Danny Jones Podcast - #70 - Former CIA Super Spy Speaks Out | Andrew Bustamante

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

Andrew Bustamante is a former covert CIA intelligence officer, US Air Force combat veteran, and Fortune 10 corporate advisor.  He spent seven years in the CIA as a clandestine operative for the agency’s undercover arm, he’d not only lived, plotted and fought in dangerous spots around the world, he had to lie to everyone he knew – including his parents – and to everyone he met. Manipulation was all part of the job. His podcast “Everyday Espionage” teaches the psychology of being a covert spy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We're going to start posting each podcast episode that you see on YouTube a week earlier on Patreon. So feel free to join for early access to all episodes. Plus, we're going to start doing bonus podcast episodes every week. So if you want to join Patreon, it's patreon.com slash concrete videos. Next week's episode is already posted there. So feel free to go check it out. Hello, world. Today, my guest is Andrew Bustamante.

is a former covert CIA intelligence officer and U.S. Air Force combat veteran. He spent seven years in the CIA as a clandestine operative for the agency's undercover arm. He not only lived, plotted, and fought in dangerous spots around the world, but he had to lie to everyone he knew, including his parents and everyone he met. Manipulation was part of his job, and his podcast, which is called Everyday Espionage, teaches the psychology of being a covert spy by being able to be able to be a covert spy. by being able to understand who you are so you can manage the experiences around you in a very deliberate way.

Andrew is so smart, it's scary, and some of the knowledge he drops on this podcast blew me away. Without further ado, please welcome Andrew Bustamante. Is that how you pronounce it? Cool. Well, Andrew, thanks for doing the show. For people out there who don't know, can you give me just like a brief explanation of who you are

and what your background is? Absolutely. My name's Andrew Bustamante. I'm a former CIA field officer. I left the agency in 2014 and went on into corporate America and then started my own gig. Now I teach spy skills to everyday people from individuals who want to learn increased security to corporations and even going back to government enterprise as a private intelligence consultant. So what exactly did you do in the CIA? So I was a field officer.

I mean, CIA, if you know anything about the military or the government, it's a whole, separate world, right? You've got cooks and chefs and everything else. So inside the agency, it's the same way. So I did what was known as human intelligence for field operations, which is completely different than the stuff that you see from satellites and the people who collect radio signals with SIGINT and NSA. So yeah, just as an overarching definition, human intelligence or what's known as human. Okay. What do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions about the CIA with all the conspiracies going

around and yeah I think you nailed it right there it's a fun thing to talk about so the biggest the biggest misconception to me is that people think that CIA is somehow behind conspiracies that work against American interests I get that that CIA has secrets and I get that it's done some kind of crazy

stuff like trying to kill people in the past and make Fidel Castro's beard fall off like we've done some zany stuff you just had you had a a guest on here not long ago talking about MK Ultra and mind control and experimenting with drugs. Absolutely, CIA has done some whack-a-doodle stuff. But to ever think that a government organization is working against its own country, against its own people, is absolutely ludicrous. And that's the biggest misconception that I see out there, is there are people who genuinely believe, because of conspiracy theories and otherwise, that there's something to gain from CIA hurting the government, American people, like people who think it's behind 9-11.

It's just insane. Right. The MK. Ultra thing's weird because it's not necessarily, I don't think he was saying that they were trying to hurt the American people. They basically were just taking in certain people as test subjects like prisoners and stuff and doing wacky experiments on them to try to, whatever, gain influence in foreign countries or with foreign leaders. Yeah, learn how the human mind works, right? Yeah. And I think MK Ultra is like, that's out there.

That's, people know that that's true. And the stuff that was done in MK Ultra, you know, when it comes to the details, I don't know if I didn't know, I couldn't say. But does it make sense that the CIA of the 1960s and 70s would take people who had like lifelong prison sentences and take them out and then subject them to, like downers and uppers and all kinds of crazy transitions to see how the brain works? It totally makes sense, man. Yeah.

But at the same time, they were doing that to increase national defense to all people. I'm not saying it was the right of the wrong decision, but I am saying it makes sense that they would do something like that because they had a justification that was in the best interest of the American people. Right. That's what you see with so many things that happened with the agency. I know one of the things that that is popular to talk about is Edward Snowden. Snowden's entire story is based, like hinges on the question of whether or not it was legal or illegal for government intelligence agencies to collect. information on people like big data on cell records and who was talking to who and record all that information and it was ultimately discovered to be illegal so that's a good thing but the justification

was always in the best interest of protecting America so that's what's so hard to understand about the intelligence world and that's what drives those misconceptions yeah so what is your view on the the whole edward snowden thing you know a lot of people a lot of people are against him saying that you know, he gave up too much information to countries like Russia and China. And other people say that, you know, he did what was best for everyone in the country. Yeah. And when I look at Snowden, and I've said this, and I'll say this until the day I die, right? The dude did the right thing the wrong way. Right? It's the, it's the, it's what you see happen mostly like at work or in your family. Like people try to do the right thing. Yeah. There's a noble intent behind what a lot of people do.

But they do it the wrong way. And when you turn to support, when you get support from places like Russia and Cuba and some of the places in Central and Latin America that Snowden got support, that's a big hint. You're dealing with bad guys, right? But you're doing the right thing. To call into question secret courts that landed on the conclusion that was okay to collect information on the average American, yeah, that's, that needs to go up the chain. But there's a chain that you're supposed to follow. There's a series of steps that you're supposed to take. to make sure the information, the threat, the hostile actors out there, don't know that it's happening.

If you recall back in the days when we were hunting Osama bin Laden, I think it was the New York Times came out with a story that was talking about how the intelligence services were following bin Laden based on his use of a satellite phone. And then like the next day, guess what, we lost all contact, all ability to trace bin Laden. because this open source newspaper basically told the world that the agency was tracking him through his satellite phone. So we just stopped using a satellite phone. And in ushered the era of covert communications for Taliban and extremists. And we had to relearn how do you track these guys if they don't use satellite phones. So there's all this damage that can be done in the intelligence world, the national security world, when people do the right thing the wrong way.

I love one of your videos I was just watching earlier, which was super eye-opening was you were talking about, I guess you spent a lot of time in China, right? I can't say where specifically, but yeah, Asia was one of my specialties. So one of the things that you mentioned, which was like, wow, was, you said, like, the United States is only 200-something years old, and China is almost 3,000 years old. And it was crazy to, like, think about that. Like, I'd never thought about that.

Like, how China is. People think China's, I mean, well, it's crazy communist. There's a whole bunch of issues with China. Their culture, people, you know, we think of China as just this crazy, outlandish place. Yeah. But it's, they have 3,000 years of history. It was interesting, your perspective on it. Yeah.

So, I mean, a lot of that goes back. There was a time, my wife is also a former agency. So my wife and I met at the agency undercover, got married. We had two different disciplines. The agency saw right away that we were an operationally useful couple. So they sent us around the world doing what, we did kind of what's known as a tandem operating couple. So just she and I against the world.

Like Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Yeah, but, you know, I don't look anything like bread. But we were in Japan on tourists, just traveling, and we went to this water, this, like, historic site. And it had this old school water mill where water was coming down off a mountain, turning a mill, grinding some, like, corn or whatever, right? And the tour guide, the English-speaking tour guide who was with us, looked at us and said, it's beautiful right we both looked at him we're like this thing is gorgeous i can't believe it's still running and she's like yeah it's two times as old as the united states and that just the way

that the tour guide explained that to us right she didn't say it was 200 years old right she didn't serve it was 400 years old excuse me she said it was two times the age of my country which just that means that that little flour mill that little corn mill has been doing its job twice as long as the United States has been demonstrating that democracy works. And that put everything into perspective for me. And now all of a sudden, you know, when we left that tourist trip and went on to continue our operations, I started realizing how big the world really is. The average Chinese person that you sit across the table from, whether they're here in the

United States or whether they're in Beijing, that person doesn't just have pressure from mom and dad like you and me. They don't just have pressure from, you know, what school they went to or what their future is supposed to look like or making people proud. or putting food on the table, they've got 3,000 years of cultural pressure. How are you going to do something in your life that moves the center kingdom, right?

Zhonguo, Chinese word for China is the center kingdom, right? The center of the universe. What are you going to do that moves us forward? Because guess what? For 3,000 years, people have been moving us forward. Are you going to drop the ball? Like, in the United States, we're kind of like, I can help the country that I live for or not, right?

Like, I'm free to leave anytime, freedom, you know, you can't hold me back, don't tread on me. That's our attitude. That is not the attitude in China. That's not the attitude in Japan where you're basically given a trade at the age of 12 and you do that trade your entire life. And you smoke and you drink and you like drive yourself to work off of four hours a day of sleep. Like it's completely different, the mindset when you start traveling the world and seeing how people think. Wow. It's super cool.

But it's one of those things that when I come back, from a big trip when I come back from operating abroad. I still operate abroad just in the commercial sector, right? You come back and you just take a big deep breath of God bless America, man. It's an awesome feeling. Why do you think it is that those countries have turned out the way they have after, I mean, they are being so old. What do you think it is? What do you think time, how time has affected the culture is like why? Do you think we're going to end up there in 2000 years? Well, you know, it's an interesting question. When you consider China, right?

