EverydaySpy Podcast - CIA Spy: "They Caught Me… So I Tried the One Escape No Spy Dares to Use"

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

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Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcf walk.ca.ca. This is a great opportunity to talk about how different the movies are from real life. Hopefully, even just the people listening to the conversation who haven't had a chance to read the book yet,

or maybe we'll never read the book, read the fucking book. Link in description. Even the people who don't, I hope that by now they've come to realize professional intelligence is a game of disappearing, of not acting suspicious, but having nefarious intent nonetheless. So when it comes time to self-evacuate or self-exfill out of a country, you really only have two or three options. You can fucking run for the hills and do whatever you need to do to escape through a jungle on a boat over a mountain and get out. Problem is you're being followed. And as soon as you make a break, everybody knows what you're doing.

That's it. That's it. And then they just call in a fucking wilderness team instead of a downtown urban surveillance team and they wrap you up in the wilderness. Or you try to go some route where you have somebody else facilitate your escape. You try to rent a private boat charter. You try to rent a private plane. You try to hide yourself in somebody's trunk. Problem is you have a fucking signal in your pocket in your cell phone.

Everybody is helping you has a signal that's coming out of their device. Once again, they see you make a break for it. They watch you fall off the cellular map and they're like, we got a runner. And then, shoon, all the teams come in. strangely, the way that you get out easiest, the way that you get out with the highest chance of success is to actually use all the formal borders that are in your place. So for me, I did the calculation of my head.

I was like, you know what? I got made in the arcade. They haven't wrapped me up yet. I still have the same surveillance team on me outside that I did for the rest of the day. Either they're not communicating or they're communicating poorly or there's something else going on here. Maybe it's budgetary.

Maybe it's logistics. Who knows? But I don't have any reason to try to run. So let's just try to cross a border. Let's see if the best chance is actually just to cross the border because I know if they suspect me, they'll wrap me up at the airport anyways. And at least if they wrap me up at the airport, it's in front of everybody. It's a formal government thing.

Like now all of a sudden it's going to be an international issue because they took me at a legal border. It's public, yeah. So that's why I chose. We made as big of a splash as we could. I sent emails. I made phone calls. I sent out lots of signals that said, hey, I'm leaving early.

Leaving tomorrow, 6 a.m. Leaving from this airport. You guys, I'm not trying to hide it. And that was the best I could do until I got to the airport and got pulled aside into secondary. What happened when you got pulled aside? Obviously, you're like, oh, fuck,

but what went down in there? Yeah, all fuck me is right. And then on top of that, I'm glad I was right about this. At least I knew that this could happen. So here are the chips that they have. Here's the chips that I have. And then it got really strange. And I love this part of the story.

And I really, if there's no other reason to read this, it's almost to read this for the story that happens at secondary. Because I was just telling you how training works against us sometimes. This is one of those instances where the training that I had received in, in handling an interrogation, countering an interrogation, resisting an interrogation. All of those things were very useful. But what was the most useful to me was understanding how the interrogation I was being exposed to was so different than what I was trained.

It was so much less professional. It was so much less specific. It was so much less intentional. It was almost chaotic. And if anything, what that did is it gave me confidence through the interrogation. And I was like, holy shit. What I went through at the farm was worse than anything I'm going through now, right? What I went through after I fucked up with Major Bondoi, however many years ago, four years ago, is worse than what I have now.

And I could actually walk away from that and I can't walk away from this. It was just so wildly interesting to see the training really come full circle. I was like, this is why we do what we do. Now, if only I can tell somebody this and I have to not fuck this up right now. But they, you felt like the guys who were questioning. you were either like out of the loop or under trained and when they were doing it like you're saying it wasn't up to par so how quickly after you sat down did you realize like oh i might be getting out of here i mean it was fast so here's what's interesting well i didn't know how fast i'd be getting

out of there but here's what i will say i sat down and it was just within a few minutes of sitting down that the interrogation started that's a no no that's a no in real interrogations you let them sweat Well, you got a flight that catch. They don't care about my flight. I know. Yeah. I mean, think about what you went through when we interrogated you, right? We at least let you, we were literally on a, on a filming schedule, but we still let you sweat

