EverydaySpy Podcast - I Was The Most Unlikely CIA Recruit (Then This Happened)

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

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Coming out of the military in 2007, right? We're in the middle of Iraq, Afghanistan. I've got medals in both wars. I'm sitting underground, babysitting nuclear missiles. And generally hating the fact that I have to shave every day, keep my hair less than an inch and shine my shoes. To be underground out of the sunlight three days of three days at a time. Right.

I was like, this is not for me. So like most people, when they break up with a significant other, I start looking for something that's completely, different than what I'm doing right now, right? Okay. So right now I'm wearing a key around my neck that can destroy humanity. What is the polar opposite of this? I mean, technically it was going and becoming a priest, but there was no way in hell I'm going to do that. So the next best thing was to go join the Peace Corps. So I was like, oh, there we go. So I start applying for the Peace Corps and I start submitting my paperwork to resign from the military when my time is up. And in the process of

applying to the Peace Corps, I get contacted by a CIA recruiter who's basically, like, their opening line to me was, hey, we saw you were looking at this. We think you might be better at this. And that was kind of what got me started on the whole path. Okay. So that's my Reader's Digest version of how I went from, you know, Bastard Child in Arizona to. So you never did go to the Peace Corps. You know, I'm going to CIA. Correct. You can't. Did you know it was CIA when they approached you? No, not by the way. No, because I was, I mean, I was 27 years old. And like most people, when somebody calls you when they're like, hey, this is the U.S. federal government. We think we have an opportunity for you.

You're kind of like, all the creative juices start flowing. You're like, I don't even have to say yes. Like, you're going to pay for a plane ticket and a hotel room and a rental car. I don't know what you were like at 27. But for me. I have a conversation. Yeah, let's go. For sure, right?

I don't say no to cool opportunities like this. It's like a hot chick showing up and being like, hey, can I come in for a drink? Yes. Yes, you can. I don't know where it's going, but I know where I hope it's going. So for sure, when I got my phone call, I was like, I really hope this is going to fast cars. tuxedos and I'm going to be a spy, but it wasn't until I actually got there for the first

interview. And after the first interview that they were like, we think you might be cut out to be a national clandestine service officer or an undercover CIA officer. Like, what's that conversation like? Right? Like, you know, that's one of those things you just, I'm sure you absolutely at no point do you think I would, yeah, I've been preparing for this. No, you know, there's no confidence. The hardest thing for me, you have the right file? The hardest thing, the hardest thing for me in business has been wearing that, that bravado. Right. Because, like, there was no bravado in me, right?

I'm having to learn that you have to turn that on publicly at times, right? So it's funny that you say that because that first interview, no shit. That first interview, I was talking to a middle-aged woman, gray hair, wearing a, no, shit, a sweater and Velcro sneakers. That was the first interview. So- So she didn't scream CIA. No, dude. So, like, I'm getting on a plane in Montana.

And I'm like, I'm going to go interview to be a spy, I hope. And then I get off the plane. I get to my hotel, which is a shitty hotel in my small little economy-sized rental car. And I go to this nondescript building. And I'm like, I'm not going to be a spy. And I walk in and sit behind fucking Bertha. And Bertha is sitting there asking me questions about, tell me this thing that you were very proud of. And tell me this thing that was a great failure.

And how do you feel about being dishonest? And I'm telling her the truth because part of me is just like, whatever Bertha has to offer, I don't want any part of it. Right. So I'm like, oh yeah, I have no problem lying to people. And yes, I think I'm better than most people. And yeah, yeah, I'm like, I'm telling her all this stuff, right? And then at the end, she's like, she, no kidding, pushes back from her desk and pulls out a drawer on the side and then pulls out a little manila folder and sticks it down on table.

And she's like, I think you might be a really good fit for the national clandestine service of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. And she opens the manila folder and it's a fucking flyer for CIA. And she pushes it across the desk. And she's like, this is what I think you might be a good fit at. what do you think? And I like had that moment, that same cognitive dissonance that is in your head right now

was in my head. And I'm like, this is a fucked up test. Like, are you telling it, punk? You can't really be, and it's a flyer.

Like, this isn't Lego land. You don't just open a manila and hand me like a, here's your timeshare brochure from CIA. That's not how this is supposed to work. This is supposed to be like hidden walls and special lights and laser beams and stuff,

right? So no, it was, apparently it was real. even though I didn't really believe it was real. But yeah. So then she walked me through that whole thing. And that was how my process of application actually started.

How long were you there before you met your wife, right? And she was in the same line of work. Yeah. So my wife actually started at CIA the same day and in the same class of new recruits that I did. She was a different skill set. And she had taken her own path to get there. Like my wife has a law degree and she has multiple degrees. and she speaks multiple language.

