EverydaySpy Podcast - Covert Signals and the Business of Spying

Episode Date: January 5, 2021

Welcome to Season 5! The goal for this season is to start taking action on the skills we've mastered in the last 4 seasons. That means its time to talk about field tradecraft! And the best place to start studying tradecraft is with covert signals. In this episode, Andrew explains covert signals you've seen in movies and a few you've never heard of. You might be surprised to learn how many signals you aren't even aware you are missing... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is everyday espionage. I am so excited to be kicking off season five, and what I really want to focus on this season is taking what you have learned over the last four seasons and starting to put a more fine-tipped point on it. I want to start transitioning away from concepts and into more practical application of what we in the field call tradecraft. Tradecraft are all those skills, all those techniques that you learn over the course of your espionage training, and then applying them to actually execute and complete operations. We did a little bit of this in season two, for those of you who've been with me for a while, but this season is my chance to kind of dig deeper. We've had a lot of success over the last two years.

We've seen a lot of growth over the last two years. And most importantly, CIA hasn't come in and shut me down yet. So the goal here is to keep pushing the limits and see how far. we can go, how much we can impact your life, how many changes espionage can make in your everyday life, ideally, without CIA telling us that we've gone too far. So for today, I want to start with a story about a recent client that I was working with who is getting ready to sell a big ticket online product. Now, for those of you who have never bought anything really expensive online, there are a number of things you can buy online that are ridiculously expensive. I mean, digital products. Products.

that don't ever get shipped to your house, things that are exclusively and wholly online. And my client had a product that he was getting ready to release that cost $3,000 per unit, per digital online unit. So he was getting ready to sell this $3,000 online product as part of his 100% digital business. And if you've ever done digital business, then you know that business online really follows

a number of statistical norms when it comes to things like sales and revenue and margins. And if you're not into business speak, if you're not into metrics and stuff, just bear with me because this is an awesome and interesting story, a way that you can apply espionage in everyday life. So he's used to running his business according to these statistical norms. And the release day came for him to launch this $3,000 product. But on release day, it didn't sell according to those predicted metrics. In fact, it fell way below expected norms so far below expected norms that people didn't know what to do. The client was obviously very upset and most of his team assumed that the poor sales, the dramatically poor sales,

were a reflection on the product and or the price of the product, meaning the product was not coming out at the right time, it was not relevant to the current audience, it was too expensive, that sort of thing. Now, I had helped in this process, so I volunteered to lead an after-action report, an old school military CIA term that basically means let's go back and look at everything we did and find the mistake. But I volunteered to lead in AAR to try to find the actual root cause for that dramatic sales slump. Now, within the first 24 hours of digging through everything that was part of that sales push, we found the issue. The issue was that there was a Post-it note sitting on someone's desk. Now, that doesn't mean that the Post-it note itself was the issue. What was the issue was what

was on the Post-it note. You see, the Post-it note simply said, sales phone number, question mark. That's it. One person, one desk, one Post-it-note, with the three words, sales phone number, question mark. Now, it's common knowledge in the digital world that high-ticket sales online are really driven over the phone. People don't just land on a web page and decide to spend $3,000. They land on a web page, they read about something. It's interesting to them and they want to talk to a human being. So this phone number is extremely important because without a working phone number, you don't really ever see a high ticket sale online. Now, what happened with this phone number is that it was never set up. So here we found this post-it note sitting on a desk, and when we started to

root cause the issue, we found that the phone number was. number was never set up. Yes, there was a phone number that was assigned. Yes, there was a customer service team sitting by on sales day ready to answer calls, but the actual phone number, the interface between the working number and the call center were never connected. It was never set up. Now, in spy jargon, we call this a commo gap or a communications gap. It's a breakdown in operational communications. That signal with those three words, sales phone number question mark, was what we in espionage would call a signal. The purpose of a signal is to trigger an event. Or it can confirm that an action is complete. It can show safety. It can show proof of life.