China's been through how many, they've been through multiple emperors. And then they had a nationalist movement that turned into a communist movement. They've had democracy that basically failed. And then they've turned over and become communist. And now their communism has adapted into like this hybrid communist government,

but bull market economy that like grapples with itself. But you saw it do in Hong Kong as a perfect example of how like, what is it once? to be in the future. So it's still evolving. What I will say is that if you just look at our election cycle, just look at what happened in November. The country is split. Half the country wants Donald Trump, half the country wants Joe Biden. The advertising that was going out to try to encourage people to vote and encourage people to participate, very little of it had to do with how our country should look 10 years from now, 20 years from now, right? It wasn't.

based on the vision of the country that we wanted to make. It was basically based on the vision of the country that existed. Right. Like fear. Yeah, it was fearmongering. That's exactly what we were doing, right? And that's what we have been doing increasingly every electoral cycle, every time that we have a new president, or every time that we go back to vote, we fearmonger. If you look at the results or if you look at some of the studies that have been done on attack ads, hate ads, you'll literally watch them double and triple in the amount of money that's been spent going all the way back to like two 2008, I want to say. So it's just insane.

But the reason that's important is because we're going through that now after being in existence for about 200 years. Right. If you look at where China was about 200 years into its existence, it was basically fearmongering too. Like, which emperor is going to take over? Which house is going

to take and own like the largest chunk of land, who's going to live where? It was you know, back in the days where there was no running water or electricity. But There is a very natural cycle. There's an evolution to all things. Just like you watch a child and you watch the child go through these simple mistakes that you as an adult don't make anymore.

And then, you know, you talk to some person who's 80 years old. And the big problems that you have right now being 30 something are problems that they laugh at. They're like, dude, my heart may fail tomorrow, right? I don't really care if you have, you know, if you pulled your calf. I have an exercise in 30 years. So it's that same kind of thing. So what will happen to America, 3,000 years? from now, if America is America, 3,000 years from now, who knows how we're going to have

evolved? This great democratic experiment is either going to be kicking ass and taking names, or it's going to evolve into some kind of hybrid. So, I mean, I don't want to hijack like your questions, right? But just as another example, what China does right now, right? What Russia does right now, the reason that America looks at Iran and China and Russia as such powerful threats isn't because they make more money than us. We're the largest economy in the world. Like we make what like I think China's entire economy is like 60% of the United States. We dominate financially.

We dominate in technology and innovation. We just we crush these countries in every kind of measurable aspect. But what they have that we don't have is authoritarian rule. They don't need to ask permission from a Senate. They don't need to go to Congress to get money. money approved. It is literally a handful of people who make all the decisions. And then everybody else follows suit.

Imperial Japan that we went to war with in World War II was the same way. And they were a freaking powerhouse. Right? My point here is that the threat isn't necessarily that our economy is going, we're never going to get eclipsed by China. If people somehow think that we're going to become Chinese in the future, that's not how it's going to work. You don't think?

No. What's going to happen is we're either going to just. I was scared for a second. We're they going to implode from the inside. And then in the vacuum of confusion, like we left in Iraq, somebody's going to step in and we're going to re-evaluate, you know, what our purposes and what our values are, just like what happened in Rome. China's not going to, like, invade America. China's goal is to just keep being China because every year that they succeed, they just grow a little bit more. And they grow a little bit more.

And that's that Chinese mindset. That's the Japanese mindset. That's the Vietnamese mindset. That's the Asian mindset. stay alive today, you're going to get more tomorrow. Wait till the bad guy dies. You basically outlast your enemy. Right.

And one of the tools that they can use to outlast, yep, is simply they don't have to ask permission. They're just like, we're a police state. You are now being observed and you don't have a right. We're listening to your phone calls and you don't have a right to say anything about it. You know, you're going to jail. You don't get a fair trial.

That's the end. But doesn't that kind of seem like that's where it's going in the U.S.? like with the Patriot Act and with what Snowden revealed, with them listening to all everybody's phone calls without permission and with the prison system here and the war on drugs and everything, it seems just like that's the direction that we want, that the government wants to go. I absolutely think that there's some experimentation going on in that direction,

and it's just a matter of how we justify it, right? It's the same, if you look at how... Calling it something like the Patriot Act, it's easy to justify. Exactly. So, I mean, if you just look at the house, right, look at Congress. originally our country was built so that public servants were servants right you went out and you were like

super successful selling cars or you were an inventor and you created lights or something right you did something important with your life and then you stepped out of that important role to basically sacrifice four years of your life to being a two-term senator or congressman right or I'm sorry a two-term congressperson

or like a one-term senator for six years but you took a hit that's why you were called a public servant The president was supposed to be like a business tycoon who then steps out of his role and takes a hit. And he lives as a president, right? Instead, now we have these professional politicians. Now you make $250,000 a year to sit on your butt in Congress doing nothing except making sure that you get invited back again. It's like a two-year thing, right, where they're constantly raising money.

Yep, that's it. And then because they want to get elected again and again and again. And they make their entire career being a professional congressperson. So when you've got that kind of engine driving us, right, you've got to find creative ways to fight an evolving bad guy. And you've got these people who are in power and want to stay in power. So what do they do? They basically subdivide themselves into intelligence committees. So I'm a congressman, but now I'm also a congressman that sits on an intelligence committee, which means I keep secrets from other congressmen.

and the secrets that I keep are like a subset of the secrets that CIA keeps and then we take our entire judicial system and we make a second judicial system in the secret courts. So now it's like the secret court's job is to keep secrets from the public courts, right? Like all we're doing is just adding layers of segregation.

Right. Which keeps the everyday person who's in charge of voting for the right congressperson uninformed about what's happening. So that's why Snowden's revelation was such a big deal because your elected officials who sat on the congressional court who appointed the judges to the secret courts

who are supposed to support CIA and NSA basically all approved. Yeah, it's okay if the government collects your private data on your cell phone. Right. That's a big deal. Yeah, it's terrifying. It's fucking terrifying.

Oh, God. Isn't that a big problem? with democracy too. I remember, I don't remember the exact name of the guy, the philosopher who had the quote about, I mean, and I'm completely going to botch this, but basically he questioned democracy as being like everyone, should every idiot in the country be allowed to make a decision that changes everyone's lives or should it be the most educated people who vote? Yeah, so this is, I think it's a fascinating question. And I, the reason that it's a philosopher who asked that kind of question is because everybody else who would ask that question would just be called an

asshole. Right. True. But yeah, you've got, we live in what's known as a republic, a representative republic. So we elects people to represent us. So even though we want to believe that every vote counts, all those people out there who say, my vote doesn't count, yeah, you're like 40% right.

Your vote, my vote, it doesn't really count. Our vote only counts if we are part of the majority votes that are able to swing the representative ladder, ladder, right, so that we get representation that we want. if you don't get representation that you want, then your vote doesn't really matter. But that's our model. So we try to pick the right people to represent us. So it's like picking an attorney.

You have a family attorney. Your one attorney represents all 12 people in your family. But guess what? Your dad wants something different than your mom. You want something different from both of them. Your six-year-old sister probably doesn't have the right to say what she wants anyways, but somehow she still gets an attorney. That's exactly what we have here.

The person who busts their ass to build a business and turn that business into a $5 million a year enterprise who puts 200 people to work, that person has exactly the same amount of voting power as the person who cheats on their taxes, collects unemployment illegally, and just doesn't do anything with their life, right? The person who lives off of food stamps and whatever else.

What kills me about our country sometimes is that you've got both sides attacking each other, and what they're attacking each other with is totally correct. There are absolutely the top 1% who could care less about low, like poor people who just want to collect more wealth and become stronger and wealthier.

That's how all human beings are. And there are absolutely the bottom 1% who are out there scavenging, you know, off of loopholes and taking advantage of people committing crimes and stealing from whatever. Those things exist. So the attacks are true,

but the attacks like the complaints are about such a small subset of society that were just blind to the other 98% all of the people out there who were just trying to do the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons. And it's just, it's hard. So that's part of, I think,

the evolution of what we have to get through as a democracy. So what made you want to get into the CIA? How did you get into the CIA? How does somebody start a career in the CIA? Mine was kind of accidental. So I was an Air Force officer. Okay.

And I was coming to the place where I could leave the FBI. Air Force and I was so excited, man. I'm not cut, if you can see me now, I'm not really cut out for short hair and clean shaving and polished boots. And honest to God, all I really wanted was to meet a nice hippie girl and have like 12 kids. That's really, yeah. So I applied to the Peace Corps. And I still remember the day, like in uniform, taking like a four hour break in between shifts. And I went to like the computer lab because that's what we had back then. And I logged in and I started making the application to the Peace Corps.

And about halfway through the application, this screen pops up and it's like, hey, you might qualify for other government positions. We recommend you put your application on hold. If you continue past this point, you'll be disqualified from, you know, other, from certain government jobs. Now, I was 24 at the time, 25 maybe. No, 27 at the time. So I was always on the lookout for the next best opportunity, right?

So I was like, shoot, 72 hours. I'll put myself on pause, you know, accept, no problem. Went home. 24 hours later, I get a phone call from an unlisted number, and they say, hey, we'd like to have a conversation with you in Langley, Virginia. Really? That's all it took. They didn't say who they were.

