EverydaySpy Podcast - The 3 Types of Surveillance — And How to Know You’re Being Watched

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

FREE TEST: Find Your Spy Superpower HERE - https://yt.everydayspy.com/spot_20260730 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every business owner, every mid-level to high-level executive who has traveled through a country that is not on good terms with the United States. And there's many, many countries beyond just like the big two or three that you would think of, when you travel into a foreign country that's not in great terms with the U.S., they watch you. And they watch you with what I call bumbling surveillance. And that's what you're talking about, the low-level minder. Like this is a dude or a gal who they run like a food cart. 14 hours a day. And they don't make enough money to keep their family alive on a food cart.

So then they work a few extra hours every night by watching foreigners. Sometimes they're assigned a foreigner. Sometimes they voluntarily watch a foreigner and then go to a local police station after they watch them and try to sell their information. Right?

Sometimes if they can't sell their information to a local police officer, they'll sell their information to like a local gangster and be like, hey, you got a guy staying at the local Radisson who wears a Rolex. But they're always trying to peddle what information they can to make a buck just to make ends meet. These individuals are really easy to spot.

These bumbling surveillance are really easy to spot. And when you see them, it's a comfort because that's all that's all that's covering you. It's when you don't see them that you have to ask harder questions. Why am I not being watched now? Am I more interesting than I think I am? Did no mind or show up today because they're hung over because they drank too many beers last night? what's the explanation? Yeah.

So you would describe back the first time we ever talked in episode 97, the three types of surveillance. There's like discrete to lose. What's the terminology for the other two? Yeah. So there's discreet to lose surveillance. There's close surveillance and discrete not to lose surveillance. Okay.

Can you just redefine all those real quick for everyone? So we have that. Absolutely. From the simplest, least sophisticated form of surveillance is called close surveillance. It's when the person who's following you essentially wants you to know you're being followed. They stay right on your shoulder. If they're driving, they stay right on your bumper.

When you park, they try to park you in. Like they're trying to intimidate you and they are also following and watching you. So these are more the bumbling guys. Close. Close. What these are is these, yeah, I mean, when it comes to training,

these are your bumbling guys. But we're talking specifically about trained surveillance. Okay. When a surveillance team is trained for close surveillance. that might be more like a police surveillance team. They know a drug dealer's coming in. They don't want that drug dealer to do any drops, so they're going to follow that drug dealer.

They can't arrest him. He hasn't committed to crime. There's no proof, but they're going to stay on his ass everywhere he goes. They're going to neutralize his ability to do anything. Okay. That's a close surveillance team. The next step down in terms of, or the next step up from, in terms of sophistication,

is something called discrete not to lose. Discrete not to lose means you don't want your target to see you, but you also can't lose them. So if they make a left turn when they shouldn't make a left turn, when they make a U-turn and they shouldn't make a U-turn, when they run across the street and there's no crosswalk,

you have to go with them because you cannot lose them. So you might stay farther back, but if they do something stupid, you're going to do something stupid too because you can't let them disappear. So you're watching them because you're confident

that they're going to execute some kind of operational act and when they commit that act, you have to be there to catch them, apprehend them, or collect evidence. That's discrete not to lose. The third most sophisticated form of surveillance is called discrete to lose. Discrete to lose means you don't ever want your target to know you're there. You want them, you want to be completely invisible to them because you're being so discreet that if you lose them, you're going to escalate the case to another resource that will pick them up.

So I'm following you down the streets in Hoboken. You turn left, you turn right. I lose you into a coffee shop. I don't know where you went. I can make a phone call and all of a sudden I've got a helicopter above head looking for you. Or I've got a series of drones that are triangulating you. Or I can find someone who's going to ping your cell phone from a local tower

and we'll find you and I'll get right back on you two blocks from now. Right. Discrete to lose is the most sophisticated form of surveillance because it's the most dangerous. Scariest one. It means that you're so interesting they're willing to spend the money of almost infinite resources to see what you're doing. So you had been going and doing these trips for a long time. How long I guess you're not allowed to say. But a while you've been going in roughly every 40 days. You're doing all these different things to manage for your people on the ground, depending on which

two are in the country at the time. And then you have this three-day trip plan where, you know, the cover is you're going to be going a meeting with these different procurement companies for your job. but you're going to be doing some of your regular things. And you notice, I guess, day one, when you come downstairs into the hotel lobby, something's off. Why was something off to you? I don't know. I don't know why things were different that day. But for whatever reason, I couldn't find a minder.