But it's supposed to transfer a message that triggers some kind of action. When the post-it note was dropped on a man's desk and it said, sales phone number question mark, that was not a signal that triggered any kind of action. Signals have to be clear and unambiguous. It is best if a signal is binary, meaning it only has two ways to read it. Yes, the signal is in place or no, the signal is not in place. That's a simple way of making sure that whoever looks for the signal either sees it and takes action or doesn't see it and doesn't take action. That's why you've heard of terms like go-no-go, because it's very clear and very and ambiguous because there's only two options. It's binary. It's not like

you turn a signal into something that can have five or seven or twelve different meanings, but if you look at the words sales phone number question mark, that can have any number of meetings. Does it mean that there is a sales phone number? Like, is it asking, is there a sales phone number? Is it saying, have you set up a sales phone number? Is it saying, is someone using the sales phone number, it's too many competing messages. It's not clear and unambiguous, which is exactly what a signal needs to be. Now, in the field, we use a lot of different kinds of signals. It's not just the stuff you see in TV and movies. And if you've ever watched X-Files like I have, I also always loved it when Mulder would take two pieces of black electrical tape and put a big X on his window and

trigger his informant to come out and meet him. But that's a crap signal. That's, that is not the kind of signal that we want to send. Yes, it is clear and unambiguous, but there is nothing covert about putting a big X on your bedroom window. So I want to talk a little bit more about how we use signals in the field, what makes a good signal, and why it's so interesting to look at these lessons and apply them to everyday life. So first of all, every human being has five senses. each sense in and of itself is a channel that you can use to receive a signal. So remember that whenever you're transferring information, there's always a sender and there's always a receiver. Now, the receiver can use any one of their five senses to receive a signal.

The sender can use anything in their environment to basically set up and send a signal. So, for example, my wife has a ringtone on her phone. Most people do. She set that ringtone to play the Adams family theme song whenever her parents call the phone. So what you see here is that she has a clear and unambiguous signal on her phone that comes through auditory channels, through sound, that tells her with clear certainty who is on the other end of the phone. She doesn't use the Adams family for anybody else. She doesn't use any other kind of ringtone for her parents. So here you have a clear and unambiguous auditory signal.

Now, what about olfactory? What about your nose? What about your sense of smell? It's common practice in the field that if you want to send a signal through sense, the sense of smell, what you use is some kind of pungent odor that sticks around for a long time. So as an example, we could use fish sauce or oyster sauce. you've ever been to Southeast Asia, if you've ever been to East Asia, if you've ever even been to a decent Chinese place, then you know what the smell of fish sauce and oyster sauce is. That stuff lingers for a long time. You can pour water on it all day long and it still doesn't go away. So imagine walking through an alley with a little bottle of fish sauce that you bought at any corner store and you chuck that sauce into the corner and break the bottle and then walk right through the entire alleyway. No one is going to know any different when they see a broken bottle on the

the corner of some empty, dirty alleyway, and it's going to reek a fish sauce. So if somebody comes through an hour later, three hours later, they smell that smell, they get a very clear go, no go, yes, no signal, whatever was behind the signal for the fish sauce. If you've ever driven down the street and seen the back of like a stop sign or the back of a speed limit sign, you know that it's this clear kind of perfect silver metal. That's a great place to put a sticker. A sticker that can be a common to everyday life, like a Biden or a Trump sticker or a sticker that has to do with your favorite skateboard company

or a sticker that has to do with an upcoming battle of the bands, whatever it might be, if you can pick the exact signal, the exact sticker that goes on the back of the exact sign, you have a clear and unambiguous, visible symbol, a visible signal that you can use using your sense of sight. What about sense of taste?

