You have no concept of any of it. You just have a passion, an idea, a dream. And that sounds very romantic. You know, when you hear about somebody's story on a podcast, or when you read about it in a book, or when you get like that one article in a magazine that talks about some success story, it sounds very sweet.

Yeah.

But it's not right. And there's a reason that you only see an article or you see a restaurant or you see a startup featured once in a magazine, because by the next cycle of the magazine, they've failed. Right. They've gone under. But everything that makes. Like you were saying, my wife, all of her superpowers would have been firmly served in a franchise.

Yeah. She would had a model to follow.

And to scale because then, then she gets to just improve on an existing system. I could see that in a community that she understands.

Yeah. Because the CIA provided rigid training protocols, methodologies. And while you created. Well, you didn't really create the model. You just borrowed it from terrorist organizations, basically. And you created a cell organization for the purpose of exposing a mole. Hopefully. Maybe you were guys were felt you were used a little bit. I will, I will find as I get to the final two chapters, but.

CIA, I mean, espionage, this is. You know, one of the key things that I was, I was reflecting on as I was preparing to talk with you is, you know, espionage itself is a franchise model. It was created originally by the Egyptians in the 1200s. The Egyptian Pharaohs were trying to essentially undermine or sabotage each other's courts. So they started using slaves, concubines, salespeople as information sources to go into other Egyptian courts and learn secrets, learn about relationships, plant seeds that were seeds of doubt.

Yeah.

That would undermine communities, kingdoms, pharaohs from within. And then as they learned how to do this with each other, they learned how to do it with other kingdoms outside. And then as conquerors came through and as Egypt fell, it Spread. And espionage was ultimately kind of professionalized by the British during the expansion of the British colonies. And of course, because the British colonies expanded, espionage found its way to India, it found its way to the United States, it found its way all across Europe. And then to try to defeat the British, you had the French refining their own version, and the Germans refining their own version, the Spaniards refining their own version. And this concept of intelligence collection is worldwide, but the structure of it, the system of it, is exactly the same. They just. Sometimes they spy in Spanish, sometimes they spy in English.

Yeah.

But otherwise, it's just a model that's been spread far and wide. We call it sticks and bricks because at its core, the fundamentals of espionage are exactly the same. No matter how much technology changes, no matter how many countries change, no matter whether they lean left or right, or whether they become dictatorships or fallen kingdoms, it's always the same. It's always just sticks and bricks.

So if you were going to break it down into three or four steps, it seems like the first is to relate or. Well, no, let me say that differently. The first thing to do is to identify, and then you need to relate, and then you need to connect. And then harvest.

Yeah.

And then maybe turn.

If you're talking about human assets.

Yes.

Right. And human assets are the bread and butter for CIA.

Okay.

But intelligence is much broader than that. Right. So absolutely, you want to identify. And what you're trying to identify is the outcome that you desire. So whether you're collecting signals with nsa, whether you're collecting human intelligence with CIA, whether you're collecting military secrets with dia, all different Alphabet soup intelligence agencies of the US Government, the first thing you want to know is your outcome. Right. What am I trying to collect? I'm trying to collect Chinese plans and intentions. I'm trying to collect. Collect North Korean nuclear capabilities. I'm trying to collect Iranian secrets about funding Hezbollah. What am I trying to collect first?

Right.

And why do I want it? And then after you have the outcome, then you come up with the plan, the tactical and strategic plan to get the information that you need to drive the outcome that you desire. And then after you have the plan, you just execute. And then after you execute, you have new information. That new information defines new outcomes. Those new outcomes tell you drive the strategic and tactical planning, which then drive the next round of execution, which takes you right back to the beginning again. Got it. And that's your flywheel.

So when you send a caseworker into in country Falcon, for the purpose of our conversation today, which was the code name for the country which you are not able to disclose that you operated in. It seemed to me that there was general intelligence gathering going on. And so if you send a caseworker in and they're going somewhere, they go into Iran and they're going to be looking, they're first, they're going to see if they're going to get counter surveilled and they're going to have to deal with that. But are they always going for something specific or do you, are there general assets that are just. That are just listening?

Yeah, it's a great question. When, when the, the field officers that penetrate a foreign border are called case officers.

Okay.

Some CEO. Very similar to the nonprofit world, you have case priorities and those cases are broken into various mission target sets. And those mission target sets are farmed out to case workers.

Okay.

And those case workers are just called case officers. So then a case officer is a dedicated officer assigned to a case very similar to what you see in, in the nonprofit world or other words. But when they go into a country, they go in with a list of priorities. If you've played video games or if you've seen movies, you talk about objectives, primary objectives, secondary objectives, tertiary objectives, alternate objectives.

Okay?

So the primary objective is the primary reason that you're there. But your secondary, tertiary, you know, alternates, those are all what you might call general intelligence collection opportunities.

Okay?

So your primary mission might be to go in there and meet the foreign Minister or meet the trade Minister. But your tertiary or an alternate objective is to define what roads are under construction, what new buildings are going up, that sort of thing, so that you can come back and provide intelligence from ground truth of the city that you were in. Things that you're not going to find from a satellite, satellite's not going to tell you whose name is on the side of a, of a, you know, white wall where there's a construction site happening. Right. You can only see that on the ground.

Right. How important is humility in having a successful career in the agency?

It's a mixed bag, right? Because it's a double edged sword. You have to be humble in the field when you're operating clandestinely. So I would say when you parallel clandestine operations with real life business operations, when you are customer facing, client facing, you have to be humble because that's how you connect with the person. But when you're back in the halls of Langley and you're fighting for funding and you're fighting for opportunity, you have to put the humility Aside a bit and be able to quantifiably, objectively make your case.

Right.

Because if you can't objectively define your successes, they're not. No one's going to listen.

Right.

And I find the same thing is true in, in business as well. If you can't quantifiably demonstrate your successes to a banker, you're not going to get a loan. Or if you do get a loan, you're not going to be able to negotiate a good interest rate. You have to quantifiably be able to justify your price, especially to clients who have deep pockets or taking a large order. So you have to be able to put the humility aside and say, look, this is what I do. I'm the best at what I do. If you want me, this is the price. If you want less than what I offer, go to one of my competitors. But you have to be able to stand your ground. Whereas, you know, with a customer, you may not. With a one to one customer or a lower level customer, you might not carry that same bravado. Yeah.

Is feel work literally acting at the highest level with the highest stakes.

This is, this is another great question. Because one of the first things they teach us when we start at the agency is they teach us the difference between method acting and going undercover.

Okay.

Method acting is what most of us can relate to. We've read about actors who do it. We've all seen the tragedies of actors who reach their mid-30s or their midlife and they don't know who they are and they end up overdosing or killing themselves or whatever else.

Okay?

So method acting and acting in general is the idea of becoming a character, fully becoming that character. This is what the agency taught us. You believe that you are them, Right. You create a fabricated history, a legacy, a legend that you. That shapes who you are. And on camera, in scene, you become that character.

And sometimes off you hear stories about some of these great roles and it's like they did not break character in the trailer.

Yeah.

For months.

Exactly. So when you have a method actor, they are essentially putting their real self aside and fully becoming someone else. When you're undercover, you don't have that luxury because you always have a mission, you always have objectives, you always have a specific outcome. And you always have to remember why you're there and what you're doing so that you can manage the risk of being exposed. So we have to, we do something called compartmentalization. We basically have this compartment in our head that is like a locked drawer of who we really are and what we're really after. But then outside of that locked drawer, we have to be our cover identity.

Right.

But we always have to be able to open that locked drawer. So I might pretend I'm single, I might pretend I'm from a wealthy family. I might pretend that, you know, I've sailed the world and I want to live that up and I want to be able to really lean into it, lean into it so much that if I actually don't like being in cold water in real life, I have to be able to be, act like I'm comfortable in cold water in my, my coverage. Right. So you have to embrace it to that level, but you have to still be able to just open that lock and pull out that drawer the moment that your target starts to bring up something of intelligence interest. So it's a, it's a difficult. Yeah, it's a difficult thing. And it exposes us to the same risk that method actors have. Because we can lose ourselves too.

Sure.

