EverydaySpy Podcast - An Ugly Kind of Justice

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

Justice isn't always simple, clear, or fair. Sometimes justice happens in ways nobody wants to admit or talk about. In this episode, Andrew shares a story where justice was delivered in a way nobody would expect, in a part of the world very few get to see. And with the right combination of pressure and patience, justice always prevails... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is everyday espionage. In 2019, I took my family for a long-term contract into the United Arab Emirates, a country also known as the UAE. Now, we lived in Abu Dhabi, and I worked all over the country. It was an awesome experience, and the kids loved learning Arabic, and my wife loved living there and working alongside me. But there was this interesting experience that happened that I wanted to share today. I was involved in a high-speed rear-end collision on one of the highways out there in Abu Dhabi. Now, these are some of the fastest highways in the world for a number of different reasons, and I was able to survive the high-speed collision.

Now, if you want to know how the collision happened or how I survived it or what spy skills I used to pull my car through the spin-out and the sand and everything, you can find it all on my website if you just look up. If you look up high-speed collision, everyday spy on Google or Yahoo or anywhere else, it'll take you right to that article. But I don't want to talk about the collision itself today. I wrote about that for you to read about somewhere else. But instead, what I want to talk about is what happened immediately after I had that collision. Now, UAE is sometimes called a police state.

It's a heavily surveilled state with a lot of advanced technology that's there to monitor its citizens, monitor terrorist threats, monitor foreigners who come and go because places like Dubai and places like Abu Dhabi are heavily transited around the world. So when a high speed collision happens, when any kind of roadway accident happens, it's very important that you immediately report everything to the police, because if they find out about it through one of their surveillance cameras or systems, it's a bad day. So one of the first things I did is I reported the accident and I ended up going to a local police station to give all the details because I had to file an insurance claim and do all the that we do in the United States or in Canada or throughout Europe.

It's a first world country. But what I found happened was when I went to go report the incident, it was a high speed hit and run collision. So it was just me reporting. It was nobody else. Now I saw the collision. I saw the truck that hit me from behind. I saw them coming in the distance because they were moving at such great speed.

I was able to brace myself before the collision. So I had a physical description of the driver, of the the truck of the location and everything else. And obviously, I survived the accident as well. So I was able to walk people through exactly what my car did and exactly where I was on the road and I could pinpoint it on a map and everything. Now, when I gave that information to the police, I started to run into a cultural barrier because I was operating from a Western mindset where you're very detailed, you're very descriptive, and you anticipate justice, you know, rapid efficient justice. But a Here I am in the Middle East as a foreigner, and that's not the same sense that I was getting.

Instead, I noticed that certain notes weren't being taken. Certain details were being left out. There was a reticence to copy down everything in the police report. The basics were there, time, location, accident. There were some references to where on the map I was and to my citizenship. But that's about it. There wasn't any of the detailed description being recorded about the vehicle, about the person, or even about the partial license plate that I was able to capture when I got hit.

So fast forward now a few weeks, and I still don't have approval from the local police force to say that it was an accident that was not my fault. So even though I was hit from behind, and even though all the photo evidence, which you can find on my blog post on EverydaySpy.com, even though everything was very clear that it was a rear-end collision at high speed on a highway, I still didn't have a formal police report saying that I was not at fault. So because of that, I couldn't pursue the proper insurance actions that were also familiar with, right?

How to get the car fixed and get my medical bills taken care of and get everything taken care of. All of that was not covered because it wasn't stated clearly that I was not at fault. So I kept going back to the police station to try to get this updated. Why was the police report not showing me as innocent? And I kept running into the same barrier over and over again, where there was this hesitation, this lack of commitment from the police to want to really pursue a truly at-fault person. It was just easier for them to say that I was not necessarily at fault and I was also

not necessarily not at fault, right? So it was a very difficult, challenging thing. This went on for many, many weeks, about eight weeks, in fact, and the insurance company was upset with me. the car rental place because I was driving a rental car was very upset with me. Obviously, the hospitals were upset with me, but I was not going to pay for something that was not my responsibility because there's no way to get that money back once you pay for it. So I kept pursuing legal action and I kept being very frustrated at what I felt was a lack of justice. It just seemed very unfair to me that I was innocent. I did not do anything wrong. And yet nobody was backing me. The police force was not supporting me. The insurance company was not supporting me.