I couldn't find a bumbling surveillance. And it was winter. It was cold. It was nasty outside. but that had never stopped, that had never stopped minders from being there before. So in that moment, it felt,

it felt comfortable. It felt like victorious. I felt like I am fucking so good at this. Here we go. This is why I'm coming here every 40 days. So that nobody thinks that I'm suspicious so that I can be free to do whatever I want to do so that like this is what it's all about.

I used to joke with James back in the building when we were back at Wolf together. We used to joke about the day that we would become invisible inside Falcon, the day that we were so commonplace, so boring, so dull, so predictable, that they wouldn't even follow us. It wasn't even worth paying the homeless guy $5 to watch us, right? And I was like, today is that day. I mean, I finally, I'm here. And I'm going to tell James, I can't wait to get back and tell James that I beat him to the punch,

Like that's that was what was going through my head. And it didn't last long before the second thought came to my head that that if they're not following me with a bumbling surveillance, they might be following me with something better. Because it doesn't take a lot to follow somebody without a person. You can follow them by following a cell phone signal. You can follow them by following a driver. You can follow them by following, you know, a series of static surveillance that that's, stand along their route. And remember, we do the same thing almost every trip. So it wouldn't be hard to set up a series of static surveillance that just watch you go from point A to point B to point

C and you never see them at all. Did that thought come into your head where you're like, could this be major bond oil all over again? It didn't come into my head in that moment. It just struck me that I could be wrong, which was not something that the younger version of me would have ever thought. The younger version of me would have been like, I am so fucking. good. But instead, I had a few years under my belt and a little bit more like humble stew, and I was like, this could be something else too. Just having the ability to recognize that there could be an alternate explanation than what you think is a lot harder than most people realize. Most people are so sure that their opinion is right. Most people are so sure that their perspective

is right, that they don't even entertain, seriously entertain a second point of view, right? You can count your religious extremist activities on the backs of people who do this. You can see how many people have lost their fortunes because this is what they did. You can see how many people have lost relationships because they truly believe that they were so right. There could be no other alternative. 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. All that I had learned in my life and up to that moment

at least gave me the sense to say, what if I'm not that good? What if this is just something else? But here's the other thing too. There's two other variables here. Number one, speed of processing, because something could go wrong at any instance. and, you know, worst case scenario.

But also, like, you take this for granted. If I'm sitting out there with Joe trying to, like, cook something up when we're not recording and come up with a title or whatever, and then, or, you know, some type of idea, I might be like, wait a minute. No, I don't know about that. Let's back it. You see what I mean? Like, you almost have, like, a physical reaction to it in tone and shift. It's not like you're talking to someone necessarily in the hotel lobby. but you can't be like, you know, or show any sign that you're even thinking.

It's true. But in your head, you're running these like algorithmic calculations of like, okay, well, those 13 people over there weren't doing this. The two guys over there aren't looking at me right now. That's not the norm. You know what I mean? Like you have to put all this together and you have to stand there like this. Yeah.

It's true. It's true. And that's part of the reason why you don't have anything else you have to do, right? The reason you schedule your day on this day. particular. I had scheduled the day so that I had two business meetings in the day. And I knew that there would be someone else driving me from business meeting to business meeting. And I knew that the drivers had already known what time to pick me up and drop me off because that was all pre-determined in email correspondence to the backstop cover organization.

So my 100% job from point A to point B was just to determine my surveillance status. And that's what a surveillance detection route is supposed to do. nothing else except determine your surveillance status. You know what the route's going to be, you know, what the turns are going to be, you know, how long you're going to be on a certain side of the street. You know everything. And there's always room for streetlights to go along

or for some traffic accident to slow you down or whatever else. So you leave space for variables, but you're giving 90% of your resources to one task. So you are correct. You have to process quickly, but you don't have to prioritize between processes. You're doing one thing and one thing only. So you can have those processes without biting your nails or looking around the room or, you know, awkwardly scratching your beltline.