But it also exposes us to the risk of a failed operation because if we get too into character and we forget why we're there, we come back empty handed. And then of course, you've got everybody wondering what the hell have you been doing for the last two weeks if you didn't bring back secrets?

Right. Holding two opposing conversations in your head at the same time, as I think Jordan Peterson says is a sign of intelligence. He does it brilliantly, by the way. You can watch him for an hour, he wouldn't need a guest. He just debates himself. Well, on one hand it's this, and on the other hand it's that. And then he works both sides of the argument. So is inherent intelligence something that the agency will test for and is that one of the most important requirements or what are some of the characteristics of people that make good agents over a long career?

Yes. So CIA, if there's anything that they do really, really well that people do not give them credit for, people don't even recognize, it's their hiring process.

Okay, Right.

CIA has mastered the process, the system of bringing in recruits, doing due diligence on them through the application and the application and vetting process so that only a few actually get invited into the training process, which further vets them before they make it into an operational role. I mean, just compare that for a second to what the average company does. They barely vet the applicant. They don't have a training process. They put them in an operational role. They, you go from, from nobody to operator In a company in a matter of days, maybe weeks, you go from nobody to operator at CIA in a matter of about 18 months.

Wow.

It's a long time to get through everything for them to actually put you in a position where you can break something for intense. All intents and purposes. Right. And during that application process, they're testing your capacity to learn. They're not teaching you anything new, they're just testing your capacity to learn. Uh, one of the big misunderstandings. People believe CIA hires people who are fluent in a foreign language. They don't. They hire people who have experience in foreign language or experiences with multiple foreign languages, but they actually could give two shits whether or not you're fluent in Spanish or fluent in Russian or fluent in Greek. That's not what they're looking for. They're looking for the person who has the capacity to learn a foreign language.

Okay.

So if you've dabbled in 12 languages, they love that. If you grew up in a Spanish speaking household and you only speak colloquial Spanish, that's excellent. If you, you know, learn Vietnamese from your grandma and then moved to the United States when you were 11 and have not spoken Vietnamese since then, great. Because they understand the wiring is in your brain.

Right.

Or a foreign language. So then after you get through the application process, into the training process, that's when they pressure test is the theoretical capacity, actually real capacity. And then you run the risk of washing out of training if you don't keep up with the real capacity. But that's the way that they process everything. That's hand to hand. Combat, driving skills, memory skills, persuasion and influence skills, critical thinking, puzzle solving, like all of it is, is tested in theory during the application process. So still tested. But it's not about, it's not about performance. It's about capacity.

Is it like Navy SEAL buds in terms of washout percentage? Is it that difficult to get through?

So Navy Seals and what, what BUDS provides is a very different level of attrition.

Okay.

Because they're, they're pushing people a different way for a different reason.

Sure. And you need, and to be, you need people. Common looking people.

Yeah.

Doing common looking things.

Absolutely.

You know, you're not looking to be the star of the show. You're looking to be an extra.

So I think, I think most of your top tier special operating units have about a one out of five success rate.

Okay.

It might be one out of three. I believe it's one out of five. So 20% success rate for an 80% washout. Rate CIA by the time you start at CIA training, not application, but training, it's about a one in three attrition rate. Okay, I'm sorry, a one in three pass rate. So 33% pass rate for US CIA in training. Navy SEAL training is about a 20% pass rate.

Yeah. Somebody pursues a career with the Agency, secrecy is paramount. Who in their family knows if what their real job is?

Most of the time, CIA will prioritize recruiting for people who have no family.

Okay.

That's one of the things they're looking for. So no wife, no kids, no divorce. The next thing they're looking for after that, if somebody does have, you know, kids or wife or divorce or whatever else, they're looking for people who have no extended family. So maybe you. Everybody has a mother and a father, but you're disconnected from them or you're an outsider from the family. Whatever, whatever else. Basically, they're looking for people who are very comfortable lying to the people who culturally should be the closest to them. Okay, so broken families, broken homes, homes with tragic loss. It's a, it's important for CIA the, the process of keeping secrets.

It.

Healthy people, balanced people. People who have had healthy upbringings and happy childhoods and who are of, of decent, average intelligence are horrible at keeping secrets.

Right.

They haven't had the traumatic experience of being abandoned. They haven't had the traumatic experience of, of having somebody, you know, become like, carry out something treacherous or undermine them. So they're trusting. And those people don't keep secrets. They hear secrets and then they feel like, oh, I've got this secret. It's, it's weighing down on my conscience. I need someone to help me process this. So then they disclose the secret, which is the opposite of what you need somebody with a traumatic background. You need somebody who's been betrayed to understand the value of the secret and keep it.

You had challenges early in life with your family, and then you performed at the Air Force Academy. How did they reach out to you and how did they connect those dots?

They being CIA?

Yes.

Yeah. When I left, when I graduated from the Air Force Academy, I went into the active duty Air Force, and I continued to have an Air Force career. Air Force officer, minimum service time after the academy is five years. So I was four years into my five year commitment. I started looking for other government jobs that would be an easy dovetail coming from the Air Force, but there was so much I didn't want to do.

And you were. You babysat nukes?

Yeah, I, I worked nuclear missile Operations. I learned how to fly with the Air Force. I had, like, I had had a very, on paper, a very successful Air Force career.

Right.

But I learned I don't like office spaces. I don't like being underground. I don't like lacks of window. Like, I don't like all these things.

Yeah.

And I wanted to see the world. And when I started applying or started looking at government jobs, most government jobs don't see the world. You sit in an office without windows in Washington, D.C. or in Roslyn, or you name the suburb outside of Washington, D.C. in the D.C. metro area. And I look at Healthy Human Services, and I look at, you know, irs, and I look at FBI, and I'm like, this does not sound like fun. And then I. I found the Peace Corps, which I think still exists. Was it shut down fully?

I don't know. I don't know. Did it get doged?

Right. But I find the Peace Corps and I'm like, oh, this sounds interesting. You see the world. You teach microfinance, you teach. You know, we build schools. Like, this sounds excellent. Plus, after being underground for, you know, four years with the Air Force, I was like, I'm ready to seed some wild oats. Yeah, get it. Get out there and, you know, find some hippie women who are also trying to save starving children.

Yeah, man.

And. And the Peace Corps had all that. So I start applying for the Peace Corps. And in the middle of that application process, I have, like this interruption, this red screen that pops up that tells me I might qualify for other government positions. Well, I'm in the job search. It asks me to put my application on hold. It says there might be something better. So that's what I do. And that's how CIA reached out to me. They found me in the process of applying for something else.

There was a movie when I was a kid called War Games.

I remember War Games.

Okay. I don't know how. I'm not even sure how old you are, man. I'm older than you. I know that, but the kid was at a computer, and it just popped up and said, want to play a game? And he starts playing the game, and little did he know he was launching the global nuclear war in playing the game. But that's what it sounds like. It sounds like you were literally at a terminal and it just blip and they. They found you. Yeah.

I mean, it wasn't quite as fun as it would be in Hollywood.

It never is.

And. And if you go back in time to when it was 2006, 2007. Yeah, screens popped up all the time.

Oh, yeah. Oh, you were on a DOS machine, right?

Yeah, so. But, yeah, it very much worked that way for me, and it very much worked that way for a number of colleagues that I met at CIA that were applying for something else. And then they got the same kind of notification. Hey, you might qualify for something else in the national security space. Would you like to pause your application? And CIA? It makes total sense. They are an arm of the federal government. So anybody that's applying for federal government is showing a certain behavior trend, a certain value set, a certain career interest that could be beneficial for CIA.

Yeah. And what did you do? You responded, I'm interested. How did they.

No, I didn't do shit.

You didn't?

No. I got the red screen, came up and said, would you mind putting your application on hold? That's all it asked.

Okay.

So I'm like, yeah, I'll put it out. I'm 27 years old.

Okay.

If a girl comes up to me and she's like, hey, would you mind pausing on dating me because there might be a better girl that's coming down the street, I'll be like, yeah, I'll wait. Yeah, you tell me something better is coming. I'll pause for sure.

Okay.