They didn't say. No, they were, they said, we are, we represent a national security entity in the government, in McLean, Virginia. Yeah. We're going to send you tickets to fly up to Langley. And, you know, if you accept our invitation. Yeah. And you'll have like your first personal interview. And then, you know, after this, you'll be able to continue with whatever government applications you want.

And that was that's how it started and that's how it starts for a lot of people really. Yeah, they get a phone call or they or they get kind of somebody stands in front of them at like a career fair believe it or not see I did a lot with career fairs college career fairs and general career fairs. But yeah, you kind of get that weird stranger who talks to you and you think yeah, this isn't real and then they follow through with something that you're like there's no way this person this person who just described themselves as Betty or Bob on the phone actually just mailed me tickets to flight of Virginia next week. Wow. And then you go and you're like, why the hell not? So when you flew to Virginia, what happened? I got off the plane, checked into like a Hampton Inn or something like that. And then went and had a day of, or half a day maybe of just generic interviews. Like, hey, we see that you're former military. Can you tell us, tell us one big success in your life and tell us what you're most afraid of and tell us this and tell us that. And, you know, we, I knew I was interviewing with national security, but I didn't know where. I didn't know if it was,

I didn't know it was intelligence or if it was like Homeland Security or Homeland Defense or if it was just Border Patrol. Yeah. Yeah. So then about halfway through that, they're like, you know, you'd be a good fit for our intelligence services. And for me, they were interviewing me for clandestine intelligence services, so undercover ops. So they were like, you'd be a good fit for clandestine operations. And I was like, yeah, because I'm ambiguously brown, right? You don't really know where I'm from.

Yeah. And that's when I kind of got real. That's insane. And you were 27 years old. Yeah, 27 years old. Don't they, when you join the CIA, don't they make you sign like a lifetime non-disclosure agreement? Yeah, it's a lifetime secrecy agreement. So that's been kind of the bane of my existence for a while now.

Wow. So you got some stuff in your head that you're not allowed. You can't say to nobody. Yeah. And like, and the thing that sucks about that lifetime security, like secrecy agreement is it's, it's for a lifetime. So it's not just the stuff that I did in the past. But if I have some badass idea of what I want to do right now, like for example, I had a collaboration going on with another former intelligence officer, a guy who was what's known as deep cover.

So much deeper than like generic cover, kind of like what you see in most movies, like super deep cover guys that people don't even, they barely know their CIA. Wow. So I had a buddy of mine and I was in collaboration with and we were trying to get a book written that represented his life because he was part of a really important, like, exciting operation that nobody knows about. Really? And I was like, oh, here's a chance for us to use everyday spy, which is my training platform.

here's a chance for us to use my training platform to tell your story and still protect your identity. And we ran up by CIA and they were like, we approve in concept. We agree with your approach, right? So we go into this six-month, just deep dive collaboration, writing, getting maps together, pulling evidence from the past, like getting this badass package put together so we can tell this story. We have, you know, Hollywood producers that are on board. We have audio producers that are on board, TV producers that are on board, who are super excited to see this thing come to life.

We get the whole thing finished, finished meaning ready for submission back to CIA to say, hey, you approved the concept, here's the final product. Man, they saw the final product, and they were like, this is never going to see the light of day, you guys. We can't let this out. And then we went back and we were like, oh, but you said conceptually it was okay.

And, you know, what's the difference? And they're like, well, when you see all the information kind of put together, it's just too dangerous. It's too dangerous to the op. It's too dangerous to the individual. It's too dangerous to the people who are, you know, still associated in some way with that. that kind of on hop. So then, boom, six months of work just. God, trashed, man. And that's,

but that's the, that's what I signed when I was 27, looking for the next best opportunity. So it gets to be a pain sometimes, but then other times, like, you know, it's really nice to know that everything that lives on the internet for me right now is CIA approved. Like, I'm never going to go to jail because they aren't going to come back and be like, oh, you know, this thing that you said you did, like, we don't like it. So now you're going to jail. So everything you do, you have to talk to them and get approved. So you have you a good relationship with them still? You don't really ever have a good relationship with the agency, but yeah, I have a working collaborative relationship. They, when they like what I do, they don't talk to me. When they don't like what I do, they tell

me not to do it. So it kind of works out. Fuck, that's crazy. So did you ever have to get, I know there's like people at the CIA who their job is specifically to disguise people, right? Did you ever have to go under any kind of crazy disguises? We kind of all do to a certain, extent. When you work in the field, disguise, we call it costume, actually. Costume. Yeah. So like the disguise department is actually like called the costume division. So really? It's just like Hollywood. It's just like Hollywood. Yeah. Exactly. So we all do it because it's there's a lot of security benefits to different levels of disguise. And by and large, there's like three levels to disguise. But yeah. So sometimes we go under a very light disguise. Like even what I'm in right now, if I were to just do my hair, grow, and shave my beard straight, like shave it so I've got, you know, clean skin. Yeah. That could be a version of disguise. Put on a pair of glasses, put on a ball cap, wear something I don't normally wear.

So, like, those are simple disguises. We wear those a lot. We'll wear those just going for a walk just so that we can shake surveillance if we need to. Without an everyday thing for you to be disguised to some level? It was like a, I would say a weekly thing. Okay. Yeah. So if you consider the fact that we basically execute anywhere from like two to five ops a week,

then that would be a weekly thing. One of those almost guaranteed is going to be in. some kind of disguise level. But then the really crazy stuff, like, you might only get into prosthetics that change your face and your nose. You might only get into changing your skin tone or your eye color. Like, that kind of stuff, you're only going to do that a handful of times in a career. Did you ever do it?

Yeah, we all do it. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you'll, the typical, like, your typical field officer will have two to three field tours before they get pulled in to do, like, become somebody's supervisor. What do they do to you? What do they make you look like? They make you fat.

They make you tall. They make you... They add, right? So they can make you taller? Yeah, with like stints that go into your shoes. What? So they can raise your shoulders so it looks like your neck is smaller, but your body is taller. There's a...

There's the key to disguise is that you can always add. You can't take away, right? You're not going to make a six foot tall person five foot eight. Right. But you can make a six foot tall person six foot two. Right? You can make somebody who weighs 180 pounds look like they weigh 210 pounds, but you can't take them and make them 160 pounds.

So the general. rule is you can always add. So they like to work from a foundation. One of the reasons why so many intelligence officers look the same, you know, shaved faces, short hair, whatever, like fit bodies, is because you can always add. You can make them a little fatter,

make them grow a beard, make them grow long hair. Easy to add, hard to take away. Right. So that's basically how it works. So for us, you know, put on a fake tattoo, put on 20 extra pounds, put like a tack in your shoe, so you walk with a limp, and all of a sudden you're a completely different person. Wow. Yeah, but you got to keep, well, keep in mind the majority of people don't observe

accurately, right? We most, most of us live our life in what's known as a zone of situational awareness that's called the white or the green zone, which means you're really only aware of between six inches and like two feet around you. Somebody could walk right by you and they could walk by you four times and you'd never even notice. Right. Right.

It's not until you become a trained observer, a skilled observer that you start seeing those patterns. So it's really easy If you can believe it Like I have literally put on A black wig With straight hair I'm a black curly haired guy

And I have put on a black Straight-haired wig And a pair of glasses And that's it And sat at tables with friends Who did not immediately recognize What? Yeah

Your own friends With my own friends And it's just It's mind boggling People are like I've seen you before Right? And I was like

Yeah We have met before Because it's just You know They don't people don't get it. They, they don't trust their instinct enough. So they feel like this tickle that says, we've met, I know you. Why do I know you? Where do I know you? Right. But they don't trust it. They don't trust it because they're like, you know, whatever. This, yeah, I'm just going to move on.

Whereas for us, when you're, when you become a trained observer, you trust that little tickle. You trust that spiky sense. And you're like, something's shady here. Like, I have seen that guy before. So did you have to go through a lot of training initially before you started, before they initially shipped you overseas to do all this undercover stuff? Yeah, there's two types of training that you go through at the agency in general. There's your intro training, which is whatever your skill set is, whether you're going to be a targeter, field officer, tech officer, whether you're going to do break in entry, whether you're going to do, right, hacking. You will go through like a prolonged training. And most of those lengths are classified, but my training was the farm, just like you've seen in the TV shows, right? So I went to the farm and then they teach you everything you need to operate independently in the field at that training course. And then from there, you'll continue going through training that's more like specific where it's needed.

So if you're going to go into the desert, if you're going to go into the jungle, if you're going to go into a position where you know, you'll only be in contact with your support element like once every month or once every two weeks or something, if you're going to create a deep cover alias, different trainings, right? So those are much shorter. But essentially, all of our training mimics this process of what's known as just in time training, meaning you're taught a skill, and then you're immediately put into an exercise where you use that skill. So it's completely different than what you're used to in college or anything like that, right? If you could imagine, like if we had weapons right now, I could basically teach you how to put a gun together and take a gun apart. Right. And then the next step would be to force you to do it,

while I'm keeping a clock and you have real risk. If you don't do it in less than two minutes, you don't continue the training, right? A real risk scenario. Spikes the adrenaline, forces you to process the information that you had, plus the skill set that you have in front of you, and then you have to perform.

