EverydaySpy Podcast - She Was a Spy… and Her Instagram Was the Perfect Cover

Episode Date: August 6, 2026

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maintain my normalcy, cover, whatever, so to speak, if they're looking at it, like, well, I'm going to go out there and I'm going to be getting information from other people. So if I'm doing that, they can't know who I am. So if I have an Instagram, then, you know, we're all good. Right. So that, it seems like this girl was kind of a bit of a, almost like represented a symbolic like pivot where you guys were realizing that like a wait a minute. So she's got this Instagram that shows her traveling places, playing tennis, doing normal stuff. That's a good cover story. Well, what's great about it, and I love that you're bringing this up, because there's a difference between a cultivated account, as we call it, and an actual account, a genuine account. Because a cultivated account demonstrates

operational security within the content that it shares, whereas a actual actual account, you know, open account, a genuine account, does not. So for example, a genuine account might talk about where specifically you are at a specific time, right? I'm going to tag myself at Giovanni's restaurant. I'm going to say I'm here right now. Here's a picture. Time stamp says it's 545 and I just got here at 540. That's not operationally secure. Somebody could see that you're at Giovanni's restaurant, see that the time was five minutes ago and then boom, they're going to Giovanni's restaurant. So that's how a genuine account generally works. A cultivated account obfuscates that.

They take a picture at Giovanni's, and then in the comments, they're like, I really enjoyed my dinner at Giovanni's yesterday. They don't even post it within a 24-hour period of time. Or they don't say,

they don't tag Giovanni's at all. They say, really appreciated my Italian dinner at this great place and whatever, right? And that's how you create an account that looks genuine to the average viewer, but when you put it under scrutiny,

you can't reverse engineer it. And that's what we found with, converse, with Converse's account, is that as she continued to post, it was crafted, it was good. You didn't know where she was, when she was. You knew that she had friends. You didn't know who her friends were. You knew that she liked sports. You didn't know exactly which sports they were. You didn't know where her favorite tennis shop was, where she liked to play tennis. You didn't know her favorite team. You didn't know her favorite drink. You didn't know if she drank. You didn't know where she

hung out, what nightclub she went to, where she went to church. You knew nothing. Error mystery. but to the average person scrolling through, she looked totally normal. Now, it would turn out she was an intelligence officer training under this guy effectively. Correct. He was different intelligence agencies around the world work in different ways. CIA has a very formal pipeline and a training program and a protocol and a group of old people who decide what young people become the new case officers. Other places, it's more tailored. It's more mentor-based. In this case, she was mentoring under the senior case officer or the senior case officer above her. And that was the hypothesis you guys had come up with.

Well, that was correct. Correct. That was the hypothesis that we had come up with as we started to meet her and learn more about the relationship between her and the other case officer. And then we became the ones that built the foundation for her case. Now, why would, this is what I can't really wrap my head around. why would someone like that who's learning under such a senior person is clearly talented and has been picked up to be talented living in a world of spies where you're not supposed to trust anyone why did she go for beverly's advances so hard and like actually become friends with her

when beverly is very clearly you know an american and trying to include her herself in her world. So this is where culture plays in. And this is why it's so going back to the beginning of our conversation, how people are people. And oftentimes we're not interested in the actual person. It takes us four hours of conversation before we care about a person. We care about everything else about them, but we don't care about them as an individual. In the case of Converse, Converse was a female, and she was younger, and she was single. And all of those things worked against her, in the culture she was coming from. So when she met Beverly,

Beverly's older, married to a younger guy who is attractive and younger, and they are both successful and powerful. To converse, she was like, how did you do that? I got to follow this old guy around everywhere. He goes, I have to make him feel special. I can't even verbalize the fact that I ever want to get married. If I admit to ever wanting to get married,

they're going to kick me out of my job, because what they want is somebody who loves the job. How do you have both a job you love and a person you love? Like there were all these mentoring moments that were almost like, like sisterly. And that was something she couldn't get. Yeah. Wow. Okay.

And that's how espionage works. Espionage is very few people commit treason for money. If you were to just look at the surface level, it would look like everybody commits treason for money. It's what they're going to do with the money they get from treason, saving for retirement, helping a kid, helping a parent get through a cancer treatment, you name it, right? Buy an investment property somewhere else that's going to be there for them as a Social Security plan. Nobody just, nobody is greedy and betrays their country just for greed.