So all I hit was, yes, I'll put myself on hold. And then I made us a little note in my planner to continue my application the Following Tuesday, after 72 hours passed and I went home. And then I got a phone call the next morning from an and partially unlisted number. It just said 703 on my little flip phone. Yeah, and the 703, I didn't know it at the time, but that's the area code for Langley, Virginia.

Right.

And I pick up the phone, and there's a woman on the other line, and she introduces herself by her first name only. And she says, hey, are you Andrew? I had a different name back then. Are you Andrew who was applying for the Peace Corps with a background in the US Air Force? And I was like, yeah, that's me. And she's like, oh, your application came across my desk. And. And we think that you might be a good fit for a national security role. And I'm having this conversation with her, and I'm like, okay, this is interesting. Sounds professional. But I don't have a last name. I don't have a specific organization. I don't have any details about her. So there's a part of me that's also like, this sounds scammish. And I'm waiting for her to say, all you have to do is give me your credit card. All you have to do is give me your home address. Like, I'm waiting for this moment and it doesn't happen. And she just says, oh, well, if we'd love to fly you to Washington, D.C. to do a round of interviews or for new openings. And I'm like, okay.

So was that the first filter saying we need people that only need a certain amount of information to take action?

I believe so. So, yeah, I. The whole first few steps in hindsight, in retrospect, sure. Were a filter for the acceptance of ambiguity and acceptance of risk tolerance. Right. She didn't give me any information. She didn't ask me for any information other than verifying who I was. And when I said, yes, I. I'll take, you know. Yeah. If you want to. If you want to line me up there and. And set me up for a couple of days to do an interview and it's all on you.

Right.

I'll do that for sure. She didn't even give me dates. She just said, okay, we'll be in touch. Right. And then the next day in the morning, an overnight FedEx package arrives with an airplane ticket in it and a hotel reservation and a rental car reservation. And the dates are like four days away.

Yeah.

So I'm like, well, shit, I didn't think this was a real phone call.

Yeah.

And now I have a FedEx package that tells me to be on this plane going to this airport, rent this car, and stay at this hotel.

So at this point, I'm thinking I'm an organ harvesting target. Like bathtubs filled with ice. You know, that's. But no, it wasn't.

Well, and I'm thinking. I'm not thinking organ harvesting, but certainly thinking, like, this is a very complex scam.

Oh, okay.

That I can't resist.

But you're going anyway.

What if it's not? I mean, is even a real ticket?

Yeah.

I'm not going to know unless I go to the airport.

Yeah.

So I put in short notice, leave with the Air Force. I get a mouth or an earful of criticism from my boss, but I'm like, hey, I'm going. Yeah, this, this. What is this?

Yeah. So you're going to a hotel room to wait further instructions.

Correct.

Okay. And I'm in. Like, for me. Oh, I'm so in. That's.

That's exactly how I felt. I don't know where this is going. I don't know what this is about. It could be really cool. Like this is how action movies start. It could be really like uncool. This is also how murder movies start.

Could be an intervention, could be anything. Anything.

But I'm not going to know unless I try.

That's right. Awesome. That's fantastic. So you went through the process, you got in, you met your wife during the process, correct?

I met my wife right after finishing the application process, actually during the CIA orientation. As boring as it sounds, and you'll never see this in the movies, CIA has about a two week orientation, just like any university or any, any business where you sign up for your health insurance and you make your list of emergency contacts and you learn about parking and you get your parking pass and you submit your paperwork to get your formal badge. All that boring shit all happens there too. And she started the same day as I did. And that's where we actually crossed paths for the first time.

Right, so you got in, you went through training, you didn't get certified.

Correct.

So you ended up having a role and then she was a tracker. So were you working together at that point in time?

When we first finished training, we were on two very different trajectories because I was, I was in training to be a case officer.

Right.

And the, the way that you actually get through that training is through a panel that has to subjectively decide, yes, we want to work with you or no, we don't want to work with you.

Right.

And that panel decided no. For me, they were like, you're too unpredictable, you're too inconsistent, you're too loud, like obvious, you're too recognizable. So we don't want to work with you. So I'm no longer on the case officer track, Right. I end up kind of in this unknown bucket, but that is like the misfit toys or the island of Misfit Toys, right? But my wife finishes top of her class in a completely different skill set. Targeting. And she's immediately assigned to one of the highest profile units at CIA because she's like an up and comer superstar in her little field. So now she's got the whole force of the government agency behind her, launching her career. And I've got the weight on my shoulders, kind of depressing my career. But we are at the place in our relationship where I'm like, this woman is special, okay? So whatever I have to do to stay close to her, I'm gonna do. So even though I'm, you know, in the basement in the dregs, getting shat on at the agency, my Career is probably never going to grow, never going to recover.

Right.

It's worth it because at five o' clock every day I punch out and go home and have this beautiful, brilliant woman who's successful. So that was what kept me at the Agency, was her. And then it took about two years before her success and my, like, build back, if you will.

Right.

Collided. And CIA saw an opportunity to use somebody like me who was like doing armpit missions around the world and somebody like her who was a high flyer and put us together on an operation which became the shadow cell operation of my book. It became kind of the heartbeat, the thing that really rekindled my fascination, my passion, my love for espionage.

Were you looking for loyalty?

When I was looking at assets, I was looking for people who were selfish.

But for yourself, Join the agency people. One of the things about the CIA is they look for people that don't have anything else to be loyal to. So they'll be loyal to the Agency. Is that to the country or is it different?

It's different. It's different because loyalty has a positive connotation.

Right?

Right. Like who doesn't want loyal friends and who doesn't want to be loyal to something? Right. Nobody thinks about the abusive side of loyalty, specifically the manipulative side of loyalty, where you full trick guilt, shame people into predictable behavior, which is what many of us actually understand. That's what loyalty really is. A dog is loyal to its owner, even when its owner beats it, even when its owner kicks it, even when its owner says terrible things to it. You know, the owner only gives a dog one kind of food, and oftentimes the owner is the one that picks that food. And they pick the food based on cheapness or volume or something other than what's best for the dog. But that dog's loyal as hell. That's the relationship that CIA creates with its officers. An unhealthy loyalty, an addiction, a need to a master.

And it's necessary because morality has no place in effective ops.

That's exactly right. At the end of the day, you need an asset to work for. An organization where that asset will take action that's in the best interest of the country and the outcome without being in their own personal best interest.

That's right. And doing whatever it takes. Rules are different around the world. We have a sense of right and wrong here. And it doesn't exist everywhere. It doesn't exist everywhere or it's different.

Yeah.

And people are. Oh, what's the best way to say it? We're Broken everywhere. And we have vices that need to be met, and we have greed. We have. And sometimes we have real needs, children to go to college, things like that. So playing on all of those things with whatever it takes strategy is really what makes the whole operation successful.

It's what makes it all tick. And if you don't like that, then you get to sit back and just enjoy the benefits of the fact that there are other people who do the job that you can't do.

Right.

I think of it a lot like I think of plumbers or like I think of dentists or like I think of. Of trash and garbage people. Yeah, those are all jobs I don't want to do. I don't want to stick my fingers in somebody else's mouth. I don't want to have to see the bad hygiene that they have chosen. I don't want to pick up their trash. I don't want to smell their trash. I don't want to have to deal with their plumbing and see their shit from the night before. I don't want that. But I'm very glad that other people do that.

That's right.

And that's what CIA is. They do the thing that you may not like, but has to be done to keep you hygienic, to keep you safe, to keep you healthy, to keep you secure in the life that you have in a way that you don't even know they're doing it.

Yeah, right.

You only get your cleaning once every six months. You don't. You're not even aware of your dentist for the rest of the five months and 29 days between visits. You don't even think of them.

That's right.

And that's what CIA. You don't even think of CIA until they're in the headlines.

Yeah, well, life is an illusion. I believe it. Everything that I've amassed can be gone in an instant. And it just. You know, we. We live in this bubble, and our reality can change in a second. And there's people out there doing things that keep our illusion intact. You know, our way of life as we believe what it is. And it's. Many people don't want to hear it. They don't want to see it. They don't want to think about it. They just want to get on Facebook, go to work, see a movie, watch football. And there's people that have drastically different lifestyles to make the whole thing work. It's incredible. In all of the Agency, in all of the organizations that we have is there in all of the counterintelligence that's constantly assaulting every country, by every country, towards every country. Is there ever a time where we don't have a mole?