out for five or seven minutes. There was no sweatshop at all here, right? You're supposed to force a person to sweat and let the time do the work for you. You're supposed to sit them in a room that's uncomfortable. I sat in a room that was perfectly comfortable. You're supposed to sit them in a room that intimidates them. I got sat in a clean, bright white room. nothing uncomfortable here folks right like it just wasn't up to snuff for what we do in the west now

either we're monsters or these guys were not prepared to be interrogating a potential suspected intelligence officer one way or the other how long was it overall it took about 90 minutes right for the entire interrogation to happen which was plenty of time for me in an air well not plenty of time but it was enough time for me to still get to my airplane, but it was just another example of that's not how it would have worked for me, right? I would have let the dude sit there for 90 minutes with no food, no water, and I would have turned the fucking heat up or down, and then just check in and be like,

oh, we haven't forgotten about you, are you doing okay? Is it anything I can get you? Don't blow water on them. Zip down to the chair. Right. It's little things. Yeah.

The little things. Let them know you care. Yeah. I got through this. they're obviously like somewhat out of the loop, but they had been told at least to flag you. And then they let you go and you were like, you got to act normal going to the,

even though you're trying to catch this flight, you got to just walk to it and you get there, you get on the plane. And then you got to think about how long it takes to get out of the airspace of Falcon. Yes. It was the worst flight I've ever been on because it's never far enough.

Every time the fucking plane turns, every time it's like, it's just doing what a plane does. But in your mind, you're like, they're going back. Sir, come with us. What is going on? And then, you know, you finally,

it wasn't until I entered my third party, my third country location, and I was actually on the ground, because I'm on a country carrier, a country controlled aircraft for Falcon. So it's not until I'm off that fucking airplane that I feel like I'm actually not still on the ground in the country. You kiss that fucking ground when you get down there.

Dude, I don't even care if it had someone, Just made out with it. I've never been so happy to be in this shit all in my life. Yeah. And then you celebrate and then you realize that you're hungry and then you have a fucking giant diarrhea shit. And then you're all fucked up because you realize all the cortisol dump

and you're just like, I'm not a Superman at all. I'm just a frail, weak little man. It's got to be an insane rush. You got to be like, I got those motherfuckers. I mean, there's a little bit of that. That's only a little bit, though. A little bit. The most of it is like, holy fuck, holy fuck.

Yeah. And then you start the whole explanation to CIA. And guess how many of them believed me? Zero. I mean, James and the rest of the cell had my back. But once I started telling people like, CIA believes that all people are born with a spy secret superpower. For some people, that means they can win deals.

For others, they can spot liars. Some can even seduce lovers. I built a free, three-minute test to help reveal to you exactly what your secret hidden superpower is. All you have to do is click on the link in the description below. Take the test and start using your spy superpower to stay ahead of 99% of people. This is what happened to me. Everybody was like, you fucked up.

You need to report how you fucked up because we don't know because we weren't there. So then that turned into a whole after-action report and the whole cell had to start. We had to scrub everybody's records, everybody's files, everybody's cases to see where the fuck up it happened because we had to assume that the reason I was under surveillance was because somewhere we had made a mistake. Did you ever find it? We never found a mistake on our side. So that left the only other explanation. The mole. So even though you guys were a cell set up so that the mole wouldn't have access to that, something happened to where they at least knew who you were. The mole. And we had set up the cell so that I was exposed. Right, you're the courier. I'm the

courier. So that's how we had set it up and we set it up that way intentionally and and setting it up that way was beneficial to the CIA mole hunt on their side. So even after we had done our scrub and Langley had done their scrub, everybody came back and was like, there was no error in operations. This was, this was the mole found you and the mole reported you. And the good news, happy story at the end, they found the mole and they were able to operate on the mole in large part because we got the right person to make the right mistake at the right time. That was confusing, man. I found them all in one Google search.

So I went out there, Ken. I don't know. Like, are we allowed to do that if the camera's on me and I say search something and then it pulls up? Try it. And you don't confirm. I'm not going to confirm or deny. All right. So I'm going to use, let's get the camera on me.