They want to do something with that money. Even the biggest traders in the United States, your Robert Hansons and your Aldrich Ames, they didn't take just money. They were playing a game where they were beating their service. CIA underestimated Aldra James. So every time he took money, he was sticking in their face. That's why he drove Jaguars and wore fancy suits to work. He was basically saying, fuck you, I'm so much smarter than you, CIA,

that I'm giving secrets to the Russians and making more money than you can give me. And you need to know that. And Robert Hansen and FBI was doing the same thing. They didn't care about the money. They cared about what the money represented. All right, real quick, I go to the bathroom, but we'll be right back. Yeah, Gio was actually just asking, we're back now, but Gio was just asking off camera, like, how do you trust your wife? Because the whole time I was reading this, I was kind of thinking that, I'm like, is Ghee just working Andy?

Are they like, yo, we got a real fucking case of cowboy fever here? So you just, you know, you keep an eye on them. I've heard of that before. She may very well be working me for all I know. But I think the way I trust her is I feel like I don't have an option. she's smarter than me and more successful than me so I'm not going to outsmart her or dupe her or trick her so if anything makes for a very easy way to be very honest and transparent with my wife

which has been all the difference in our relationship too whenever I have an insecurity or a doubt whenever I see a hot chick on the street it's just so much easier to tell her the truth because whatever comes next is going to be easier than if I lied to her Gee, you see the rack on that chick? I need you guys to, like, put a GoPro on and just, like, walk around time. I need to see this, like, in action. What it looks like?

Yeah. Yeah. You just see Andy's head turn all the time with the GoPro. Turns back to Jehe. Come on. So it's worth noting, I mean, and we talk about this in the book as well, my wife has an anxiety disorder. 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. She has, she suffers from depression. She has mental health issues that made her almost ideally suited to work at CIA. As long as I don't violate her own mental health challenges, it's actually more comforting to her.

What drives an anxious person crazy is when they wonder if you saw the girl with the nice rack. As soon as you say, I saw the girl with a nice rack, it's like talking to Rain Man. Oh, yeah, it was a nice rack. It was a good rack. It was definitely a good rack. And that goes way better than... Did you see the rack? Are you lying to me? You're lying to me. I can see that you're lying to me.

Sorry, that's so good. Well, I'm happy for you. That's a great relationship. There's a lot of guys out there right now going, I need that. Do you have anxiety? A little more anxiety in my life. All right. So back to the cell, though.

You are the go-between, like we said. So you're going to be the guy who's now as SOO even. You've had a lot of experience like on the ground doing things there. So you have that skill set as well as managing the cell with Ghee. But you're going to go into Falcon, as you said, always through a second country under an assumed identity, which you've talked about out of context on a lot of podcasts with me before where you're like, yeah, I work for a business or something like that. So I think in the book you said you worked for Acme and like, what was it? procurement or something like that. Yep.

Okay. So you would go in there and what was your, you're doing some different things every time, but high level, like what was your main job when you would go into Falcon? Whenever you enter into a hostile country, and by every country to a certain extent is hostile, but the definition that we're talking about when we talk about denied areas or we talk about these areas that are the most aggressive adversaries to the United States. When you go into those countries, you can't do more than one operational act at a time. So if you were to go into a more permissive environment, then you would be able to go in

and you may be able to do two or three things in a day because nobody's really watching. That's what we're like here in the United States. Foreign adversaries can come here and do whatever they want to do because we don't have cameras on every intersection. we don't fund our police enough to make them anything significant to a foreign intelligence threat. We treat everybody who comes into the United States essentially as a U.S. citizen first. So they all have privacy and they have the benefit of innocence until proven guilty. Like they have rights and privileges that are essentially granted to them because we give them

to our own citizens. Other parts of the world are not like that. So what that meant is that inside Falcon, our case officers couldn't go. to Falcon to execute an operation, and also on that operation, procure their operational support requirements. If they needed bulk cash deposits, if they needed special watches, if they needed certain SIM cards or batteries

that were specific to Falcon, they couldn't do that on their own. They couldn't show up and then procure those things and carry out the operational act. It would create a trail that would identify that what they're doing is espionage. So I would go in ahead of them. I would do the actual procurement