This is one that always surprises people. There are absolutely times in the, the field where you want to send someone a go-no-go signal and you want to send it through taste. So for example, if you're about to drop a bomb on a terrorist hideout and you want the informant to get out of the building, you can send them a signal that has to do with taste. And one of the ways that we do that is we can use salt in a glass of water or really salt in a glass of almost anything else because salt will dissolve and it will spoil the taste in a very specific way. So now what you can do is have 10 glasses of water, only one of which has salt in it, and you can basically

trigger to that group, whoever drinks that one glass is going to know if they're prepared to receive that signal, they're going to know what that signal means. It means get up, get out of your seat, get out of the building, you know, come back to never again kind of thing. But you can always trigger a signal with the sense of taste also. And one of my favorites is whenever you signal a tactile signal, you send some kind of signal that has to do with your sense of touch. And a very popular way to do this is with thumb tacks or with double-sided tape or with some kind of putty that doesn't dry. Sometimes you can use grease like the grease that you use in your everyday plumbing. If you smear a little bit of grease, you stick a piece of double-sided tape

under the right handrail on the right subway, then when someone walks by, it's very easy for them to just reach out, grab the handrail, and touch underneath their handrail like they would if they were holding the handrail. And as soon as they feel that tackiness on their fingertips, they know that that's their signal. So here you have five examples, five senses, each of which is a very clear signal. Yes, no. It's binary. Either the signal is there or the signal is not there. If you don't hear the Adams family, then it's not your parents calling. If you don't smell the fish sauce, then there is no signal. If you don't see the sticker on the back of the stop sign, then continue with your normal day. If you don't taste the salt in the water, then stay in place. If you don't feel the sticky

tape on the handrail, then continue with your operation. This is what's powerful and magical and awesome about signals. And this is exactly what was missing on that Post-it note. That Post-it note had no clear, unambiguous message. It was not binary. Cammo gaps happen in everyday life for us all the time. It's not just when you're selling a $3,000 product or when you're trying to execute an espionage operations. We see Cammo gaps happen in grocery lists. When it comes to picking up the kids, when it comes to following up on sales leads in your business or managing some kind of large construction or IT project, the list goes on. There's all sorts of areas where people just drop the ball on clear, unambiguous conversation.

I have people sometimes ask me why it is that I think spy skills are even relevant in the real world. I get that question. People come to me and basically question the entire purpose behind my business. How is this stuff even useful? And it's something that always makes me chuckle. Because I look at the same question and I ask myself, how are spy skills not applicable? How can you not see this? Every day of your life, you run some kind of operation.

You run dozens of operations in any given day. Anything from dropping your kids off at band practice or picking your wife up from the nail salon, anywhere you're going, anything you're doing, you have an objective and you have to take action, to achieve that objective. That is an operation. The hardest part of being a spy isn't all of the sexy stuff. The hardest part is the simple stuff, like making sure that you send a clear,

unambiguous binary signal that a total stranger who you have never met, who you will never meet, who is in disguise and you wouldn't recognize them even if you did know them, that person needs to be able to read and understand the message that you're trying to send. That is a very simple task, and it's a task that is extremely difficult in the field unless you follow specific clear tradecraft guidelines like we're talking about today. So we identified that this Post-it note was the issue with my client's sales slump. So what we did is we fixed it. We went ahead and we dug deeper into the phone number,

When we found out that the phone number had never been set up, we fixed the phone number, and then we relaunched his whole sales campaign. And because of our AAR and our ability to identify and find that one simple, small communication gap that ended up ruining an entire sales day, when he relaunched his campaign, he made $150,000 in sales in the next 24. hours. That's that's the opportunity cost of a gap in communications. When the gap happens, he lost $150,000. When the gap was closed, he earned $150,000. That is what happens when signals fail. When signals get confused, when they fail, when they're not properly sent,

transmitted, or received, bad things happen. And just because you don't see it, he never saw that $150,000 come through the door. He never, knew it was even available to him in sales revenue except for his own predictions through statistical mathematics. But my point is, how many opportunities are passing you by because of poor signals, because of communication, commo gaps that are happening all around you? Clear, ambiguous signals that are not being received by you or that you are not sending yourself, right? How often do you not say what you really think. Or how often do you accept a task you only partially understand? How often do you see someone smile and nod when you look at them and you think to yourself that they are actually

confused? These are all signs of a failed signal. And failed signals will always result in missed opportunities. Don't let that happen to you. Get clear, get unambiguous, get binary, because that 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 EverydaySpy 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.