The car rental company was not supporting me. I was on this island by myself, and it's often in this moment that many of us cave in. We pay for things that aren't our responsibility to pay for. We do things for other people that isn't our obligation or isn't our responsibility. Just because the pressure becomes so much and no one wants to help us. Well, after 10 weeks of pursuing this fight with the police, going back to the police station, almost weekly to talk to the same. talked to the same detectives over and over again, I finally found this low-level police officer

who realized or who shared my sense of a lack of justice, who realized that what was happening wasn't fair. And it was really a breakthrough moment for me because this low-level person was able to put me in touch with a different investigator, a different person in the police chain who heard out my story and then heard my description, pulled up my record, and realized that there were gaps in the record. So what we found out happened over the next few days, they pulled the actual footage from the car accident itself because like I said, UAE is almost a police state.

They have automated cameras and speed tracking cameras and facial recognition cameras all over the country, especially on the highways. And when they pulled out all of these details from the cameras and from the footage, it matched what I said in my investigative claim. The description of the driver matched, the description of the truck matched, the partial on the license plate matched.

So they knew that I was telling the truth. Now, what happened is that they discovered who the owner of the vehicle was. They discovered who the person was that rear-ended me at high speed. That was the problem. That was the rub. Because the person who hit me was a high-ranking native official. And that was what the original investigator was trying to not cover up, but they were trying to derail. the investigation because they knew the sensitivities there. Now I know if you're like me,

then you're feeling again like this is some kind of conspiracy. It's some kind of injustice. It was all very unfair. If that's what you're thinking, I want to remind you that we're talking about a completely different culture. We're in a completely different part of the world. And I was a guest in that place. I was a guest in the UAE on a contract supporting their government. So for me, I had my human rights. But it wasn't, I had no right, no reason to expect that the legal system was going to operate there, like it operates in the United States. In the United States, it doesn't matter who hits you in a car.

The police have a very independent course of action they have to take. We have three different wings to our government, right? We have three different branches. And those three different branches exist for checks and balances. That just doesn't exist in other parts of the world, especially not in the Middle East in the UAE. So when the new investigator told me that the person who hit me was a high-ranking official, he also explained to me that that meant that the judicial process was going to have to be different. I didn't really care at the time.

Now remember, this is 10 weeks of me trying to get someone just to acknowledge that the accident wasn't my own fault. So I was already, like, celebrating in my head when they told me that they were willing to move the case in a different direction. So they told me that they were going to reach out to the insurance company, They were going to reach out to the car rental place. They were going to reach out to the hospital. They were going to give everybody an update that was going to take me off the X. So I would stop getting phone calls and I would stop getting harassed. I was already considering all of this a victory on its own.

But what happened next was really shocking to me. So true to their word, nobody bothered me from that point forward. About four weeks later, the police called me back into the station. And when I showed up, I had no idea why I was coming. I had no idea what was going on. But I showed up to the station. I was called into this back room that was very ornate, a very beautiful somebody importance office. I don't know who it was. I didn't speak enough Arabic to know who it was. But I walked back there and sitting in a chair with another chair in front of them was this

fully regaled, totally ornate individual who was dressed in their formal public uniform. They had a chest full of medals on. They had their full of medals on. They had their full hat, I mean, this was an important person. And then sitting in behind a large desk was a police officer also in full regalia, fully dressed, fully looking like dressed to the nines. Now I'm showing up in my business casual stuff from work because I just got called in. No idea what's about to happen. And they sit me down directly across from the larger gentleman who was in all of his fancy dress. I don't know what he was or who he represented. And the police officer stood between us and the police officer called in a translator and

basically told me that the person sitting across me was the person who hit me. The individual who rear-ended me on the highway was actually the head of their emergency management services. He was an EMT. He was a first responder. He was driving too fast. He was under the influence of a local drug in the UAE and he had hit me and then he had abandoned me like he had left me on the side of the road. So that was the actual truth of the incident. But because of who he was and because of what he represented in his uniform and in his, in his national service, instead of going down the more traditional route of paperwork and filing and guilt and everything else, the police officer decided

that they were going to have this sort of encounter with me in a private setting instead. And that they were going to speak to each other in Arabic and that I wasn't supposed to understand and the translator told me all of this and the translator even told me that he was going to stop translating as soon as the police officer and the EMT started speaking to each other. So then everything went silent and I did not have enough Arabic to keep up. And what happened was mostly a one-way conversation where the police officer used a tone and a directness of voice that was very clear to me that he was reprimanding, he was berating, he was publicly shaming this other high-ranking officer directly in front of me, a foreigner, a guest in their country,

who was not even wearing any kind of fancy outfit. I was just there in a button-down shirt and some slacks. And it was painful. It was awkward. It was even embarrassing to me being from a Western culture to be present while two grown adults sat across for me with one publicly shaming this other one, reprimanding. them with waving finger in their face and spit coming out of his mouth, it was just a very awkward moment.