So how did you catch the initial surveillance in this case? So there's a process for surveillance detection, and we get to go through it almost step by step in the book. I'm really excited about that. That's one of the things that CIA didn't like about this book. There were several that they didn't like. And we can talk about some other time. But one of the things they didn't like is that I expressed how we detected or how I did. detected surveillance on this route. As I went from point A to point B, as I went from the hotel to the first business meeting, someone else was driving. My entire focus was just on finding surveillance, which means that I could observe the environment around me. And when you are looking for surveillance, what you're really looking for is a change in the environment that doesn't

make sense. When you move, let's just say you move from Hoboken to New Jersey, or Hoboken to Manhattan. Whether you're driving or training or ferrying, you, if you do it enough times, you know what to expect. You know what normal looks like. Surveillance happens when normal doesn't look normal. When you see one face too many times or when you see one card too many times, or when you make a mistake and you take a U-turn and somebody follows you through the U-turn, and then that same person that follows you through your turn, just happens to be the person who walks into the deli on 37th that you walk into. You're looking for strange patterns that don't fit the chaos of normalcy. And that's from point A to point B. I also had a second meeting

schedule that day. And in between those two meetings, I was going to take kind of a lunch break. So again, I get out, I leave from point B to go to my lunch break. And I'm looking for the things that don't look normal from point B to point C, but I'm also looking for anything that repeats what happened in the first leg. We call them legs. You have multiple legs to a surveillance detection route, sometimes three, sometimes five, sometimes seven. What you're looking for is how often do you see the same outlier from leg to leg? That's how you truly determine if you're under surveillance. And that's what we detail in the story. That's how I found out. Not just that I was under surveillance, but who specifically was following me. You were seeing some of the same

people and you were seeing it. There were multiple different people, multiple different cars, which now says it's been in your head, this has been escalated. Correct. At what point did you start shitting yourself? Second leg, second leg, picking up the same vehicle from the first leg, identifying, identifying people who, when I moved from driving to walking and seeing the same people again, both in cars and on foot, that shit's scary. That shit's scary because now you realize there's a team.

The team has resources. Like, it's easy for one person. When you learn surveillance detection, you learn that all the advantages do not go to the surveillance team. The surveillance team has all the disadvantages because they have to react. Yes. So they're always one step behind.

They don't know where you're going next. They don't know when you're going there. If they lose you, they have to find you again. So you might think that the surveillance team has all the advantages. The only advantage the surveillance team has is technology. and resources. It's actually the field operator that has all of the advantages

in a surveillance detection route. You're the wide receiver. They're the cornerback. Yes. You choose everything, right? So you become acutely aware of these advantages and disadvantages because if you fuck up

and you make them suspicious of you, they can plus up with more resources. They can fall off and come back on you the next day. They can escalate you even higher and all of a sudden you have a SWAT team or a takedown team. rather than a surveillance team following you. So it becomes this really difficult dance

where you have to act in such a way that's so calculated that they don't realize it's calculated, that's so predictable without seeming predictable, that they just watch you and don't care. They don't escalate, they don't chase, they don't worry. And this is one place you said the movies get wrong all the time. All the time. Because in the movies, what does somebody do when they're under surveillance?

They fucking run, they try to do crazy shit, jump on buildings you're basically saying I love the visual you gave where you're like it's like when you see a bear you don't run because it says that's danger so it's going to come after you you have to like very cautiously look at it and back away so you're like hey amigo i ain't here do anything i'm not here i'm not i'm not worth your time that's the whole goal we call it lulling surveillance you're trying to lull your surveillance to sleep you're trying to to lull them into making an error. You're trying to lull them into into giving up on you, right? It's a job for them too. It's a job for them too. They

woke up at some time, got their kids off to school, ate their breakfast, took their coffee. They're going to have to take their morning shit at some point too. So the whole goal is to make their life so simple and predictable that when four o'clock comes around, they're like, nothing here, folks, and they go home. That's what you want to do. You don't want to be interesting enough that at four o'clock they call in and they get overtime and they're like hey we're going to stay on this guy for another three hours what made you want to go to an arcade once you knew that this stuff was going down it was it's really cool people are going to have to like read to get all the details of different places you were picking and what you would have to think about going into them like

plan out why would be there and why it would make sense to be in this place like down to the microscopic type shit but what made you say you know what i'm going to stop and you know shoot badly in an arcade so they know i'm not a good shot. So surveillance teams are made up of people, and every one of the people on a team is creating a surveillance persona for the day. So if you were to come to my surveillance training course, one of the things everyday spy teaches is it certifies people in discrete to lose surveillance.

If you were to come, I would teach you about how to make a profile and how to change your profile to fit into different environments for different purposes. Professional surveillance teams know how to change their profile for different circumstances, because at the first hour that you're following somebody, you might need to look a certain way. But by the fourth hour that you're following somebody, you need to change your profile. I was at a point in the surveillance detection route

where I knew that the next person who should follow me is the younger male on their team. You can literally see the pattern and how professional surveillance works. So to lull them to sleep, you try to make it as easy as possible for them. So I didn't want to go into the quilting store because if I went to the quilting store

and some fucking 22 year old kid followed me, he would feel awkward. But maybe the 60 year old woman or the 55 year old woman wouldn't feel so awkward. But she wasn't the next one up on the, on the rotation. Oh, you had that calculated.