It's a great question. CIA operates from the assumption that at any given time, you have three moles active that you haven't discovered.

Okay, that's if that seems reasonable.

That seems reasonable. And if you don't have a mole. If you don't have a mole, we just assume that there are three. If you do have a mole, you assume that there are five. Because when you discover one, you know that your theory about three was wrong. So you have to increase your theory. And that's. That's a type of counterintelligence that we call defensive counterintelligence. You've mentioned the term counterintelligence twice. So I just want to make sure, like, there's a very specific definition for counterintelligence. Counterintelligence has two arms. Offensive counterintelligence. Defensive counterintelligence. Offensive counterintelligence is when you are trying to collect intelligence about an intelligence organization. That's offensive counterintelligence. You are actively countering their capability by stealing their secrets.

Okay.

Then you have defensive counterintelligence, which is when you try to prevent a foreign intelligence organization from stealing your intelligence information. Okay? So when we talk about moles, we are talking about both offensive and defensive operations. We are actively trying to find and neutralize the moles among us. But we are also actively trying to create moles and penetrations that will get into intelligence services around the world.

It's almost like theft or embezzlement in a corporate setting where one person can do so much. But if you get two people, say the person that opens the mail, the person that deposits the checks, the person that writes the checks, if these. There's two people together, the exposure is so much higher. And I'm interested to.

So I just have to enter. I have to interject because it's such a great point. Espionage is a crime. And I don't think people realize that CIA is a criminal organization.

Okay.

I don't think people realize that in what they do. Yeah. In. In by nature of what they do. If CIA were in the United States without presidential protection.

Yes, they would.

They would literally be an organized criminal organization. They would fall under. They would fall under FBI for investigation and arrest. But because they serve national security interests, there's a specific carve out what's called an authority, an executive authority, a presidential authority granted to everybody who's a sworn member of CIA that protects them from their criminal activity and then as to meet that presidential authority, the criminal activity must be directed against foreign countries or foreign nationals. So the idea that CIA collects on Americans, the idea that CIA commits crimes and criminal actions inside the United States is patently false. They cannot, if they did, they would fall outside of their presidential authority and they would, they would be under the purview of arrest. Which is why CIA moles like Aldrich Ames get arrested because they, they step outside of their presidential protection and then they are, they are due processed for criminal activity.

Right.

When Americans discover that there's some kind of illegal activity against them, like the, like Watergate or like the collection of data that came because of the Snowden exposure.

Right.

What they don't realize is that. What they don't realize is that what they're being told and what the reality of it is are two different things. What Snowden exposed was not a giant cover up to steal American data. What Snowden exposed was an approved government operation that included multiple organizations that had multiple rooms, teams of cleared attorneys and judges who had all collaborated and said, if we do it this way it's legal. If we do it that way it's illegal. So we will stay firmly within the legal boundaries.

And Snowden just disagree. Agreed with it.

Yeah. And then when he exposed it.

Yeah.

It went to a civilian court that doesn't understand the nuances of classification. And that isn't, that doesn't have the need to know, to be able to see what really is being exchanged. So now you have an uninformed civilian court making a decision on a privileged classified activity. Of course they're going to have a different conclusion.

Sure.

Than the internal judges. And that, that's what happens over and over again with these pro, these whistleblowers who claim that they're helping the American people when all they're really doing is stirring up a pot that is making us less safe.

Yes. Is it Simtar?

Was the mole in the book Scimitar?

Yes, Scimitar. That's how that's pronounced. Are you at liberty to share how long he may have been operating as a mole before the CIA found out or suspected that there was one?

In generalities, yes. So, uh, the estimate that we have at CIA for Scimitar is that he was engaging with foreign intelligence about a year after he left CIA. So he was still connected to CIA. He still had a peer network in CIA. He still had information of privileged knowledge. When you leave CIA, you don't lose your network. You don't Lose your assets, you don't lose your friends, you don't lose your email addresses. You still know secrets. So he started cooperating shortly after he left. But then as the years progressed, he became less useful because he didn't have real time access. So then after about three years, he tried to apply to go back to CIA.

Okay.

Another thing that people don't realize, CIA does not do well with attrition. They put about two million, two and a half million dollars worth of training into everybody who works at CIA. They put about two and a half million dollars of training into everybody who becomes a CIA officer. Well, then when those people retire, when they separate, when they get medically retired, when they leave now, they're a huge vulnerability to CIA.

Right.

So CIA wants to make it really easy for you to come back to the fold. So we all know as CIA officers that that back door entrance to get back in is way less scrupulous than the front entrance propped open. So all we have to do is basically make a phone call and we're back in. Well, he tried to make that phone call about three years in, but he was already on FBI's radar.

It's on the watch list.

So that door was available to him, but the full access was not. And that's where the case really started to build, because now they could see him taking active steps to try to get back in, communicating with his handlers in the foreign country of Falcon, trying again a different way and communicating again. And that unfortunately, or fortunately in the United States, that data is needed to build a case of evidence that will hold up in a court of law where he's being tried by his peers.

How were you and Jihee approached to help with this problem?

It was actually really funny. I was doing my operations, she was doing her operations, which I can't. I can't emphasize enough how different those operations were. Basically, I was getting all the jobs that nobody would say yes to. She was getting all the jobs that were brand new that, you know, only special people get invited to.

Yeah.

And then we both get called into an office where the name and the number on the door is so special that every CIA officer knows. It's like being called to. I don't know, it's like being called to the Hollywood sign in. In Hollywood, California.

Okay. Right.

You're like, oh, everybody knows what the Hollywood sign is. Like, everybody knows door, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Well, we get called to that office. And of course, for my wife, she's like, I wonder why I'm Being called there. Like, I'm already doing this other important thing. Why would I be called to this completely different important thing? And for me, I'm like, this has got to be a mistake. Like, I'm, I'm sitting here picking up dog in the back of, you know, in Africa. Why am I being called to. Why am I being called to the presidential suite?

Yeah.

So we get called to this office by our bosses and I'm really like, this is strange. So I, I send my wife a secret message because we have our own secret system at CIA. I send her a message that says, you're never going to believe what just happened to me. And she's simultaneously sending me a message and she's like, the strangest thing just happened to me. And we're both like, we're getting called to this office at the same time in the same place. And that's how it, that's how we kind of realized something strange was happening again. And then when we actually get there, it's very similar to what you would expect from any CEO suite or any CEO conference room. It's a very beautiful office, but it's in a skiff. So it has a very thick door and thick walls and everything. Secure compartmentalized information facility.

Right. So sound dead and thickened walls.

No radio signals in or out.

Got it.

No electrical wires in or out. Everything's kind of self contained. And we go in there and that's where they explain to us, hey, we have this, this new operation that we want to put the two of you on together instead of separate.

And is that for appearances? Is that because of skillset? Is it. It just works as a couple with all of the above?

All of the above, exactly.

Okay.

There aren't many complimentary skill set couples at CIA. Opposites attract everywhere. Sure, and CIA actually has quite a lot of intramural dating, but opposites that are also complimentary doesn't happen often. Like a tech person might date a map person, but those aren't really complimentary skill sets. And a disguise person might date a paramilitary person, but those aren't complimentary skill sets. In the case of my wife and I, I was an operational planner. For all intents and purposes, she was an operational targeter. Two different skill sets that were complimentary.

So was the mole tied specifically to Falcon? And were you chosen because you were outside of Falcon and so you could create a different view and maybe put different bait? Or what was the, what was the thinking? Because if they, if I, if I'm inside the organization and I think I've got a mole, right? Then I don't know what they're listening to. I don't know who they're getting information from. So I've got to have an outside in. That's why if we have theft or in the past, when I've had theft or in any way, whether it be within our building or out in the franchise network, I use a third party because I don't want anyone to know that might be telling them that we're looking.

And I think that's the main difference between how a corporate entity thinks versus how a government agency thinks. Okay, they do want a third party. They want that outside observer, but they don't want the outside observer to identify the theft and report it. They want the outside observer to basically become the bait that the threat pursues.