Joe, Google this because I'm going to use the words in the book. CIA, informant, arrested, O'Hare, airport, cash. Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join

thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at PMC

That first one. Camera's still on me, right? Still on Andy? Can I read the headline, Andy? Go ahead, man. All right. How a $230,000 debt and a LinkedIn message led an ex-Ci officer to spy for China. Kevin Mallory went years without a steady job making him a right target for recruitment court

documents set. Now, you're not going to confirm or deny, but the person that you write about in the book is named Skimitar. And what was confusing to me is that the guy had a CIA background according to what you write, but had been outside of that for a long time. So I think you wrote at some point he tried to get back into, but didn't necessarily get in. So how did he get access to like clearly some of the highest people in Falcon House to be able to get information, you know? So one of the things that we we find with moles. we found with what we call internal penetrations,

is that they have an ability to tap into networks of persons, people that they know, and then they also have the ability to tap into physical controlled networks that they have access to. So whether or not Kevin is the right scimitar or whether it's somebody else, what we found is that the person who was able to report on Falcon House had both access to the systems

at some point to some level, and access to the people at some point and at some level. And that was, you said this in the book, he wasn't discovered until after you guys had left CIA. And if you think about it, let's just, I mean, let's talk about the meta, right? The meta strategy behind the book. We created a book that was transparent

because that's what we wanted to give. CIA read our transparent book and said, the American people will never see this. So then we asked them, how do we make this story, how do we make the details of this, the important parts of the transparency that we want to share, how do we make this available? At first, they said, no, no ball. Later on, as we got into more legal back and forth, and we started exploring the option of suing CIA, then they started to play ball a little bit more. So what is in this book is still what CIA

would have considered to be classified from three years ago. But it also allows for the areas where they have reviewed it and they have said you're allowed to say this. So whether the O'Hare Airport was something we intentionally intended to say at the beginning or whether that's something CIA came in with at the end is up to the reader to determine. But either way, it was allowed in there. Correct. That we can pull on that kind of threat. Did you, like while you guys were still there, though, first of all, once you get made and get out of there and have this daring escape and then report it back and it gets handled and whatever. What happens to the cell after that?

Because now they don't have a courier. They find a new courier. When we built the architecture for the cell model, we made it in such a way that couriers, the nodes, as we called them, could always be replaced and that the scale, the model could be scaled in other places. So Wolf found a new courier. And when Ji and I both left Wolf to go on to our next operation,

they found a new target or two. And then we helped start to train other units of CIA around the world how to build their own cell model. Some people picked it up. Some people hated it. But everybody that picked up the cell model had their targeter, had their case officer pool, had their courier. Courier wasn't always a sue. Sometimes the courier was a junior case officer or a tech person or a logs person, logistics person. But we all had the same kind of model with the same idea in mind.

So you, this mission was clearly a success because you invented something new by using something that previously like an enemy had used against you. And eventually part of the work leads to them actually uncovering the mole. And also along the way, you're getting a lot of intel on Falcon that you wouldn't have been able to access if the people that need to get that information had, you know, some sort of direct connection. to the mole. Right. It's actually funny because from CIA's point of view, the success was for the exact opposite of the order that you laid out. What do you mean? The first reason we were successful was because we got information on Falcon that we didn't previously have. Right. Okay. And then we also got the mall. We also got the mall. Okay. So you see that later there's people from CIA who are publicly talking about not necessarily the detail you did, but the model of like having compartmentalization,

which is kind of what for case officers, which is kind of what you invented here. So clearly, in the modern day, some version of this has been adopted at a high level across the agency around the world for different missions. Right. So what's fascinating is that in the immediate aftermath, the last few years of my career, I trained other people how to do this. My wife was also called in to train other people how to do this. We very quickly rose through leadership ranks from middle managers to senior managers

based on the success of operations and our success exporting this model. But then we left. And we left for personal reasons. We wanted to raise a family. We had been promoted so fast in CIA that we were basically being pulled off of operations together. So it just wasn't conducive. CIA is not an organization that really cares if you want to be parents or really cares if you want to be married. They want you to serve the American people.

So we came to the conclusion. I had always come to the conclusion. I'd rather be married and be a dad. more than be a public servant. So once my wife kind of landed on the same shoe in our success, we left CIA. When we left CIA, we- Allegedly. When we left CIA, we didn't take relationships with us. We didn't stay in contact with our friends who were still undercover. To do so would have been to risk their status. It wasn't until I think 2017, it may have been 2019, when the director announced publicly that CIA was going to reorganize and he was reorganizing

the entire agency into the same model that we had built in our shadow cell and the same model that we had taught around the world. So it's almost like our model went from the field to headquarters, which is exactly how we would expect change to work. Because the field drives the operation, headquarters reacts. And that conflict must have continued for years. And to my understanding, it still continues because after the reorg, most of the NCS was angry. The only thing that, it's not the only thing, but one of the main things that I am a little concerned about with this book coming out is all the angst and all the ire of CIA case officers who hate John Brennan's reorganization of CIA. They're now going to know we were part of what contributed.