She's actually brilliant, right? But yeah, we ended up landing kind of in the same. It's a, the room where new initiates are kind of sworn in is a big pavilion called the bubble. And if you look up CIA on like Google Maps and you look down at it from the sky, you'll actually see a giant like building that's shaped like a golf ball. And that's what we call the bubble. It's basically where we go for all of our, you know, all of our auditorium,

conversations and all of our, what was it called in high school, whenever you had, you had like a speaker in the middle of the day. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever that. Yeah. Yeah. Like a, okay. Yeah. So it was that kind of auditorium, right? So we're in there and we're in there with 250 different people and some of them are covert operators and some of them are tech officers and some of those are targeters and some of them are analysts and we're all kind of getting sworn in and doing our whole oath of allegiance to the American Constitution. And that's where we met. there are other podcasts out there that have gone over your story. So if you can talk a little bit about, you know, being the CIA and basically how, you know,

you and you, you and you, you and you, you and you and your wife got to that point where you said, we want to have kids. We want to have a family. Like, we can't be disappearing for six months at a time or two years at a time. Yeah. Nobody can get in touch with us. Like, so if you could go into, you know, that whole thing. Yeah.

If we could talk about that, and that would be great. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's kind of cool as I get to tell a little bit of a different story this time because we've been in the process of writing and publishing a book. Okay. And our book has been picked up. And our book has been, so we're going to be launching. We're going to be releasing in June of 2024, a new book that's under the imprint of Hachette publishing company.

So the third largest publisher in the United States. And in that process, we've had to have a lot of conversations with what's called the PCRB or the pre-publication review committee for CIA. Right. And they've cleared us to tell more of our stories. So it's actually going to be a different story. But long story short. Is it okay if he keeps that part in?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. The, uh, the, my wife and I both started CIA and we, like, we didn't know what we were getting into. She, she was just trying to get a government job so that she could retire. Right. And the only organization she didn't want to work for was CIA. And I was trying to get to the Peace Corps.

Right. So we both came from very far flanks to end up at CIA. Yeah. And then because we were recruited as generalists, not as specialists, right? Because like, if you're a Chinese speaker, you're a specialist in China. If you're a Russian speaker, you're a specialist in Russia. And if you know how to hack a computer, then you're a specialist in what's known as the information operation director at IOD.

So, you know, there's all these different specialists that come in. We were brought in as generalists, which basically meant that we were kind of farmed out to whoever needed help. Right. So for me, I'm a brown guy with like, that looks ethnically ambiguous. And I was former military. So I ended up getting assigned to all the shithole places of the world, right? Any place where a brown guy can blend in and not be remembered, that's kind of where I ended up going.

So I was doing a lot of counterterrorism stuff, counterproliferation stuff, counter-narcotic stuff. My wife had multiple degrees, and she was fluent in multiple language. So she ended up doing a lot of covert influence stuff. She ended up doing a lot of covert action stuff. So we ended up doing these kind of non-mainstream things in a very elite organization. And it's important for people to understand. And CIA is a very large government organization. Not everybody does sexy shit.

There's a lot of boring, mundane shit that people end up doing. And that was kind of where we ended up. So I'm assuming that, you know, just because of my vast knowledge in watching movies, is that basically like, it's not like they're sending you somewhere and saying, you know, you have to go infiltrate this or do this. But or they may be saying that. But what they're, what's really happening is you're going and you're working a regular job. Yeah. And you're put into a position where you can either, you know, you can influence certain people or you can hope to, to lure people into giving over government, you know, government information for their government because they're in a good spot. So they're trying to put you in a spot, but you're basically still working a regular job. So you're there working a regular job. And that could take, that doesn't take two months. That could take 18 months. It could be, you could be there for a year. working a regular job, hoping that you are able to put yourself in a position to meet people that you can build up a friendship with and convince or at least a, you know, whatever,

you can build up some kind of a, their confidence in you, trust in you that they will then, you can then approach them. But that could take, that doesn't take 30 days. Right. Exactly. So, I mean, you're, you're more right than you are wrong. Okay. For sure, we go and we, we, we go and we take on some kind of phony career. We're basically trained con men, right, right? Or con women. So we go somewhere and we build up a footprint that we belong there when we don't. And we can kind of, we can craft the footprint. We can prepare the battlefield before we go because we're the CIA. So we can create fake online personas and we can create fake, you know, banking records and education records and everything for our alias before we actually land on site. So when we land on site,

we know it's actually day one on site. But if somebody in that country, Mogadish, or Turkey. If they were to actually research us, they would see like all this stuff that says that we've been there forever. So we go there and you're right. We basically live in an undercover capacity, which means that we live off of what we call the local economy.

We become somebody in the local community. And we live that role and we do a day job that's basically a nine to five job. But we don't just hope to make contacts. Our job for CIA doesn't actually start until after the day job ends. So what really happens is you work a 12 to 14 hour day, six to seven days a week.

You live your lifestyle. We call it a lifestyle career because you don't really get days off. So you're doing your nine to five. And then during your nine to five, all that's there to do is just what we call it's creating cover for status. You're there for a reason.