Okay?

And that's what CIA was doing with us. We Scimitar, the mole, was reporting directly to Falcon, the foreign country. And Falcon is a high risk, major geopolitical adversary for the United States. So it was a high risk, high stakes operation. But nobody knew who Scimitar was. So everybody who was working the Falcon target was on the suspect list. You couldn't trust anybody. Didn't matter if they had 30 years at CIA or three days at CIA. You don't know who the mole is. So you can't trust anybody who's experienced against that ally or against that enemy. So they have to pick people who are completely different outside of that fold, because those are the only people you can trust. And you still have to pull from within CIA. You can't pull someone from NSA because they don't understand CIA language, they don't understand CIA operations. So I'm coming from essentially Africa, where I was working. My wife's coming from a part of Asia that I can't disclose. And we are brought together to basically build new, new operations, new CIA operations against Falcon. A country that we've never traveled to, we've never worked in. We don't speak the language, we don't know the people, but it's like, it's almost like calling two to local baseball leagues, to amateur leagues. And you, you call them to make a team, to go against a major league team. We know that the odds are against us and we know, like this is. This doesn't make any sense. But you don't say no to an opportunity like this unless you want to throw away your career. And my wife's was a career we were not going to throw away. So they're giving us this hey, you're going to build a case, you're going to build a team, you're going to build a whole new mo. We're going to send you this place you know nothing about. We're going to give you a blank check to take whatever risks you need to be successful. But we have complete deniability of you. So if you fuck up, not on us, if you overspend, that's on you. Like all this, it's all risk and no upside, right? But to say no at CIA, you don't, you don't say no.

Career suicide.

It's a career suicide. And I don't care about career suicide. I'm picking up the shit anyway, right? But I can't do that to my wife.

The book is called Shadow Cell and it's called that because of the unique way that you decided and you had developed a bit of a reputation as an innovator and out of the box thinker. Probably one of the reasons you ended up where you did because lack of predictability. But they felt that this would be a good use of your talents. How did you approach the operation when.

They told us that we had to build something new. CIA is like I was explaining earlier, they're a franchise.

Yeah.

They don't build new.

Right.

They repeat. Yeah, they carbon copy and then kind of slightly customize. They change the paint on the walls, they change the rims on the wheels. That's, that's all they do. But it's otherwise, it's always the same. So we're being told that we have to innovate something new. We don't, we're not told why. They don't tell us there's a mole right away. They don't, they certainly don't tell us that we're bait for the mole. That actually is a, an interesting turn in events that I'll explain later when it comes to how we publish the book. But they give us all this encouragement and resourcing to create something new. And we actually get to where we're supposed to be. The COVID legend's in place, everything's in place. And we land at the airport and we go to our, you know, the flat that, that's been arranged for us and we sit there and we're like, now what do we do? I don't even know how to start. So we go to and from this clandestine office that they made for us and we're trying to rack our brains on how we can do something different, how we can do something unique. We meet with Some of the field officers who are already in country, already running operations that are tangential to Falcon operations. And through that process, we meet somebody, a guy in the book named James who speaks the Falcon language, who has a reputation back at the building for being a very reliable, very effective officer. And we land on this idea, because of my wife, that instead of trying to model CIA operations off of CIA operations, what if we tried to model CIA operations off of terrorist operations, which at the time that we were given this assignment, it's the middle of the global war on terror, Right. And there was really only one country heavily invested in the global war on terrorists. Yes, there were Brits, yes, there were Aussies. Yes, there were New Zealanders. Yes, they were French. Yes, people were dying from all the different countries, but there was only one country putting hundreds of billions of dollars into that fight, and it was the United States. So we had all the IP on how terrorist organizations work. It was only Al Qaeda and CIA that worked out, that knew how Al Qaeda operated. So when we looked at Falcon, we were like, falcon's not participating in the global war on terror. They don't understand our iPad. And I've been, like I said, scooping shit from all over the world, right? So my wife's like, you know how CIA, you know, she's looking at me and she says, you know how terrorists operate, I know how terrorist cells communicate.

Right.

Why don't we just build our own cell? Which is where the shadow cell concept came from. We just built a cell that's job was to collect intelligence rather than building a cell whose job it was to blow up buildings.

Hmm. Some of the characteristics of terrorist cells are the way that they communicate, decentralized authority. They, they can be quiet and to themselves. There's literally thousands of them across the globe, and it may be four or five or six people, and they may get communication infrequently. So it's very difficult to track. I know the only way they found Bin Laden was ultimately through a courier, and it was just one mistake. And when they were there, they realized that he was robustly running the organization with very little contact from the outside world other than this one courier.

Exactly. Right. And that was a model that was completely foreign to operations at CIA, where everything needed 12 people to sign off and everything needed to be communicated and everything needed to be approved. And you needed this broad spectrum of middle managers justifying their job.

Sure.

Before operations didn't get to the director. So it was the exact opposite.

Right.

Whereas terrorists have independent financing, meaning they, they have wealth that's washed multiple steps before a pile of money is delivered to somebody and that person doesn't have to report receipts back, they don't have to report expenses back, they're just given a pile of money and they do what they want to with that money. So we were like, well, what if we just wash our money and what if we independently finance our operations and what if we create operations that actually create revenue and then we keep the revenue for ourselves and use it to fund more operations. We start modeling as much as we can.

Sure.

Off of these.

Starting a business.

Yeah.

You're basically starting a business.

Exactly right. And you're, you're just creating a business that is a business of secrets. Instead of trading commodities, you're trading secrets. Instead of buying and selling in credit cards, you're buying and selling in, in currencies that can't be tracked.

Yeah. How did you build a team and then how did you commence operations?

Building the team was the first big challenge because we were doing something outside of the norm. And CIA is a very corporate entity. If you want to promote, you have to meet certain criteria. Right. You have to hit your sales targets, you have to get enough facetime with the boss. You have to have an end of year report that says all the right shit. Like that's how it works.

Sure.

And nobody wants to be a GS11 forever. They all want to climb the ladder and make more money and that's the only way to do it.

Right.

So here we are working off the record essentially in a side kind of operation. So everybody we talk to, we're like, hey, we've got this thing that we're doing, but you're not going to get any credit. We've got this, this exciting opportunity, but you can't tell your boss and it's approved and we can show you the letter where it's approved.

Right.

But all of your work is going to be taking you away from your career successes.

Yeah.

And bringing you into the mission to save, you know, to help and serve the United States. Maybe people are going to be surprised. Maybe people aren't going to be surprised. The vast majority of CIA officers that we talk to had no interest in the mission of protecting American citizens. They were at that point very focused on their career.

Sure.

When you sign up for CIA, you're like, I'm here to protect America. But once you go through your in processing and your training and all the other shit, you become disillusioned very quickly and you realize, oh, if I, if I ever want to make a living wage. If I ever want to make $92,000 a year to live in Washington D.C. which is not very much money in Washington D.C. if I ever want that, I have to make sure I hit my minimum quota. I have to make sure I punch in and punch out. I have to make sure I'm on the boss's good list. It's just like anybody else in corporate America. The idea of the mission kind of takes a second seat or a back burner. So my wife and I were stuck finding those few people who were hyper mission focused, those people who were in it for the exciting, like, opportunity, for the fun time. And we found them. We refined our pitch and we found people who were susceptible to the pitch, and we found some people who were very good at it and some people who we uninvited from the team. But ultimately we ended up with about five really, really strong, mission oriented, hyper patriotic, willing to risk their whole career on this exciting, innovative opportunity that had no guarantees. And that was our team.

And then operationalizing. You moved to a friendly country and Wolf.

Correct.

You move to a friendly country, and then from there you would move to a neutral. You would fly to a neutral country, and then you would fly into the target country, Falcon.

Exactly right.

And what was your primary mission when you would go in country to your. Now you know that it was to be bait for a mole. But what did you believe your primary mission was at the time?