That's called just in time learning. Okay. If there's no real risk, it's basically like college and you're like, uh, I can handle a 40 on this test. I'll just make it up on the next exam. Yeah.

There's no stakes. You just, you can plan it out, over the course of a semester and be like, yeah, I'll be fine. And where did you go to first when they shipped you overseas? And what was your main objectives when you, when they sent you, where do they send you first? So we're, this is, now we're getting into like more classified areas, right?

Because our personal operational background is where we start running into classification problems, where we start, you know, stuff is confidential, stuff is classified, stuff can't be shared. But what I can say in general is not everybody gets shipped out right away. Okay. Some people will be deployed into positions where they're going to learn a special skill. Like maybe you're going to go work with joint military ops, and you might honestly go to like paradise. You might go to like Southern Florida and just practice jumping out of helicopters and amphibious assaults.

That might be your first tour. Other people will stay at Langley. He'll stay at headquarters. Some people might go, you know, take a tour with FBI or take a tour with NSA and just, you know, be a joint liaison, learn that side of the operation. And then other people will go and do different types. of field ops, some long-term field ops, some short-term field ops, some special operation field ops, different stuff like that. So for me, let me think, for me it was more of a traditional route. So traditional overseas assignments, traditional domestic assignment, traditional

overseas assignment, traditional domestic assignment. And then it was actually in 2012, there was some big developments in like the world of counterterrorism and counter nuclear proliferation where my military background kind of came into play and I was all of a sudden like fleeted out of this traditional world and into special ops covert action world. Wow. And that was kind of how I ended my career.

As a program manager doing covert action with joint U.S. military and other domestic intelligence community partners. Okay. And then we had our first kid, the long story short, we left because my wife and I left because we had our child. And when we kind of did the math, looking at how other parents in the agency end up, we were like,

I don't know if it's worth it to like potentially sacrifice our marriage and the childhood experience, the parenting experience for a career working for a secret intelligence organization. But so haven't you said that, like said previously where you were like generally, like the countries that you were in? Correct. Yes. So I specialize in Asia.

Okay, Asia. And what's nice is that when you specialize against the target that's an Asian target, I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to think of the different targets that are in Asia. They're actually all over the world. So I've had a chance to travel in Latin America, Central America, Europe, Africa, you know, Asia chasing these bad guys all over the world. Wow. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun.

And so your job was basically to just like find yourself in the same environments as these bad guys? Yeah, basically. Yeah. So the way that our ops worked, because my wife and I, were a tandem couple, she was what's known as a targeter. So her job was to find targets. And the way we define a target is somebody who's in possession of secret information that the American government wants.

Maybe that secret information has to do with, you know, nuclear weapons or maybe it has to do the troop movements or maybe it has to do with, you know, artificial intelligence. Who knows? But she knows what American intelligence needs. And she finds the people who have, who we think have access to that information. And then my job is to build an op where we could. where we meet that person and collect that information or prove whether or not they have what we think they have. So a lot of that is it's just social skills.

It's social skills across cultural barriers dealing with people who have no reason to trust you as an American, unless you put on a disguise and pretend that you're not. And you were most often than not in a disguise pretending you were somebody else, right? No, yeah, yeah. Most often I was not in a disguise. Okay, you were not in a disguise. Not in disguise, yeah. And then, but I also didn't overtly claim to be American.

I don't look Caucasian So a lot of times if I'm if I'm meeting with somebody and we're speaking in English They don't have English that's sharp enough to know that mine's an American accent If we're meeting in a foreign language then my foreign language skill Would always have an American accent or a Western accent right because it would be their native language And they would realize kind of early on that I'm a westerner Most likely American but stereotypes about America are super strong overseas Like if you're not white, six foot two, and like 195 pounds,

people actually don't think you're American. They're like, maybe you're Canadian. Really? Or maybe you're European. Yeah, they don't think like, just like when I say Chinese person, an image comes to your mind. Not all Chinese people look like that. Right.

It's the same thing overseas. If you're sitting in Japan and you say American person, an image is going to come to mind. Like Hollywood, football players, celebrities. Interesting. Yeah, that's going to come to their mind. That's not what I look like. Wow. So your wife would basically figure out the people who have this information that the government wants, and you would somehow find a way to meet this person in public somewhere.

Yeah. In public or it could be in virtual world, or it could be in private if you had like the right kind of connections where you could connect through what's known as like access agents. Sometimes you hear them called useful idiots, like people in between who can connect you. is the person you want to talk to, and then you can have a cup of coffee in private as your first meeting. But a lot of times it's really just, I know this person's going to be at this hotel, I know this person's going to be at this conference,

I know this person's going to be at this baseball game, right? Yeah. I got to find a way. So as part of your training to develop these social skills and these like psychological tricks that you could play to sort of get these people to like you and trust you? Yeah, that's exactly right. So one of the, just to kind of reference back to your previous podcast on MK. Ultra.

Yeah. Right. MK. was a goal to try and get people to understand mind control. I would say that we never mastered mind control in the way that MK. Ultra set out for us to do, but we have very much learned the process of mastering, persuasion, mastering, mastering influence, which is all a form of mind control, right? And we do it without drugs, we do it without, you know,

without anything except for mastering deliberate social skills, right? Understanding how the human mind works, understanding the cognitive processes, being able to put deliberate elements in place that steer a person's thinking and get them to land on a specific outcome. Wow. That is what we wanted to, that we want them to deliver. So you're doing it right now.

I don't know if you've, if you've thought of that. Every interview that you have, you are using some of those skills. Right. So just as a real quick exercise, right? Okay. What's your name? My name's Danny. Danny, where were you born?

It's born in Clearwater. Clearwater, Florida? Yes. That's an awesome town. Yeah. Did you like learn to love the beach growing up in that town? Or do you not love the beach because you grew up in that town? No, I've always just loved, I love the beach.

in the water. You love the beach. Are you a water person? Do you do stuff on the water? Absolutely. All the time. Like what? Fish, surf, swim, dive, everything. So who's in control of this conversation? You are. I am. Why? Because you're steering it. You're guiding me with the questions. What do you do every time you have a podcast interview? Sort of, yeah, the same thing. The exact same thing, man. That's a form of like cognitive control. Interesting. But we don't often think that. Most people think that if you're talking most, you're in control of a conversation. Right? It's why it's why when you're you want to impress your date, you talk. Right. You want to impress your date, shut the hell up.

Right, exactly. Listen. Yeah, exactly right. Because then you'll be in control of the conversation. Like, cognitively, when you start receiving questions, you start to feel like you are the center of attention, even though you're only the center of my attention, right? Anybody else who's in the room doesn't really know that you're there. But you start, you feel good.

There's all these emotional receptors that start to trigger. You feel like the center of attention. You feel like you're interesting. You feel like all these things about you that are mundane to you. you're like, oh, this guy really likes me. Like, I feel really good about myself, right? Yeah. And then you start to associate that with the person asking the questions.

And you start to be like, I feel really good around this guy. In fact, you just feel good because you're getting questions. Right. Right. But if I ask you the right questions and every time I'm around you, I ask you questions, and every time I'm around you, I stroke your ego, or I pump you up or I help you connect in ways that you want to connect with, like, business networks or whatever else, like you're going to start to associate positive feelings with me as a person.

Right. Right. And now all of a sudden it's not hard to take that one step further and be like, you're not just positive towards me, but you're actually loyal towards me. And that's the human cycle, man, from stranger to friend, from friend to loyalist. So is this the kind, are these the kind of principles that you teach with your everyday spy podcast? Yeah, exactly right. Okay. Yeah, these are the principles that we teach.

And then we also teach people how to apply them to everyday life, right? Because it's one thing to understand something conceptually. It's something completely different when you know how to apply it. you can apply it to finding a date. You can apply it to getting a raise. You can apply it to securing a job. When I left the agency, I had to get a job, right? But guess what?

I couldn't tell anybody. That you worked at the CIA? So it's like, you really couldn't tell them that? No, I couldn't tell you. I went through a two-year cleanse where my cover had to be scrubbed. So I wasn't allowed to talk about who I really was or what I really did. I was only able to lean on this fabricated resume that CIA gave me with with phone calls that

would like answer on deadline. like sources and stuff and resources. Everything was fake, yeah. Wow. So after like six months of trying to find a job and not finding a job, I was like, to hell with this. I'm just going to use the skills that the agency taught me. And I'm going to fraud, like fraudulent myself into a job.

And that's essentially what I ended up doing. So I got myself into an IT position with like a Fortune 10 company lying the whole way there. And then I spent like a year with no skills at all learning on the job, trying to like balance. It was just an op. It was just another op. But when the agency finally rolled back my cover, I was able to go to my boss and be like,

hey, man, it's been nice working for you. I want to make sure that you know this in case there's any kind of legal ramifications. But my resume was fake. My application was fake. I really don't have any of the skills that you hired me for. And what do they say?

Well, my boss was like, thanks for telling me. Keep doing a good job. And I'm going to talk to my boss too, right? So then, like, my boss and the boss above him, like knew the truth. And I don't know if it ever went any further than that. but essentially like I was doing a good job.