to that reorganization that they all hate so much. John Brennan's not a well-liked guy, and I'll go so far as to say he's not a good guy, very, very clearly. I can't think of one thing I like about that guy at all. But him taking something that was successful and putting it into operational planning is what you should do. And I don't understand why I could see why this wouldn't be, useful absolutely everywhere, but when you need to compartmentalize things to basically create a safety

outlet where you're still, not only are you still able to do your job, you actually really have more freedom to do it because no one's looking over your fucking shoulder. I would assume as a case officer, that would be something that you're like, well, fuck yeah, sign me up. So why are people like, no, we don't want to do this? It's like they're saying they want a daddy at Langley. It has no, it has nothing to do with the operation. And that's what's so saying. sad. And this is one of the few things that I will say is really, really sad about CIA. It is a careerist organization. So everybody who's there and who stays there is always thinking, how do I get up in my career? How do I climb one rank higher? How do I stab my friend in the

back so that I can be the next GS-14 or GS-15? Because they all know, they all know that at the end of a 20 or 30-year career, only a few people will be making $200,000 a year. The rest of them will be making $90,000 a year. So they have to stab and climb and scratch all the way up that pyramid. It used to be that you only had to compete against other case officers. Well, now, thanks to the cell model, thanks to John Brennan's reorg, anybody can become a leader. Anybody can be a courier. Anybody can be a mission planner. Anybody can choose to start a new cell. You could be an analyst, you could be a targeter, you could be a tech person, you could be a politics. It's politics. And now, if somebody runs a good operation and they're an analyst, they're dictating operations to a case

officer when it used to be only case officers could ever do operations. The fact that I was a sue dictating operations to case officers, they didn't like that. They hated it. People back at headquarters hated it. The people in my cell were like, fuck yeah, man, Andy has an idea and we all decide if we also like the idea. It's a very collaborative environment. I had lots of bad ideas that never saw the light of day because my case officer peers were like, we didn't don't want to do that. I also had lots of good ideas where my case officer peers were like, fuck, I never thought of that. That's not the way it works at headquarters. At headquarters in Washington, D.C., it's a game of fucking, how do I get out of this bow tie and how do I stab somebody in the

back so that I can get back out to the field and do real work? And they don't like it when when anybody else gets promoted ahead of them. Yeah, you've always hit on the bureaucracy point with CIA and how that fucking gets in the way. And I, I, I, I, I, I, I get it because it's not, that's where it's like, how would it be different than the DMV? Makes sense to me. Yeah. Because you just have enough people like the Jim DeOrio one-thirders he talks about. There's enough of those at a big organization that it just fucking pulls down a lot of weight on the ship and stops things from happening.

Yeah. So there's, again, it's a little bit bittersweet. Even the release of the book is bittersweet because for all the CIA people that think that I'm worthless, or think that I'm a faker, or think that I'm overstating my success, which I've never overstated my success. I've always just said I'm a guy with a voice. That's all I am.

Now they'll see, guess what? I'm really not a success. I fucking am a farm flunky. I'm not a case officer. People have called me case officer. You'll never see me once say I'm a case officer. I think we've always referred to you as just CIA spy. Yeah.

A lot of people have just referred to me. What I call myself is just a field officer, right? that in many ways, yes, all you haters on the internet, you're right. I'm not great. I'm not God's gift to CIA. I never said I was. In fact, I wrote a book telling you about how bad I was at being a CIA officer. But I actually did get to do some cool shit.

I actually did get to work for CIA. I actually did get to impact the safety and security that we used to get to enjoy that is now depleting every week. But it's not about me. The really impressive people were the people who were in the cell with us. And this book talks about how awesome all of them are. Even in this conversation, I don't talk about me as much as I talk about how awesome they were. My wife was so awesome. The operators, the case officers were super awesome.

We haven't even touched on how badass the tech ops and the linguist were that worked with us. The people that work at CIA are incredible. And the few of us that get to talk about CIA, I have no problem being the target of your jokes because these people aren't. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th,

join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcf walk.ca.ca. Thank you.