Yeah, we, we. The guidance that we got, the direction we got from CIA was that we were supposed to build a new network stable, we call them stables of people, just like you have stables of animals, information sources who provide regular information. So our job was to create a new information stable against Falcon. The reason that we operationalized the way we did is we wanted to borrow best practices from terrorist organizations. And terrorist organizations don't fly from the hostile country into the United States. They fly through a neutral country where they do a document swap, and then they fly to the target country. So a Pakistani terrorist will fly to Saudi Arabia, a friendly US country that's neutral to Pakistan, document swap into a fake document, a fake passport, European passport, whatever else, and then fly to the United States. So the record in the United States shows that this actual covert terrorist came from Saudi Arabia on a European passport. Boom.

Good.

Welcome to the United States. High five. Fist bump stamp on your custom passport. If it had said Pakistan, it would have been a different story. Right. So we modeled off of that when we operationalized. And then also similar to terrorist operations, when a Financier. When a money mover travels, they travel alone and they travel from different neutral countries. When somebody who's a bomb maker travels, they travel different than the financier through a different neutral country under different documentation. When an actual person who's designed to blow themselves up, when a jihadi or a whatever, somebody who's going to sacrifice themselves, travels, they travel yet differently still. So we set the same thing up. So for me, as the support operational planner, I traveled more like a money mover.

Okay.

My wife didn't travel. She was kind of the primary person who ran everything from the main building in Wolf. And then we had all of our operators who traveled kind of like jihadis, different neutral countries. So we would all come and go through different routes at different times. But the one thing we had in common was Falcon. So it's almost like building a bookshelf one step at a time where everybody has a different step, but the bookshelf stays in the garage. So we all go to the garage at a different time. I go in and I put on the first shelf and I put one nail in the side and I leave. And somebody else comes a different day and they put one nail in the other side of the shelf and then they leave. And then another person comes and they build the next shelf all by themselves. And then I come back a few weeks later and I paint the back or glue the shelves, and then the next person comes and they put the first book on and the last person comes and they actually take it out of the garage. So that's. That was our methodology for building these operations.

What happened in the arcade?

On one of my visits to the city, a city we call Kestrel, which is the capital city in the country of Falcon, I came under surveillance and I identified my surveillance because CIA trained us to do so. And in that surveillance run, I had to find a way to. What I was trying to do was make my surveillance team bored. I wanted them to be comfortable and I wanted them to feel safe. So I went into this giant arcade. It was very popular in the early 2000s all across the world with these giant multi level arcades. And I was like, oh, I'm gonna go in here, I'm gonna spend 50 bucks US which is going to put me in. I'm going to have games for hours. And my surveillance team, they're going to send one person in to sit up at a high, like at a bar and watch me. And then the rest of the team's going to get a smoke break and they're going to have a, you know, turnover, and they're going to chill, and nobody's going to think that I'm a spy because I'm just some asshole in an arcade. Well, what I didn't realize is that when I went into the arcade, I actually spooked the surveillance team, and they did something that's called a starburst pattern. A starburst pattern is when a surveillance team doesn't know where their target went.

Right.

So everybody goes on the hunts in like, a big explosion. And they all go in different directions to try to find their person, right?

So if I'm reading this, they probably. They're not sauntering. They probably increase their pace. They're scanning a little bit more with their eyes. They're taking more risk. They're.

They're.

They're looking around instead of looking indifferent, right. And.

And at the time, I don't know this, right? So I think I'm. I think I'm brilliant. I think I'm God's gift to espionage. And I'm sitting there playing like a dinosaur game where I'm going through the jungle shooting dinosaurs. And then all of a sudden, a surveillant pops up from behind that game box. And he's not who I would expected to see. I recognized him in my periphery as a surveillant, but I wasn't in the zone. I was playing a game on a computer instead of playing the game of espionage. So when this person appeared in my periphery, that I recognized. My instinct, like everybody else's instinct, is to look at them.

Yeah.

Which is something you are trained to never do to a surveillance. You never look in the eyes of the person following you. You don't do it every time. You see it in the movies. That's how you know the movies are not informed by a professional because you never make eye contact with the threat. But I wasn't focused in that moment, so I did exactly that. I looked and I caught his eyes. And he was also not in the game of espionage. He was in the game of find the fucking target.

Yeah.

So when he turned the corner and I saw him and he saw me both in our peripheries, our instincts took over, and then, boom, we locked eyes.

And it.

It couldn't have been in reality. It couldn't have been more than maybe a second and a half. Maybe a second. Just long enough to be like, oh, I shouldn't be looking at you. And then we broke contact. But in the moment, yeah, it felt forever.

So you were. You felt at that point that you were made.

Absolutely. I knew I was made. He knew I was made. But he also knew he was.

He was made. Okay, so now we all know that this is a target. What did you do?

I'm. Right away I felt in danger. I was right. This is, I mean, this is the game over moment.

They could scoop you up and disappear you.

I am in a foreign country under a fake identity where I lied to the border patrol, I lied to the guards, I lied to my air on the airline ticket. Like, this is fraud and espionage on. This is fraud on multiple levels.

Right?

And if they find out why I'm here, it's espionage on top of that. And that's the death penalty in every country.

And the CIA already told you that they're not going to come get you, right?

So I'm sitting here to try to, to try to find time to think. I stayed in the arcade in that moment.

Did you second guess your decision? Everything to do what you're doing, everything. You're like, I just gave my life for this.

I had, I had my future with my wife disappearing like dissolving in my own head. The children that I didn't have, but I always wanted dissolving in my own head. The fucking people at CIA who had always criticized me and, and told me that they would never want to work with me. They all shine bright in my head.

Yeah.

And I'm trying to fuck up and I'm trying to think about what do I do next, but I'm stuck in this cloud of self criticism. And that, that was a big part of why I was like, I don't even know what to do. So I'm not going to physically leave this location. So I just go sit somewhere else and do something else and put quarters in something else and whatever. I didn't even care. I was just like, I need to find a way to think. And as hard as it was, CIA knows that these moments happen. So they teach us how to gain back.

Calm down. Did your heart rate go to 200? Oh.

I mean, it was out of this world, right? Like internal vision and everything.

You're an incredibly engaging, emotive person. You're friendly. That's. In that moment, if you lost focus, your thing would be to engage, right? Your default is to engage. And it was the worst thing that you could do. And now you had to talk yourself down alone.

No, no, I can't make a phone call. I couldn't really do anything.

And did you decide to leave the country?

That was the moment After I regained a semblance of control, I was able to make what we call a risk matrix of where I was the most vulnerable, when I was the most vulnerable, and what actions I could take to reduce the risks that are the most pressing. CIA doesn't really believe in the risk management process. CIA believes in something called a risk tolerance project process. So you find the areas where you can increase your risk and in so doing you're basically shifting the sands of risk, whereas the risk management process believes that you can somehow take risk away. Yeah, CIA doesn't believe that when you reduce risk in one place, you just increase it somewhere else. So what I needed to do was reduce imminent risk to increase long term risk. So how do I make it so I don't get captured right now? Even if it means I might increase the opportunity for getting captured later? Again, movies get this wrong. When, when, when CIA officers are identified in a movie, when secret agents are identified in a movie, what do they do? They run, right? They shoot. They run. They, they start taking weapons apart and they start blowing cars up. And like that's the opposite of what we're trained to do because that's the kind of thing that increases the imminency of immediate capture. Now you don't just have a five person surveillance team, you have every police officer in the area coming after you because you just blew up a car.

What about something as subtle as just changing your pattern? Having a secondary hotel? My thing would be don't be where they're looking for me if they want to scoop me. But at the end of the day, you're not going to get out of.

The country it's in. We're again, the way that I think. Your default thinking is the way that the movies tell you to think. Okay, I've been made. So if I change the pattern, anything after being made that validates, it validates that I'm here on nefarious purposes. So I know on one side, the longer I keep the pattern, the more I reduce the chances of immediate capture. And the more I change the pattern, the more I increase the chances of immediate capture. But if I keep the pattern, my long term capture is almost guaranteed because they're going to know how to find me. And they can just park a van on a corner knowing I'm going to drive up to that corner, right? So I have to balance these two. So the way I did that was keeping my pattern for that night, but then laying the groundwork to fly, to leave the country on an official ticket with a justifiable business reason and scheduling a flight for early the next morning. I was playing a risk. You can't get rid of risk. You always have risk. But I was playing a risk that if I worked on American time zones to book a flight that would be overnight in the foreign country where I was when my surveillance team and all the intel administrators would basically be at home sleeping or at home dealing with their kids. So maybe there's a window in there where I could schedule an official flight which isn't going to raise any alarm bells, right? And catch the official flight before anybody even wakes up. So that's what I did. It was about 8 o' clock at night and I schedule a 6am flight the next day. I was already scheduled to leave two days later, but I just moved my ticket up. So instead of buying a ticket out of the blue, I just made a flight change and hoped that I would get out before anybody really noticed that I changed the flight.