I learned what I needed to learn. Right, right. You're very competent. That's one of the most important things. Yeah. And that's what, but that's, that's an everyday skill,

right? I can drop you in almost any job in any industry anywhere and you're going to learn how to do it. Right. The hard part is getting through the gatekeeper, right? How do you get past the HR person? How do you nail the interview?

Right. How do you fake it? Right. Until you can prove it. And that's kind of, that's an intel. Wow. That's fascinating, man.

So what, what was it? Like, after how many years? Total were you in the CIA? Seven years total with the agency. Seven years. What point was it that you and your wife,

what drove you guys to ultimately make the decision to leave? So I would say about the five-year mark, we started realizing like it may not be the best fit for us. You're always, it's the government. It's the CIA, but it's still the government. You don't really have a lot of control over where you are, whether your boss is a dirtbag or a superstar, you know, it's not a meritocracy.

Doing a good job doesn't make more money. It doesn't get you choice assignments, right? It's all about who you know still. It's a good old boys network, right? So we were both kind of realizing that maybe it wasn't going to be the best long-term fit for us at about five years. And then we got a sweet assignment that we were both like,

there's no way we're going to turn this thing down. Like, let's ride this wave and see what happens. And we had such a good time on that assignment that we ended up getting pregnant. How long do the assignments typically last? They last between two and four years, depending on where you're going. I mean, some short-term assignments

can be much shorter than that, but your typical assignment is somewhere between two and four. So we went out and, like, we had a blast, and then we ended up getting pregnant, and once we got pregnant, if anybody out there has kids, knows what it's like to be in a relationship where the wife or the girlfriend gets pregnant,

everything changes, right? Like there becomes this, like an extra lens is like lifted and you're like, oh, these are my real priorities and these are the things that are just nice to have. Yeah. It's crystal clear. As soon as you know, there's a baby in a belly, you're like, holy smokes. She changes. It's crazy. So that happened to us. And we were like, okay, we're going to have a baby. This, this bologna's got to end, right? I mean, before that, my wife, my wife would get shipped somewhere for like two months. I couldn't talk to her. She couldn't tell me where she was going. Really? I didn't know she was coming home. You guys wouldn't even talk for two months. Yeah. I mean, we would talk through secret systems that the agency provided us because we were co-workers.

So we'd be able to plan for one op while she's still on her other app. But essentially, that's just glorified email. So it's like your wife is doing one thing and then you're here and then she'll come back for a week and then I find out I'm gone for two months. And then like maybe we're both gone. Nobody knows when we're going to talk to each other next, if we're going to talk to each other next. And it's sexy and it's fun and it's exciting when you're 28 years old. Absolutely.

And you know, it's like a dream job for a bachelor versus a single person. Yeah, exactly. And even when we got married, we were like, oh, this is sweet. Like, you know, who gets to live this life? They make movies about this kind of thing, right? But then all of a sudden there was a baby. And now we're like, okay, if you leave for two months, what do I tell them six years from now if you don't come home? Right.

Right. And then the agency starts to play a role in what you can and can't tell family and who you can't tell about whatever, right? And it becomes this really messy, like, pit of just. Right. Lies. Lies and compromise. And that's why the agency has one of the highest divorce rates in America, right? And agency employees, marriages just don't laugh.

divorce is rife, adultery is, you know, rampant. Like, bad stuff happens when you start compromising on these core values. Like, the agency doesn't care because you're still loyal to the United States. You're still doing your job. Yeah. They don't really care about whether or not you stay married or not, right? Right.

As long as you don't start selling secrets to the Russians. I can imagine already husbands out in Russia on some covert mission, and he had to sleep with this Russian lady because it was part of the mission. Sorry, I mean, I had to do it. Yeah. And then how are you going to talk about that when? you come back. Exactly. Right? Like, uh, it was, you know, the things I do for my country, like triple X style, right? Right. Right. It's like, or is it like, yeah, nothing really

happened, babe. It was a really boring trip. Right. Jeez. I only talked to, you know, Sasha, but Sasha was a boy and he was fat. You wouldn't have liked it. God, let's make spaghetti and meatballs for dinner. Yeah, that's the, that's the worst, that's the worst possible career I could imagine you could, you could have for raising children. Yeah, and that's what happens. And that's what so, the reason one of the reasons I am so positive still to this day about the agency is because the men and women working right now are making that sacrifice. Like they are going to work every day, lying to teenagers every day, missing birthday parties, missing baseball games, right? They're going on these missions that they may not come back from because they believe so strongly in the mission. And they are voluntarily putting everything about themselves and their family second.

that's not the way I'm wired right but if that's the way they're wired God bless them because they're doing a job I won't do and they're doing it to keep my family safe yeah I can't talk trash about that you know I mean I'm not gonna write some trashy memoir that that tries to bitch slap the agency when there are people out there making that genuine sacrifice and yeah some of them you know they make that sacrifice it doesn't go well they lose spouses they have children that are that never want to talk to them again right? I mean it's just they they retire at 60 with a divorce and half their net worth is taken away

and they've got to keep working at like doing whatever they do right it's just it's a it's a huge compromise it's a huge challenge and it's one that I will always honor and respect the people doing it yeah definitely different kind of different kind of human to do that yeah to do that work absolutely so when you were on a lot of these covert ops that you were on was your how often would you say your life was actually in danger when you were on these jobs? Like were you, if, say, for example, someone figured out that you weren't who you were saying you were, would your life be an immediate danger? So it's interesting when you think about what a life really is, right? So we call espionage the gentleman's game.

It's more like chess than anything else, right? When you capture a piece, the piece has more value to you alive than it does dead, right? So it's not like a soldier where, you know, here's a, company of here's a platoon of army people trying to you know storm a machine gun nest the machine gun nests only mission is to kill every single person that platoon and make sure it stays safe yeah right we're in a completely different kind of game so if we're overseas if we're on mission if we're doing something in a war zone we are worth way more if somebody can capture us and hold us than if they just neutralize us and it's the same way with us we would rather follow a russian spy for years and

let them keep operating, then pick them up and scoop them into a cell somewhere and arrest them. Because you learn so much more watching them operate. You learn from interrogations. You learn from monitoring communication systems, right? So it's a gentleman's game because there's so much more at stake when you're being observed than once you've been captured. Right. So I would say that was my life in danger? And I wasn't really at risk of losing my life very often.

That, you know, there's always IEDs that go off on the sides of roads. There's always, you know, bullets and mission and rockets that fly overhead if you're in a war zone. Yeah. Or a civil war zone, right? Yeah. And that kind of stuff is kind of always a threat. But when it comes to whether or not someone's going to individually target me and, like, snipe me from, like, the 12th floor of some building, it's not really like that. The bigger risk is that somebody has identified me through my cover.

And that ruins the mission. And that ruins the mission. And I don't know it. And now everything I do every day, right, they're tapped into my phone lines, tapped into my cell phone, they're following my emails, they're following me, they're following my wife, right? And they're just sucking up every piece of information. They find my assets. They find my targets. They find my mission. They find the objective. They let me do everything while they build a big case, a big international case, right. And then, you know, right before I get on a plane to go home. The last thing they want to do is let you know that they've figured you out. Exactly right. And that's something that you don't see. Like in the movies, it's like, oh, they're following James Bond, and as soon as they think they have a good shot, they try to kill him. Like, no.

James Bond, I would just watch that guy all day long and be like, this guy is such a douche. Really? There's his asset. There's a lady sleeping with. There's where he keeps his money. Right. Like, there's the car he drives.

Right. We can put a GPS tracker on the car and always know where he's at. You know, he wears the same three suits. Yeah. Right? He uses the same gun. It's just, you know, it's way easier to watch the guy and learn about MI6 than it is to just neutralize the guy.

and stick them in a cell. Right. I know one of the things I wanted to talk about was the Havana syndrome, where, I mean, when I first found out about it a couple months ago and I read about it, and I saw like an interview from one of the guys on YouTube, that was absolutely fucking terrifying.

All of a sudden, your whole family is waking up with migraines and bleeding out of your nose. I guess, from what I understand is the rush, were blasting microwave energy, very focused microwave energy at these buildings, like either U.S. embassies or buildings like that where they knew Americans were working, either for the CIA or for whatever, blasting microwave energy at them for some reason or not, basically the jam signals or communication. Do you know anything about that? Yeah, so what you're getting at

when we talk about the Havana syndrome. So, I mean, first and foremost, we have to recognize that Nobody knows what it is. Nobody knows. Nobody can confirm if it's even real, right? We've just had enough instances of it where we're like, you know, predominance of evidence suggests something is going on. We don't know who it is, but we know that it started in Havana. And we know that in Havana is like the Russian embassy was across the street from the American embassy.

Right. Right. So like, that's the foundation. That's where it all started. Outside of that, a lot of what's happening is speculation, which makes it dangerous. But here's kind of what I would. add to the conversation. We know that there is an inherent risk in direct weapons, kinetic weapons, right?

If person A shoots person B, like we live in a world where the whole world knows it now. Right. Right. You can't hide the ballistic evidence. Like there's going to be a bullet that has a unique, you know, caliber that's going to come from a gun that has unique caliber. So you can't hide that kind of stuff. So now we're getting into this world of like energy weapons. And we've seen them in crowd control too.