But when it was all said and done after about five minutes of very stern talking to from one person to the other, the translator turned back on and told me that everything was done and that I was going to have a formal document that said I was not at fault and that the document would not say who was at fault, but that between the four people in the room, including the translator, we all knew the truth. And that was the end of it. After that, the gentleman who had hit me, the head of the emergency management services, he got up. He escorted me out of the room.

He escorted me all the way through the police station. I mean, the man, he went to my car. He helped me open my own door. He ran traffic cop and like waved at me to back up out of my parking spot. And he was waving other cars off to the sides so that I'd have a clear path out. It was a totally surreal experience with this high-ranking individual who was basically acting as my own personal traffic cop while I drove away from the police station that day. And that's it. And that's how it all ended.

No more calls, no more pressure. I guess by some definitions, I won because I don't have to pay anything. And by other definitions, it may sound like it was some sort of faulty legal system or some sort of nepotistic process that existed in a tribal culture. But what I want to talk about is that the reason that lesson is important is because when you go and you spend your life traveling around the world like I did, like my wife does, like we still do with our kids, you start to learn that there are different types of cultures. Some are shame-based cultures, some are fear-based cultures, and some are guilt-based cultures. Now, in the West and throughout Europe and the United States, we live under what's known as a guilt-based culture. Now, guilt, some people say it ties back to our Christian roots, our roots and Christianity and the foundations of our nations.

But essentially, a guilt-based culture is a culture that's based in good and bad, right, and wrong. And that's why when you believe that you have done something wrong, even if nobody else knows about it, you still feel guilty. It's the reason why people make people who have a lot of money, but who want to help the poor, they donate a lot of money to the poor, and they fight injustice. It's because they feel guilty that some people don't get what other people do get, this unfairness. That's all symptomatic of a guilt-based society, a guilt-based culture. In the Middle East, particularly in the UAE,

and throughout Kaleiji Arab countries where there's oil, wealth, and their success, they live under what's known as a shame-based culture. In a shame culture, there is no guilt. There is no right or wrong. There is simply the idea of honor, something in the Arabic word that's known as shiraf. When you have shir-off, when you have honor, then you must protect your honor at all costs. And everybody else in the culture knows that it's honorable to protect each other's honor. And that's exactly what I was running into in my experience in the Middle East. Everyone was trying to protect their own honor by protecting the honor of the senior ranking person who hit me, of the official who hit me. And that was justice in their eyes.

That was fair and honorable and correct because they were not a guilt-based culture. They were a shame-based culture, which meant that to bring shame on someone, else was a big deal. Just like bringing prosecution and sending someone to jail in a guilt-based culture, that is a big deal. It's one thing, you know, at your kitchen table to be condemning other people. But we don't often condemn people in public because in a guilt-based culture, when you say that someone is guilty of something, you have to then prove that they are guilty of something. If you can't prove it, then you really don't have any right to say it. That's why we all talk a big game at the dinner table. We all talk a lot when we're

watching football, but we don't have such loud mouth in public. Everybody's happy to weigh in on Twitter and Facebook and share their opinion there, but whenever you actually put people in front of each other, they don't want to talk. They don't have the same ego or the same haughtiness and that same confidence when they're talking in person. Shame-based cultures are very similar, where you don't want to talk about anything that's going to make someone look bad in public. You might do it, you know, behind a handle on Reddit or you might do it in Twitter, which is why the Middle Eastern cultures struggle with a lot of social media and why they try to regulate their way through it. But for sure, in public, you're not going to do that. Add to that the extra layer in places like UAE where if

you violate their shame-based culture, it is actually a legal offense. So they kind of double down on their own Arabic culture to incentivize people not to degrade or publicly. reduce someone's standing or someone's reputation. So when I was present for the police officer reprimanding the EMT in public, public meaning in front of me, a foreigner, that event was the equivalent of someone being essentially fined or sent to jail or having their license taken in the United States. The reason I want to talk about this is because when you realize that you are in a guilt-based culture, like those of us from the West, you tend to hold yourself back because if you think you're

doing something wrong, you feel guilty. You actually start to degrade and reprimand yourself quietly, secretly, in your own head, maybe in a small group. You go to some kind of self-counseling or some kind of counseling session with a group of people. You feel guilty, and therefore or you claim that you are guilty. Guilty meaning the opposite of innocence. But in a shame-based culture, nobody assumes anyone is guilty until they are actually proven to be guilty.