This story is representative of the page turner that the book is. It's just one interesting scenario after another. The logic, the thinking, it's so informative. So we're not going to go. We're going to. People need to read it. So we're not going to go any farther into it. But because I, I am interested to know a few more details about, you know, how it went. But like, it's all in the book. It's all in the book.

I appreciate that.

And people need, people need to get the book and, and they need to listen to you wherever they are. I've got a couple of questions though. What's your familiarity with Iran?

Every CIA officer has a handful of countries that they have to understand on a fundamental level. Right? China is one of those countries. Iran's one of those countries. North Korea is one of those countries. Saudi Arabia is one of those countries. Turkey is one of those countries. Russia is one of those countries. So when it comes to the fundamentals of Iran, I'm there. But what an Iran specialist understands far exceeds my knowledge.

For years, decades maybe, since I was a child. With the hostage crisis forward, it was always my understanding that that was the one country that was the most significant, other than maybe Russia and China, but the next country that maybe our relations were poor and the nuclear risk was high and that they were funding, constantly funding things around the globe against us. And then we fly over there and we drop a bunker buster bomb on their nuclear enrichment factory.

One of them.

One of them. Why was there no retaliation to that? What in the. Like, I, I couldn't believe we did it because it was counter to everything that I ever believed that the way that we wanted to handle that situation, but yet we just did it. And I'm interested if there's any insight you have around why we did it and whether that, what that has done with our position with that country.

Remember how I was telling you espionage is a, is a franchise, Everybody does it. Yeah. One of the key elements of espionage is covert action, meaning you take action that nobody can see. What we did when we dropped those deep penetrating bombs on the Natanz factory weapons in a nuclear enrichment factory, we did not take covert action. We took overt action.

Right.

When you don't see response from overt action, it's virtually guaranteed that there is covert action as the response.

Okay.

Iran understands that the worst. Iran, China and Russia have all learned from Al Qaeda. You don't fuck with the United States publicly.

Right.

If you think about what these countries have done to the United States in the last 25 years. China broke into our military records database in 2013 and stole every military record of every retired, deceased and active duty military member from the database itself and got away with it. We didn't do anything against China. We kept buying their plastic shit. They kept buying our, our rice and metal shit. Right. Because there was no overt response to their overt attack. Everything we did was covert. All of our response to China after that was something the public couldn't see, that the government didn't want the public to see it. Because if there was public response, there'd be escalation. Iran is the same way. They're not stupid back country hillbillies. They're not dumb. They're just prioritizing their responses differently than what we would expect. Americans oftentimes forget we are the wealthiest, most capable military in the world with the most modern technology and weapons systems at our disposal.

Right.

If you were the big kid on the, on the playground and you went up and you punched some little kid in the face, you really think that little kid's gonna come back and try to punch you in the face? No. That little kid's going to bond with other little kids and they're going to be like, hey, how do we pee in the guy's milk at lunch? That's what they're going to figure out. So that's what Iran does.

Okay.

You also have to put in context what happened in the months leading up to the bombing of the Natanz facility. Israel had escalated conflict with Iran.

Right.

They had already flown in cruise Missiles and fighter jets. They had neutralized and destroyed almost all of Iran's counter defensive tech capabilities. They had blown up their surface to air missiles, they had knocked down their radar systems. Iran was blind. So the reason the United States, the reason Trump was comfortable flying in some of our most expensive assets to drop a couple of bombs on a country that was completely sovereign and technically at peace with the United States was because he knew that there was no system to respond. The reason Israel took the risk to destroy all that was to get the United States involved in this conflict. So there's many, many movements on the chessboard that you have to take into account before you think about just the bunker buster. And then in response to the bunker buster, my point here is whatever Iran is doing, they didn't have to do it right away.

That's right.

They don't have to do it overtly. So what is the COVID response that they're planning that they have already put in motion, that maybe has even happened and we just haven't been publicly exposed to it? Maybe they launched some kind of digital Trojan horse against DOD that's causing absolute havoc with Space Force right now. But it's all covert, so the American public doesn't know it's there.

Well, we were already fighting a proxy war in Israel through Hamas and all those other places that are funded by Iran. So it was just, it was an escalation to already public skirmish that we were fighting through others.

And think about how long it took before the American public even recognized that the conflict between Hamas and Israel was a proxy war with Iran. It's that two and a half year fight went a full 18 months before anybody, any average lay American was like, oh, we're actually fighting Iran. There's some people probably listening to this.

Now that are like, like what?

We were fighting with Iran?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have something I'm deeply interested in your opinion on. You just mentioned the theft of the military records by China. You've got TikTok installed on hundreds of millions of people's phones, which can provide all kinds of information about the whereabouts and the ongoings of American citizens. You have the ability, there is the ability to literally scrape any device of all of its information at any time without proximity, whether it be laptops, computer, cell phones, any of these things. And there's just so much information out there. But from our perspective, the public's perspective, the ability to have artificial intelligence to make sense of that mess is new. But is it new to the government?

No. No. Even when I was at CIA as a new recruit in 2007, AI was already actively being employed.

Okay.

It's not the generative AI creating fancy videos and deepfakes that we're used to seeing now.

Right.

It was precursor to that. But when you think about the head start that that CIA had on AI in 2007 versus when AI became a mainstream topic to the lay American in, what, 2024.

Yes.

It's a huge advantage.

Yes.

And that if we had it, all of our allies had it. The Brits, the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the. The Israelis, the Turks. And if they had it, then their biggest competitors also had it. The Chinese, the Russian, the North Koreans, the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Iranians. So everybody's had a head start. When I Look at the AI race now, we're all 15 years behind the average American, and their opinion is 15 years uninformed about the risk of AI. When we look at China now and we see what their capabilities are publicly now. Right. We are 15 years behind what their actual capabilities are because they've been investing in it covertly as well. When we look at the generative capability that exists in the United States, we have to hope that our intelligence services are also 15 years ahead of what we see. Otherwise, the race is already over.

Yeah. Hmm. As an American, is there anything that I have that is secure?

No, there's nothing you have that's secure. I tell this to people all the time, and it's a very uncomfortable truth. If you become a target, and unfortunately, we live in a world right now where you can become a political target also. Right. If you become a target, there's nothing you can do. Just like you were saying a few seconds ago there, you can remotely scrape any digital device anywhere in the world. And if you can do that, I mean, here's what's amazing. It costs about $30,000 to remotely scrape anyone's technology. I can make a phone call right now, transfer 30 grand, and scrape your entire phone without you knowing about it. Scrape your personal laptop, scrape your Netflix account, scrape your smart TV or smart refrigerator, anything.

Is that a public or private resource? That's a private resource available to anybody.

Anybody. Anybody that has five figures that they want to spend on it and the.

Phone number and people.

Well. And a phone number or a contact that has close access to your phone. I don't know if you know this. My phone and your phone, simply by being within proximity, share data. They share data. If you have certain apps installed, one of those apps is Meta. If you have Facebook or Instagram on your phone. The proximity of those two phones can actually share data about the other phone. It's something called geofencing. Totally legit, right? Commercial technology. But that makes it so I don't even need to know your phone number. I just need to know that she's in the room with us and her phone's with her.

Got it. Everyday Spy. So as an executive, as a curious executive who's built a lot of businesses, I've had the opportunity to get training on communication. Couldn't tell it from this interview. Boy, you should have. You should have heard the word salad I'd had 10 years ago.

You know, words.

Words need to be served. Neat.

Neat.

No ice cubes.