The reason that you're there is because you work in a tire factory. So boom, you work in a tire factory all day long. But then by night, you actually go out there and you try to make friends with the people that you need to influence. Now, for me, a lot of my work was in the counter space,

counter proliferation, counter narcotics, counterterrorism. So the people I had to cozy up to were scumbags. So my cover roles were oftentimes scummy cover rolls, right? Because it's the kind of person who whenever they sniff me out, I fit, right? I work. So you don't have a cushy job in the embassy. So I was looking to drive sports cars and wear tuxedoes and I got recruited to like, you know, sell fish taco.

on a freaking wheel cart. You're pressing stuff in a factor like this mother. Why am I doing this? It's not sexy. It's not, right? So after from 2007 to 2008, I was going through training.

From 2008 to 2010, I'm basically in a variety of these just armpits of the world, trying to crack into terrorist groups and trying to crack into proliferation circles and trying to get arms dealers and human traffickers and collect low-level secrets

because the government secrets are all your really elite stuff. The rest of us are out there just trying to keep Americans safe, prevent bombs from going off in Boston and prevent, you know, airplanes from crashing into planes in New York. And we didn't do very well at either of those, right? So that's, that was the main focus of what me and many, many different CIA officers did until 2010. And in 2010, I got called in to a secret meeting where my history of fixing shitty stuff

turned into this opportunity to like, combat a major threat against CIA, which I didn't even know existed at the time. It was so compartmentalized. I didn't realize it was happening. So. Specter. Yeah. So that, that invitation, that conversation in 2010 completely transformed my entire career. And my wife and I were, we were a married tandem couple. We had just gotten married like two months before that conversation happened. So we both got pulled into the same operation. And the operation was essentially a way of creating a new, operational methodology that would take CIA into the next like 50 years of operations, right? Because we had been built around Cold War tactics. Right. And then we had not really

evolved past Cold War tactics, even though it was 2010. We were still leveraging Cold War tactics to fight terrorists and it wasn't working. So they wanted us to create a whole new way of doing operations. Before you think that that sounds special, I can guarantee you that knowing the way CIA works, there were 15 other people that they had the same tasking for. Right, right. And it was just, okay, all 15 of you go out there and try and do it, and we already anticipate we're going to lose seven of you, but hopefully one of the remaining eight will figure this out. I don't like the way that sounds at all. But that's the way it works, right? When you say lose, you mean like it's not going to work and then they come back and do

something else. No, that's not, that's not quite what I mean. That's what you meant, right? We're all disposable assets, right? That's one of the things that makes the job sexy when you're a little bit off. That's horrible. That's a horrible. story. Oh, um, that's, I would have never going to have one of the seven.

It's easy for you to say. You're like, no, it's a great story. I mean, nobody, we haven't seen Bob in a while, but I didn't like Bob.

Bob, Bob, there's no, there's no guarantee anything bad happened to Bob, right? Bob was compartmentalized out of sight out of mind in that world, man. That's part of the profession. Oh my God. Um, so, okay.

So how, well, how long, how long did, how long are, are these, These, I'm going to say missions is probably. Generally, a mission is between like three and six months.

Okay. What we were assigned to do in 2010 ended up taking us two and a half years. Oh, I was just going to say. But if it takes root, right? Like if it bears fruit, then they start extending it. Sort of. What ends up happening is if it bears fruit, they have to ask themselves the question, they being CIA leadership, has to ask themselves a question.

If we extend this with the same people, do we run the risk of losing the people who have set it up or do we replace the people who have set it up and make it more of an institutionalized process, right? Think of it like a director of sales or something like that in a business. When you have a good director of sales, do you keep them as the director of sales or do you move them up to become the vice president of sales, right? That's the same kind of process that happens at CIA. Okay. And oftentimes what they want to do is they want to move you up because it's a major loss. It's a loss on multiple fronts if a successful officer gets captured in the line of duty because then not only do you lose the successful officer and all of their intellectual property

and all of their continuity operationally, but you also end up having an international issue. Right. Whereas if you can fleet that person up in the chain of command and replace them with somebody who's more disposable, you end up documenting their processes and now you can basically just institutionalize the process and protect the asset. Right? There's it's a people don't realize this is how CIA works, but a lot of times what ends up happening is is if you are captured like there was a guy I worked for. There's a guy I worked for at CIA. I don't even know if I can say it. I probably can't say his name publicly even though I'm pretty sure he's over Jimmy. Jimmy. So I worked for Jimmy at CIA. Jimmy was captured by Svr in Russia during an assignment that he had in Argentina in like the late 90s. So he's captured by the Russians in Argentina. extradited to Russia where he spends three to six months in a Russian prison until there's a spy swap

between CIA and Russia in the early 2000s. He gets to come back from Russia. Well, now they don't ever want him to be at risk of being captured again. So how do they protect him? They promote him into positions of authority, right? That protects him from ever going overseas. And it rewards him for a job well done. Right. Right. Even though most of the people that work for him are like, that dude is a train wreck. That dude is mentally unstable. That dude has alcohol issues. That dude is a CI security risk. So popular opinion was irrelevant because CIA had a way of basically putting him into golden handcuffs.

Keeping him in the organization and moving him up is how they kind of kept him under control.