Like how do you break up a crowd? without killing people, like what happened in Kent State back in the 60s or whatever. So you've got to find a way to break up crowds. You've got to find a way to basically target individuals

in a way that can't be tracked. So that's where these energy weapons come from, or indirect energy weapons, right? So basically, whether it's a fire hose that just, nobody wants to get here with a fire hose, so they all run away. Right.

Or whether it's a sound wave that makes you vomit or makes you disoriented. Like, we've seen these things in other parts of the world. We've seen here in the United States. Yeah. What we have here is an instance

where some, thing and theoretically like it wouldn't be hard to take an energy weapon and mount it and direct it at a certain floor of a building. There's an infrastructure requirement anytime you have an intelligence operation going on. So with an infrastructure requirement, like it's hard to just move your your command center from place to place. So once people know where your command center is, you know, they could use a pulse energy weapon and just aim it at the windows and do their, do their thing, right? Disorient you, make you sick to your stomach, you know, cause nosebleeds, you know, push for brain aneurysms, things that can't be tracked. So what's fascinating about

the Havana syndrome is that it happened in Cuba and in China and in Russia and in other countries around the world. And it's oftentimes most often associated with, you know, diplomats and people who are in the intelligence service who are, you know, at some point in a diplomatic facility. So there you see like the infrastructure is there permanent infrastructure things are like individuals who are being targeted it's not like you hear you know you don't get articles about janitors who are complaining about this stuff right right who are on the first floor it's always u.s diplomats isn't it yeah that we hear about the most yeah exactly and the kind of technology that would be used to make this kind of effect is not the kind of technology that's going to exist in Nigeria or Kenya right it's going to come

from a first world tech savvy country but yeah and that's that's kind of what we're seeing so for me, it certainly suggests that there's an intentional weapon of some sort that's being used to deter people from going to these command centers. Like, if I was still in the agency and somebody told me I had to go to Moscow and, like, sit on the fifth floor, I'd be like, oh, come on, guys. Like, I don't really want to be throwing up every afternoon. That sounds miserable. Would you really be concerned if they told you that?

Oh, yeah. I guarantee you, people are doing that right now. I promise you. And that's what makes these weapons so powerful. Like, what's happening? I don't know. What's the risk? I don't know. Is it going to happen to me? I don't know.

But you have to make a decision to go or not go. And you're like, uh, and one of the biggest issues with it is, I guess initially a lot of the people were getting, uh, like paid benefits or paid basically like, basically like, paid basically like, basically like, paid basically like, basically like, paid, basically like, basically like, paid, basically like, and these people aren't getting some of those benefits. I don't know that piece. I would hope that, I mean, because if you are a government employee, you always have certain government benefits, which goes like kind of points to the whole solar winds debacle and the recent breach, the cyber breach with solar winds. But yeah, so since all government employees have government benefits,

then it doesn't matter if you're undercover or not undercover, you should have the coverage you need to get taken care of. What is solar winds? So there was a massive breach. I think it was December 12th or 13th. So it's a... Just a couple days ago? Yeah, just a week ago.

Really a fascinating example of what I teach as industrial espionage. So Solar Winds is a database company. They basically, they're a contracting civilian company. And their job is basically to monitor the performance and the health of different databases for companies and government entities and state organizations. Yeah. Like they have something like 18,000 customers. So they're massive, successful company.

right? Well, a breach was just identified. They don't know who it's from. They speculate that it's Russia. And essentially what happened is some sort of foreign hacking malicious code was inserted into their system specifically so that their servers,

their servers would forward that malicious code onto these targeted clients. And then once it was on these targeted clients' servers, it would penetrate those servers and then start collecting data and sending it back. Holy shit. Massive, man. It's the biggest, it's the biggest breach that we have ever had in American history. It's all over the

news in certain circles, right? Yeah. It's not something people are keeping secret, but what I think America doesn't understand is like, this is traditional espionage. I am on, the reason I'm excited about my business is because I think we are on the brink of possibly the greatest espionage revolution in history. What do you mean by that? Because espionage has become so much easier now. You've got countries that have access to information that allows them to make their own decisions. So the

days of the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Union, even the days in North Korea where you see like, you know, people having information control and you can like brainwashing entire countries, that day is over. Like North Korea is literally counting the days until somehow

somebody can like sneak in with Google. Right? Right. Right. But people can make their own decisions. when people can make their own decisions, they can make their own bad decisions. And it's very, very hard for even a state-controlled organization, like even a police state to protect all of its information when individuals can choose what they do and what they don't do.

On top of that, that same technology that makes it possible for an individual to make a bad decision is also the technology that makes it possible for cyber actors from anywhere in the world to target anywhere else in the world. And espionage is all about finding the weak point and the most vulnerable point and entering through that vulnerable point you can get to like

you know you can get to the strongest guy in the world right your your UFC fighters your like your powerhouses right whatever they are they all still have vulnerable points right they're still soft between their toes it still sucks when they have an earache

right they still rush to the dentist when they have a cavity they have vulnerable points even though they're big strong people countries are the same way United States big strong country Guess what? We still have vulnerable points. Solar winds was one of those vulnerable points. That was the weak spot between our toes. Somebody out there was like, oh, look at this little company that has no protection and weak passwords, but is connected to all of these secret government organizations, all through the DOD, right? Look at this. It's connected everywhere. And if we can just penetrate there, we'll get into everything. And that's what they did. So how did we find out about it? So interestingly enough, this is such an ugly story, man. Yeah.

There's an international cybersecurity group out there called Fire Eye. And they're like top, top quality cybersecurity group based. They might be based out of New York. Okay. Possibly Singapore. Anyways, these are shit-hot cybersecurity guys. Guess who they did business with? Solar Winds.

Solar Winds managed all their databases, right? All the performance, all the health, all the server requirements, everything. So then FireI used their own cybersecurity tools on their own systems. And they started seeing these anomalies. And they were like, this looks like we've been penetrated. Right? So they isolate the penetration. They start to reverse engineer it.

And they're like, we have found something that looks like it was exported to our server from solar winds. So Fire Eye tells all of their clients, hey, guys, we know you counted on us for cybersecurity. And we're connected to all of your systems. Right. We think that we've been compromised. It's like COVID-19 for the cyber world, right? Here's our contact tracing. Hey guys, I know we hung out last week.

I just tested positive for COVID. Right? And then all these people start to freak out. Yeah. And then the person who tests a positive, fire eye, looks back at solar winds and is like, hey, we think you might have been penetrated. Solar Winds does a scan and they're like, yeah, we've been penetrated.

So then they have to go out and tell all of their clients, we think we've been penetrated, keep an eye out, like, look for these kinds of anomalies. And then once they told all of their clients, everybody's like, oh, we see anomalies, we see anomalies, we see anomalies. And it's just this, it's not ugly. It's not like sloppy. It's not sloppy cyber tradecraft.

It's really refined, effective tradecraft. So refined that solar winds never found it. Fire, I barely found it, right? Like, that's how quality the penetration was. So it's a big deal. And how did we figure out it was Russia? Nobody knows. Everyone's saying it, though, right?

The reason everybody says it is because, so there's an MO to cyber operations. there's two types of cyber out there. There's slap your mama cyber where it's like, hey, I just like, I took you, I took you down, I want the whole world to know about it. I'm going to do everything except say, I did it.

I'm just going to say, hey guys, like, not my fault that you suck. And then there's a cyber that like you don't even know happened. Super refined, you know, professional, you don't even know we were there.

Right? It's the same kind of thing that you see with like professional athletes. There's a professional athlete, who comes out there and dominates on the field and then wants to be the one on all the talk shows and wants to be like, I'm the best, I'm the bomb, I'm the shit. And then you've got the quiet killer

who you don't ever see on talk shows who everybody wants to wear their jersey because they're like, that guy's a killer. Right? Two different types. China is this one. When they break in and steal something, they leave footprints everywhere, right?

They're like... They're marching all over the grave. They leave red flags just to give you a hint. But then if you come back and say, China did this, So like, oh, it wasn't us, wasn't us. But, you know, it happened to you. Sucks to suck.

It sucks to be you. Sucks to suck. Russia, on the other hand, is like, they don't even get caught 90% of the time. Wow. Belarus doesn't get caught. Iran doesn't get caught. Like, these are really, really refined cyber folks. America, we pride ourselves on being so good at what we do.

You don't even see that we've been there, right? That's how refined this was. So when it's that refined, Israel, they are so good at what they do. I stepped away from the mic. They're so good at what they do. they do, they don't even leave a footprint. They don't ever get caught. Like, this group barely got caught.

And the reason they got caught is probably because they were going up against the hardest cyber targets in the world. There's only a handful of players that play at that level. We're one of them. Russia's the next one on the list. So it makes it really easy for us to be like, Russia did this. But you can't see anybody confirming it, right? For every one person that says it was Russia, two other people say we don't know.