And on top of that, because shame is such a big deal, nobody wants to accuse someone of wrongdoing until they have no other options. So in a shame-based culture, when somebody knows they've done something wrong, They still don't admit that they've done something wrong. They feel no shame.

They feel no guilt. So that's exactly what happened in my case. The high-ranking official who rear-ended me had no shame about it, had no guilt about it. Because from his point of view, when he hit me, he didn't stop. There was no police report that included his name. And he knew that he was so high-ranking that the other people in the country, when they found out about even if the cameras highlighted his license plate, highlighted his truck, highlighted his position, that nobody would be so persistent, so daring enough to actually challenge him publicly. And he

was right. The only thing he miscalculated was that the person he hit was me, a very stubborn, hard-headed westerner, who was also a guest of the Emirati government. Had I been there with some corporation, had I been there as a tourist, had I been there, under any other auspices, I am certain that I would have never had any kind of resolution. I would have been stuck with my own bills. Yes, that sounds unfair by Western standards, but it's not at all unfair by Middle Eastern standards. It was only the fact that he hit me and I had my own passport that was cleared and approved

with my own national ID supporting the national security infrastructure of UAE. That's the only reason. That and one pioneering young police officer who agreed that it was unfair. that I was getting the run around, those two things together were the only reason that I was able to get the kind of justice that I got. So I want to say that to you because I want you to understand when you are conducting espionage abroad, you are only doing bad things. You are always breaking the law. Technically, according to all things in a guilt-based culture, you are guilty, even if nobody else knows about it. So CIA teaches us to compartmentalize our guilt and recognize that there is nothing

wrong with having an unfair advantage over somebody else. That's why I don't feel like there was anything wrong with that senior ranking Emeraldi official not admitting that he hit me. He didn't do anything wrong because he was not living in a guilt-based culture. There was no right and wrong in his culture. He was in a shame-based culture. And as long as nobody accused him, he had nothing to be ashamed of. Now, what's interesting is when he was discovered, then his actual punishment was the sharpest, most painful kind of shaming that can be done. It's essentially like having a teacher call you in in front of your children and reprimand you in front of your children. That would be a humiliating, embarrassing experience. And then you have to go out and publicly serve your children for a few hours,

right? That's what this guy ended up doing for me. He got called in, reprimanded publicly, and then became my personal traffic cop for about 45 minutes. That's not a fun day for that guy, right? He learned his lesson, inshalla, we hope. But the point is he was living in a completely different culture. He had an unfair advantage over every westerner, every guilt-based cultural person who ever travels through the Middle East. The local people have an advantage over you if you continue to exist in your own perspective of a guilt-based culture. They live in a shame-based culture. And once you understand the power that comes from not feeling guilty, when you realize that you can do whatever is in your best interest and you can choose instead to just recognize

that as long as nobody knows about it, then you haven't done anything wrong. If you haven't done anything wrong, then you have no reason to feel ashamed. That is the power of the Middle Eastern culture. That is the power of what CIA teaches. It spies when we travel and work abroad, when we break laws and break rules in every country. If nobody knows about it, then you haven't done anything wrong. So every unfair advantage I'm teaching you in this conversation that we have, or if I teach you online, or if I teach you in person. I am giving you unfair advantages that let you leapfrog and shortcut success that other people simply can't reach. And there is nothing wrong with that. In a guilt-based culture, you might feel guilty. But the truth is that unless anyone finds out

about it and then accuses you, that would be the only time that you would ever have to feel any sense of shame. And I would argue that there is no shame. in doing what's best for you to get you to where you want to be so that you can affect the change that you want to affect on the world. And that is everyday espionage. Everyday espionage is dedicated to one thing, educating everyday people. I know that not everyone will listen,

but those who listen will learn. If you learned something new today, click subscribe, review, and share the podcast with a friend. Find me on social media at Everyday. or on my website, Everydayspy.com. If you are up for a special challenge, visit Everydayspy.com forward slash operations and join me for an authentic spy training mission. And above all else, remember that knowledge is freedom.