I like it. It's like, it's just like my bourbon.

Yeah, just nice and neat. But the training that you're bringing with Everyday Spy and how quickly can people integrate what you're teaching into their conversations with their family, with their children, Business. What's the. What is the. What is the get for people for working with you, consuming your content however you do it?

I'll answer your question first and then answer why second?

Yeah.

The skills that we teach can be applied within minutes after you learn them. They can amplify relationships, amplify wealth, amplify personal health. Because these are the same three pillars that CIA wants to amplify in every officer. And CIA doesn't deal with the science. They focus on the practicality. We don't get to learn why shit works. They just tell us do it, we do it and it works. And that's all it takes for us to keep doing it. Okay, so whether it's something as simple as drinking 500ml of water as soon as you wake up, anybody who drinks 500 milliliters of water tomorrow morning will literally transform their entire day. Fifteen minutes after they drink that water, something as simple as that, all the way up to the specific words and cadence of your voice to create a temporary hypnosis to get a person to trust you more than they should trust you. So that they divulge secrets. Secrets. CIA teaches us the step by step of multiple tactics. The reason I teach these and CI and Everyday Spy can get these into the hands of the everyday person within minutes, within hours, within days, depending on how fast the person applies them, is because when I went to CIA, I was expecting to be a movie star. I was expecting to drive fast cars, meet fast women, and look really good in a custom tailored suit. None of that happened. But what happened instead was they completely changed my life. They changed the way I thought. They changed the way I looked at the world around me. They changed the way that I engaged with people. They changed the way that I prioritized opportunities and risks. And that was a permanent change. If they would have given me a nice suit and a sports car, it would have been awesome for about two days. Instead, they gave me skills that made the rest of my life exponentially better than every year of my life up until the day that I started training. And that's what I want to do with Everyday Spy. My company is there to change people's lives in an instant, in a moment, to completely change the future direction, the trajectory through an inflection point. That can be as simple as an $11 four part special series that you purchased. If they just read. It doesn't take long to read a three page article, but it can change the direction of your entire future.

How much of our success has to do with manipulation? Whether it be with to make money or manipulation with good intent to create positive change in other people?

The short answer is the vast majority of your success is tied to the. What you say is the manipulation of people.

We could call it influence, but it's really manipulation.

And, and even the word manipulation is a term that we don't use at CIA, inside the walls of CIA.

Okay.

Because manipulation has an inherently negative connotation to it. It's like the opposite of loyalty. Loyalty has a positive connotation. Manipulation has a connotation when in fact what we're talking about, when we use the word manipulation or when we use a word like motivation, what we're talking about is getting people to take a certain action that we want. When you manipulate somebody, you get them to take an action that you want that doesn't benefit them. But we also motivate people to take a specific action that benefits us and also benefits them. Okay, so that's how CIA looks at it. There is no motivation or manipulation. It's just behavioral control. Getting a person to take a behavior that you are directing when you're looking.

To turn a target. Is it motivation through something that they want and need? And where does somebody. What's the psychological bridge that somebody needs to cross to betray their country with information?

It's shockingly a short bridge.

Is it?

It is.

So I can be bought. By the way, just if any CIA people are out there.

I don't know if your national secrets are worth.

I don't think they're worth much, but I do like Starbucks. Be uneasy.

The you had two questions there. Right, so. So the first question was. I just lost the first question, actually.

Yeah, me too. It's been a minute. It's been a minute. No, but it was what a psychological bridge was. Yeah.

What is.

What is the bridge? To get somebod to basically say, I'm willing to make this trade of what I had. It's going to be to the detriment of my country, but it's going to be for the benefit of me. How do I justify it?

The reason that it's easy to convert a patriot into a traitor is because when it comes down to getting anybody to take an action, there's a. There's one dominant instinct. And that dominant instinct is survival instinct. Human beings are still animals. We might be spiritual animals, but we are still biological animals. And every animal has two competing instincts, a survival instinct and a tribal instinct. We all know that we're better in groups, but we all also know that if we're in a group, we might not be taken care of. We might be the weakest in the group. We might be tricked. The berries that I gather all day might get shared with somebody I don't like. So we have these two competing and conflicting instincts at all times. Which is why sometimes you see people act in their own best interest. Sometimes you see people act in the best interest of the group. CIA understands that it's a psychological thing in all people, all ages, all educational levels, all languages, all religious sets.

Right?

Competing instincts. So when I want you to do something, I just have to pander to your survival instincts. Because if it's not the dominant instinct in this moment, maybe you're feeling really safe with your family and I just plant the seed like, you know, you're a handsome guy. Well, now, two weeks from now, when your wife is mad at you and you and I are having a bourbon together, you remember that I think you're a handsome guy. And now maybe you're thinking, I wonder if we could go to a strip club. I wonder if we could go take off these wedding rings and go on a date somewhere and see if we can, you know, pick some ladies up. That's exactly what happens to people, right? You're with a business partner and you're happy with that business partner on Monday, but on Wednesday they piss you off. And now all of a sudden you're okay talking to somebody about selling the business.

Sure.

Right. That's. It's those competing instincts that are constantly happening. So CIA teaches us to systematically plant the seeds consistently over time because we know that your life is going to change in some unpredictable way. And when that unpredictable change is not something that you like, the seeds that.

We planted will grow and there's recency. So you have to be consistent.

Yep.

And they're just like, you know what? I'll probably see Andrew next week. Alex. Alex, what was your name? Alex Rodriguez. I'll see Alex Rodriguez in Falcon next week and he'll have something for me.

Yeah. And that's. That's the system. That's also the system for good business.

Yeah.

Plant seeds consistently over time, and that client who isn't interested in you today is going to eventually have friction with their primary provider. And then when they come to you and they're like, can you rescue me? Can you save me? Boom. You have a new premium client for life. Because you said you spent the time planting the seeds.

Yeah. Well, Andrew, this has been great. Thank you so much for coming in. Can you tell people the best way to get in touch with you or to get familiar with your content?

You can find me on my homepage all the time, everydayspy.com you can find me on social media, every channel at Everyday Spy. And you can always click on the link in the description of this interview. And you'll be taking to our spy quiz, the same quiz that you used to find out that you were a mastermind.

I took it this morning. What does that mean? Does that mean I'm eligible or ineligible or higher as a agent?

It's funny. The most people are fully eligible to be hired. It just depends on the need of the mission that they fill you as a mastermind. It means that you are very operationally oriented. You are by all means a successful business owner. So it makes sense. You think quickly, you are decisive, you take risks. But it also means that I know that you might struggle with self discipline because follow through isn't always the best. I actually hear giggles coming from your producer over here.

Fair. Fair feedback. Fair feedback. Well, obviously. And. And it's a free test. It took me about five minutes to take this morning and gave me some great feedback. So. Yeah. So I appreciate it. All right, everybody go there. Curveball for you.

Okay.

Well, I shouldn't say that. Well, I will say, okay, gun to your head, which you have to start a business in the next 30 days and it can't be anything that you're currently doing.

Okay.

This is about market opportunity. If you had to start a business and you were forced to do it in the next 30 days, what would you do? Where's the market opportunity, I would create.

Some kind of business that has to do with ongoing repair, because things always break down and they have to be repaired again. People don't like having to find a new repairman. They like going back to the same repairman. So if I could find my way into something that I know is going to degrade and I know I can repair and I can do a good job once every six months, like a dentist, only I don't want to touch teeth.

Right.

That's where I would go. So fixing driveways, repairing automobiles, repairing some element of the house.

Yeah.

Something that had to do with children's shoes, maybe. Right. Anything that has to do with that needs continual repair so that I can build a loyal client base and then just clone and duplicate the business in the next village over and then do the same thing again.

Yep. Recurring business.

Recurring business.

Awesome. Fastball right down the middle. If you had one sentence to make an impact in somebody's life, what would that be?

If you don't try, the competition win. That's my one sentence.

If you don't try, the competition wins. Awesome. Thank you so much for being on.

My pleasure.

Yeah. I'm Jeff Duden. We're here with Andrew Bustamante. We've been on the unemployable podcast. Thanks for listening.

Thanks for having me, man.

Yeah, this was awesome.