Super refined, man. That's, that's espion. that's insane it's super for me i think it's super exciting it is exciting no it's exciting and it's it's scary it's every it's everything yeah why do you think it is i mean i i hear a lot that russia their spying techniques and their technology when it comes to surveillance and stuff is way more advanced than us is that accurate yeah there's um i wouldn't say it's more advanced i would say that it's more aggressive more aggressive yeah so you've got you got these handful of of national intelligence organizations

that have very refined, very sophisticated, talented people, intelligent people. They understand technology. They know how to use it, right? Some of the countries on that list. Israel's on that list. America's on that list. Canada's on that list.

The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, on that list. China's on the list. India's on that list. Brazil is on that list. It's a huge list. There's lots of Korea, Japan. These are super refined places

that are really. good at what they do. The difference between them is how aggressive they are. Okay. America doesn't want to get caught. Like we want to be the quiet, gray person that never gets caught. So we're, we use our stuff less aggressively. China wants the whole world to secretly fear them. So they don't worry about aggression. They want to appear aggressive. And then they have this excellent narrative because they're not a democracy, right? A handful of people decide that they have their own, um, what's the word I'm looking for? for propaganda organization, their job is just to come up with the narrative. So whenever someone accuses China of being aggressive, China just comes up with a narrative that's like,

hey, we're trying to be a world leader. Yeah. We're trying to help. Don't mistake our aggression, or don't mistake our goodwill for aggression while we figure this thing out, right? Right. So that's how it works.

Places like Russia, super aggressive, because Russia's in this funky spot where it's still a state-controlled nation, but they're trying to play this role where they're like a peacekeeper in the world, like they're trying to offset American supremacy with their own kind of Russian supremacy. So it gets really sticky, man.

How do you put surveillance on all your people, but then tell people, like tell other countries that you can trust us, we're here to help. Right. It's really hard to do that. It's hard to do that when you've got a country like America that actually helps you with no strings attached, right? Or Canada that actually helps you with no strings attached

because the real strings are hidden. So nobody even knows that they're there, right? That's the difference between what's known as tradecraft, how we do our trade craft and how they do their trade craft. Do you think, this is one of the terms of espionage,

do you think, obviously when they charge Snowden, his charge, his main charge was espionage. Was that actually espionage? So. A lot of people say, a lot of,

there's like one guy on Twitter, I forget his, I forget his name, that basically says that he compromised a lot of stuff by giving things to China and Russia. But basically,

I guess from what I understand is what he did is not technically espionage because espionage is giving is giving compromising information to other countries. So here's what's interesting about Snowden and going back to what we were talking about. Remember we were talking about vulnerabilities and the soft spot between your toes? Yeah. Right. Snowden wasn't an intelligence officer. He was a contractor. That's often mistaken. A lot of times it's reported that he was an NSA employee. He was not. He was a contractor. A contractor that's a third party contractor just like solar Wind is a third-party contract. Okay, okay.

We have multiple cases in the United States where third-party contractors are targeted by foreign intelligence services because they have access to top secret systems, but they don't have any of the protections that like full-blown CIA officers, NSA officers, DIA officers have, right? So as an example, when I was in CIA, I had to take a full scope polygraph. I had to go through multiple interviews every year to make sure that I was not compromised to a foreign intelligence unit, right? Okay.

When I worked, I would often work side by side with a contractor, a contractor from Booz Allen Hamilton, a contractor from Northrop Grumman, a contractor from CACI, who didn't have any of that security barrage that they had to go through. They basically were like, CACI, the government went to CICI and was like, we need a body. We need a body to type. And they're like, here you go. This person has a top secret clearance, and they're yours. That's a third party contractor. That's the weak spot. And they don't sign those confidentiality, lifetime confidentiality.

They don't sign a lifetime confidentiality agreement. Their contracting company signs that agreement for them, right? So that's how it's like Snowden could be in a seat on Monday, and then the next day the contract goes to a different organization or like Snowden's contractor contracting firm decides, you know, this guy's not worth it. Let's put somebody else in, right? That's part of the problem that has been identified with solar winds. We have this huge soft underbelly because we've relied on contractors and third party contractors for so long. So with Snowden, he was never an intelligence officer. He never had direct access to intelligence policy.

Therefore, he doesn't really fall under the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act specifically applies to intelligence personnel. So if an intelligence personnel officer who's been entrusted and sworn their oath to the United States violates it, they can be tried for treason and for espionage. If you don't sign that, they have to find different charges, which is why you see he has all sorts of charges for, like, compromising information and selling. information and giving away secrets that shouldn't have been like he's got a whole rap sheet of things that he has done that are valid uh valid criminal charges that can be

with that can be upheld but that that's why there's so much question about the espionage act got it yeah i thought i thought i thought for some reason i thought that just because that he revealed information that was specific to america american government spying on americans I thought that it wasn't espionage because it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't, didn't have anything to do with any sort of foreign entities. Yeah. So when he left the United States, he basically started selling his services, his services meaning his information. That's how he paid for his escape. Oh, really?

Yeah. So he gave information to Uruguay, gave information to Cuba, gave information to Russia, gave information to China. That's how he kind of, that was the barter that he used to keep getting state level protection to escape them, to evade American authorities. So they all offered protection for a limited period of time until they got the information that applied to them and then they shipped him off to the next person. Wow. Yeah, that's where the treason charges come in. That's where, you know, we can say that he has compromised information that was secret national security information that he swore to protect. but then he didn't protect it.

Not espionage act, but that is a criminal charge. Do you think that's how he's in Russia right now? Yeah, absolutely. The way that that guy has been able to evade capture isn't because big-hearted countries around the world want to support him. It's because they're like, Snowden is a giant black eye to the United States. He's only getting help from countries that hate the United States. Right.

So that's how it works. And if something were to happen the other way around, I promise you right now if some contractor who does business on behalf of Russia's FSB, if somebody were to come out and like basically out themselves in the press and say, hey, Russia does this terrible thing.

America would be like, come on over to America. We've got a nice house for you in Seattle. Yeah. We're going to give you lots of prime time television spots. Oh my God. But do you think that's the only reason they're protecting him is because it makes the U.S. look bad?

a black guy in the United States, or is he actually giving them any kind of, any kind of compromising information? Yeah, I don't, I don't think he has anything else to give. No, he gave everything out publicly. As soon as he left, like, I'm sure he didn't give everything up publicly because he's a smart guy. A smart guy would know you give 80% of it away publicly. You keep 20% in reserve for that day that Russia comes and they're like, okay, we don't really need you anymore. You're like, ho, ho, ho, did I tell you about this? And then you, you know, you buy a little bit more time. So I'm sure he had stuff in reserve. But, but, but yeah, the reason that, Russia keeps him is not because he's doing anything that helps them now.

He's not giving them anything that's super sensitive. He's not talented enough to be developing technology for them. All of their resources are more talented than he is. Maybe he can give them some context or some insight into how American cybersecurity works. But he's outdated. He's obsolete in a lot of ways now. But what he is still current on is he is still a big hot seat. He's a big hot ticket item in the United States.

If Russia gives Snowden back to the United States, you can be sure it's because they're trading him for people that have been captured in the United States that they want back. Wow. Yeah, it's called a prisoner exchange or an intel exchange. But couldn't he just be pardoned by the president or something? It could be if a president wanted to do that. But that's not good politics. They would most likely try to do a barter. Yeah, most likely, and I think that's what our government probably knows too, is it like Snowden's being held in Russia so that the next time we busts.

seven illegals. You recall back in like 2010 or 11, we busted like seven Russian illegals here in the United States and put them all in jail and then there was a big prisoner exchange. So that's what they're waiting for. They're waiting for the next big exchange where like it's just public enough but not too public where they can be like

hey, we'll give you Snowden and you can close this case and you can show that the United States is all powerful. But in exchange for that, we're going to want these three guys that you wrapped up. That's what I think they're waiting for. That's what most intelligence professionals think. That's Snowden's value now is just as a chip for some future date.

Yeah, but you would think that, you would think that just pardoning him would take that power away from Russia, you know? It would take that, they're holding him, they have that leverage of Snowden. If the president could just pardon him, they would take that leverage away from them. But it also validates what he did. Yeah. Like, if you pardon one person who's been deemed a traitor, what keeps you from pardoning a future trader or a past trader, right? And there have been some massive, massive compromises. CIA officers,

NSA officers, DIA officers, contractors for all different intelligence community firms. You know, how do you choose who gets a pardoned and who doesn't get a pardon? And even worse, you're basically saying that Snowden, what Snowden did was 100% right and everything that our system did was wrong. So now we're going to pardon it. And that's a hard thing to do, right? That's basically admitting that our system is broken. Right. It's hard to admit that in a world stage, even though we've had to come close recently. Yeah.

Well, they did recently come out and say that and admit that everything that they were doing was illegal and violated the Constitution. I think that was recently. I saw that in a, I think it was a Washington Post article, I think maybe, like two weeks ago. Yeah, correct. Like the courts, the civilian courts ultimately ruled. that the secret courts made the wrong call. Okay. Right.

And that's why I still say that Snowden did the right thing the wrong way, right? Our civilian courts have said we should not have collected this kind of information. Right. He did the right thing calling attention to it. But you don't call attention to something by pawning it off to our most hostile enemies. Yeah. What are your thoughts? What are your thoughts on the whole election fraud scandal?