part of espionage, I would buy a cell phone, I would buy a SIM card, I would make a mass depositor a withdrawal of cash. And then I would essentially cache those things or dead drop those things somewhere where a case officer could pick it up when they arrive. So did you really, you really had a cover working for, in this case, Acme? Yeah, I really had an identity that allowed me to transit Falcon without coming onto suspicion. There's a lot of roles that are immediately suspicious and not always suspicious for espionage reasons. Sometimes people are interested in you because they think that you're wealthy. Sometimes people are interested in you because they think that you have access to IP. Sometimes people are interested in you because they think that you have

familial connections or celebrity connections. So it's actually quite hard sometimes to build a cover persona that doesn't catch anyone's interest. So in this case, Acme Corporation was one corporation that does something mundane. They do something that has. to do with with everyday needs. Think like soles on shoes or printer cartridges and printers or the person or like the nail clippers right something stupid that nobody anywhere is concerned with the IP of nail clippers and nobody anywhere is concerned with the celebrity connections of a company that makes the souls for shoes and like it's all mundane and silly but it's big business right it's big enough

business that you want to have the natural resources that either provide the beginning or you want to have the trade route that carries them or you want to have the manufacturing that builds them. So there's every reason in the world for a real world business person to do that job. And there's also every reason in the world for local businesses to want to meet with you. But basically police, law enforcement, and intelligence don't care about you. But you really had to have that cover because you had to represent this, whoever the actual real company was. And you really have to learn about it and you really have to know the lingo, right? So you literally reported to a guy working for that company in another country, or was it,

you were disconnected and just said you worked for them and would approach it that way? So this is getting into the sensitive side of how these operations are built. Okay. So what I will say is that I was not alone. There were people that I had to speak to and people who had to speak to me. that's part of what makes it a backstopped cover, what we call a backstop cover. So I could send emails, emails would come, I can make phone calls and phone, inbound phone calls would come in.

So everything is legit. Actually a registered business, actually registers a profit and actually has regular revenue in P&L. Like, it's all a very real thing. But where that person was located and how much that person was dedicated to my cover versus, you know,

multiple businesses or whatever else, that gets into the classified area. Okay. All right. So I won't pull on that. But essentially how, I don't know if this is classified too, but like how often are you going there to do this kind of stuff? So I would go maybe once every 40-ish days or so. I would go frequently because I'm supporting four case officers. And not only am I supporting those four case officers, I have a very active targeter who wants more information, more restaurant locations, more intersections, more street names, more maps, more. more, you know, IMEIs and ISMIs from different cell phone manufacturers. Like, there's just tons of information. There's tons of collection that needs to happen on the logistics side of a CIA operation. So there's always a reason to go.

And the more you go, the less suspicious you are. Right. Because the more regular your passages, the more you look like a regular business person, you always stay for two or three days. You always stay in the same hotel. You always do the same, like, things in the same city. You go to the same restaurants, you know, rent the same car from the same rental car agency.

All that stuff's very common. And now all of a sudden it puts you almost above suspicion. What about for someone like Beverly, though, who I believe met, you said it's Converse, not Converse. I think Converse is better. I always thought Converse is better too. This was literally a conversation I had with my wife. I was like, why don't we call this person Converse?

And she was like... Gee, he just call it Converse. It's better. You see like the black shoe and the star and everything. On the Julian Dory podcast, we're going to call it. So you meet, you meet Converse in, or Beverly meets Converse, I believe, in Wolf, not in Falcon. So is she straddling between Wolf and Falcon? Correct.

How does she manage that and not, you know, because it's a different role than you? Right. So every case officer has their own justification for going into and out of Falcon. So their frequency is something that we schedule, we plan to make sure that there's never two of them in the country at the same time. their routes, their third country cleansing routes are all different. We have a specific plan for everyone to make sure that the operations don't overlap or collide. We're also carefully controlling what geographic regions they're going to to make sure that they're not in the same city, possibly staying in a hotel that's on the same block.

We want to isolate as much as possible so that if Falcon intelligence does spot one of us, it doesn't lead to the others. Okay. Right. So while Converse is happening inside of Wolf, the information that Ghee's collecting that she gives to, she gives to Beverly, some of those cases are happening inside Falcon. Some of those cases are happening in third country locations where the Falcon target comes out of Falcon for a day or two, but we're trying to build an excuse for Beverly to meet the person in Falcon later.

Oh.