Do you think about that at all? Have you talked about that at all? Yeah. It's, you know, the whole... With a dominion. servers and Russia and all this. It's hard to keep a handle on all of it. So here's, you know, the, if anybody's old enough to remember The Matrix, there's this,

the whole first movie basically revolves around this red pill and blue pill. Yeah. Right. Why oh, why didn't I take the blue pill? The blue pill being the pill that keeps you ignorant to all this stuff, right? One of the first things that espionage taught me is that just because you're aware of it doesn't mean it's not happening to you. Right?

So in every election around the world that has some nexus that impacts the United States, I don't think it's surprising to think that the United States is probably involved. How can we make sure that things in Somalia go favorably for us?

How can we make sure that things in the Middle East go favorably for us or in South America go favorably for us? How can we as an intelligence infrastructure influence that to make sure it works? why do we think that that hasn't been happening the entire time the United States has been alive, right?

Japan was Japan three, what, 300, 250 years before the United States was the United States. China was China, 3,000 years before the United States was the United States. Do we really think that we've ever had a presidential election that hasn't had foreign influence? What happened in 2016? Yeah, what happened to... Trump got elected?

Yeah. That was just when foreign influence was. was caught. Do you see what I'm saying? Every election before that, it's reasonable to assume it had foreign influence. It had foreign interference. When you say they were caught, what do you mean specifically? That means like Facebook caught Russia. Right. Twitter caught Russia. People caught Russia being involved. Right. Whether or not there was any like, where they were using Facebook and social media to basically create these like these toxic echo chambers on YouTube rallying people up on certain narratives or whatever. Why do we think that that didn't happen before 2014?

Just because there's no evidence, just because no one's looked. Like what makes us think that didn't happen in 2008? What makes us think that didn't happen in 2004? What makes us think that didn't happen in whatever? 1982. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Logically, every single presidential cycle has foreign influence. Logically, Russia would be involved in every single one of them. It just so happens that technology got to a place in 2014. where Russia got too aggressive and they got caught, just like solar winds. Right. You see what I mean? We don't know if it was Russia or not. Somebody got aggressive and technology made it so we could catch it.

They caught it in 2014. So what was everybody looking for in 2016? They caught it. Everybody was looking for it in 2020. They caught it again. Right? So where do I land on the whole election fraud and whatever else? I think that now that we know that the narrative is muddy,

now that we know without a shadow of a doubt that foreign intelligence services are actively involved in our election cycle like what is being said matters less than realizing we can't trust everything that's being said how much of it is coming from somebody who has an opinion

how much of it's being fabricated how much of it is alarmist rhetoric how much of it is genuine not just on the Republican side either but on the Biden side too let's not forget that like Like we had intelligence reports that were saying China wanted Biden, Russia wanted, you know, Trump. Really?

Whether or not those are true reports or not, what makes us think that China isn't just as involved in the narratives happening right now as Russia is accused of being involved in narratives right now? And we haven't even talked about Iran being involved or about North Korea being involved. Like it's not hard. The whole cycle, there's an anatomy for how you drive an influence operation. and we know how that anatomy works. It was silly for us if we ever thought that somehow the United States and our electoral process was independent of influence operations before 2016. Right. I just think it's weird.

Like it's so much different now. And like before it was Facebook, now it's this weird company called Dominion that owns these ballot machines or whatever. And they somehow, their servers somehow got compromised and from. or at least that's from Venezuela or whatever. I can't even keep track of it all. It's so confusing. And that's a big, for me,

that's a big sign of a conspiracy. When it's that confusing, when it's that confusing and it's that complicated and it's that hard to follow, if it's that hard for you to follow and you're a pretty smart guy, how much harder is it to architect? Right? It's much,

much easier for like somebody to think up some sort of paranoid idea. And then someone like Iran or someone like Venezuela, chimes in with a couple of fake accounts and magnifies that alarmist rhetoric. It could all be real. It could all be fake. The problem is nobody's realizing it could be both. People are either believing it's real

or believing it's fake. Nobody's sitting around saying, hey, like, elements of this are probably real and elements of this are probably fake. Let's figure it out. The definition of intelligence is landing on a conclusion when you don't have all the information. That's what makes intelligence intelligence.

If you had a conclusion, it wouldn't be intelligence. It would just be fact. If you had no basis at all for what you're saying, it would be fabrication. It also wouldn't be intelligence. Intelligence is what you do when you take missing pieces and complete pieces and you put it all together and you come to a conclusion.

And then that conclusion can change, but you land on some kind of conclusion. My conclusion in this is elements of this are real. Elements of this are fake. We need time to collect more information. Right. Yeah. It's crazy that it's almost like it's almost just like a battle of different countries around the world trying to determine who the next president of the United States is going to be. I mean, could you think if if you were in charge of China or Russia, would you

bat an eye at putting tens of millions or even billions of dollars into influencing the outcome of the United States? Right. Most powerful person. It's going to directly affect you in a positive way. Absolutely. Exactly. Right. Like we do it every day. We're going to buy. the right kind of car insurance that benefits us. We're going to go to the restaurant that benefits us. We're going to watch the show on Netflix that benefits us. Like we're dedicating our resources to making those decisions. It makes

perfect sense that some foreign country would be like, well, we've got to dedicate resources to getting the right person in that office. Kind of a weird segue. But have you ever heard of a guy named Barry Seal? It's only faint. He was a commercial airline pilot who

was working for the... started working for the Medellian cartel. And he was flying tons of cocaine from South America or Central America to, I think it was Arkansas. Nice. And basically he got busted and he became a DEA informant. And he was when he was... Was he one of your guests too?

No. Or was his story told? His story was told on one of my podcasts. Okay. I think that may have been where I've seen it before. Yeah. A guy by the name of Sean Atwood, a guy who lives in the UK, wrote a book about the war on, a series of books about the war on drugs.

And basically there was a whole book about Barry Seal and George Bush and the Clintons, when Bill Clinton was still a governor, whatever the hell he was in Arkansas. And this guy, Barry Seal, who was now a DEA informant, flying drugs back and forth from South America to, the United States basically there's like the the theory is that he was doing that for the government

for the CIA to fuel the war on drugs and the government was directly doing business with the Medellin cartel and he was could have compromised George Bush somehow for being involved and when he was murdered

the claim is that the U.S. government George Bush gave the Medellin cartel, this guy's position basically gave him up so that they could execute him so that I would bury everything. Crazy, crazy, amazingly fascinating conspiracy about the CIA's involvement with, you know, the war on drugs and all of that. Just diving down another rabbit hole, which I thought was interesting.

It's definitely interesting. And I would say, excuse me, I would say that I don't ever write, off conspiracy theories. I've seen too many conspiracy theories turned into conspiracies that turn out to be actual facts, not theories, right? I don't think that the theory is ever 100%

right, but it might be 20% right. Do you know what I mean? Right. And just like we know about some shady stuff that CIA is done for MK Ultra and against Fidel Castro and against, you know, leaders in the Congo, like anything's possible. We've got to remember

that the agency, CIA, is a tool of the executive branch. The executive branch is the president's branch, right? So that means the president can do whatever he wants with CIA. We don't fall under any, like we're not under the judicial branch. We're not under the legislative branch. We're under the executive branch.

We work for the executive. If the president comes up with some hairbrained, wacky idea, like when he comes to us, he has the authority to do what he wants to do. And we are still a government organization. CIA still does what they're told to do, right? Sometimes they run it through attorneys. sometimes they run it through secret courts and secret courts might come back and agree or disagree or whatever else.

But, you know, is it beyond the realm of reality to think that that story is true? Not at all. Like, CIA's done wacky stuff. And if it comes to, if the president wanted it to happen, like we ultimately salute, smile, and execute, right? Like, that's the job of a government servant. Give everyone out there an idea of where they can find more of the stuff you're doing with your podcast with your website, with anything else,

how can people find you? Yeah, absolutely. If you are a podcast listener, I've got a very popular podcast called Everyday Espionage. You'll find me on all the major platforms out there. Everyday espionage, you can search for that. You can search for Andrew Bustamante. You'll find it there.

All of my lessons, everything that I teach is available through Everydayspy.com. Everydayspy.com, I've got a free spy game out there for folks to actually come on and test their own spy skills. I've got tons of content. A game? Yeah. You can play online?

Yeah. Remember how I was telling you about just in time learning? Yeah. How we learn, how we train basically just in time to use a skill. Yeah. We've simulated that same kind of training into an online game that you can do right there on the website. So, and it's free.

It's, I just want to give people a taste of how fun and powerful it is to learn these skills, like, quickly using that just and time learning process. That's amazing. Yeah. And then all of our content is available there. And, you know, we offer all sorts of stuff through our newsletter that you can sign up for there. And then we've got social media, just like everybody else.

We're not as popular as you. but you can find us on YouTube, you can find us on Twitter, you can find us on Facebook. Everything is at Everyday Spy. So yeah, if people want to find me, reach out and let's talk,

and it's a blast doing what I do. That's amazing, man. Well, thank you for being here and sharing your knowledge and your experiences with us. I really appreciate that. No, it's my pleasure, brother. Cool, man.

Well, let's definitely do this again. Super interesting. I'm in. Take care. Goodbye, world.