Yeah. I knew the next person up on the rotation was the young kid. Well, where is he going to fit in? The arcade. And one of the other things you always want to do on a surveillance route is you want to be able to control your time.

So if you walk into a coffee shop, for example. Logically, you think, oh, copy shop's going to be quick. You don't have any fucking idea. The barista could be lazy. They could be slow. There could be a long line.

There's all sorts of reasons why you might walk into a copy shop and you think you're going to be there for two minutes, but you're there for 15 minutes instead. That's a showstopper for surveillance detection route because you lost control of time.

You walk into an arcade. You control every element of your time. Do you play one game? Do you play four games? Do you die quickly in the game? Do you just walk around? Do you go buy a coffee or a Coke if the line is short? Do you just use the restroom?

You can control every element of your time. So I knew I wanted a place for a 22-year-old guy to follow me, about 22-year-old to follow me. I wanted it to be a place that only he would fit in in the whole team, so it makes it very easy for him, and a place where I could loiter so that as soon as I saw him with me, I could play three, four, five games,

give the whole team a 15- or 20-minute break so that they can smoke a cigarette, they can restructure who's in what cars. Like, I want them to have a really easy life so that they don't think that there's anything suspicious about me. And that 22-year-old guy can follow me anywhere in this arcade he wants to

because he doesn't even have to be close to me. He can be on the second floor and watch me on the first floor. He can be on the first floor and watch me on the second floor. It's easy. That's why I picked the arcade. But you don't want you or him

to make each other. You never want to make eye contact with these people. And that's what happened here. I'll read this little passage. You were in the arcade and you said I squinted down the barrel of the plastic rifle.

You were playing some fucking dinosaur game. Shoot the dinosaur. The T-Rex was looking right at me, clawing at the dirt with its hind leg. I had a good clean shot at it. My finger hovered over the trigger. At that moment, a figure appeared around the right-hand side of the arcade cabinet.

Little more than two arms breasts away from me. It was someone I recognized from earlier in the day, but it wasn't Puma. it was bomber man the guy from outside the knockoff shop hours ago and miles across town in the confusion of that moment there was no time to calibrate my reactions we locked eyes each of us visibly recognizing the other my heart stopped i had been made now they knew for sure that i had intelligence training bomber man's mouth hung open on impulse i squeezed the blue plastic trigger my shot went wide the tewrex word and charged me its jaws clamped shut and blood red text filled the screen came over

there's no way the timing was that perfect i this was one part i didn't buy Like, you definitely shot, and I don't know, five minutes later. But you locked eyes with this guy, you know. And that's horrible. Yeah. It's horrible. I mean, it's, the thing that's so nasty about it is how fast it all went wrong. Yeah.

I mean, I'm in the arcade. I'm playing the fucking game. First of all, if anybody's played like these, I think this was like a Jurassic Park game, nobody ever beats the fucking Tyrannosaurus in the actual game. It costs like $5. But regardless, regardless, I thought I was doing everything right. I was like, oh, yeah, they've got the team out there. They're going to send the young guy in.

You know, the next person up on the list is earmuffs. I'm going to be good to go. I've got four more hours to kill, and then they're going to be off shift. I thought I had it all on lockdown. And then my peripheral eyes caught somebody familiar that was not the right person. Had I had my periphery caught Puma, the guy wearing the Puma suit, I would have been perfect. I'd have been like, got it. Like, that's exactly what I expected.

But instead, it's like when you see something that's just out of place and you do a double take, fucking the wrong person was there. And I looked at him and I was like, what? And then clearly, he was also surprised to see me because there, he was looking at me. If you've ever been to an arcade, this is what kills me. Every time I go to an arcade now. He's got arcade PTSD. In a way, it's ridiculous.

But the next time you're in arcade, the next time you're an arcade, the next time you go to, you know, whatever the adult arcade is or anything else, you'll notice nobody makes eye contact. Nobody looks at anybody. You're there with your friends. You're looking at the bar. You're checking out asses and tits. You're doing whatever you're doing, but you're not making eye contact with strangers. And it felt so horrible in that moment because I was like, we're looking at each other in this fucking place where nobody's looking at each other. How long was it? Like two seconds, five seconds? I think in reality it was probably a second to a second and a half. But it felt longer. But it felt so long. Was it kind of like that scene in the town

where they like get out of the car after they did the big getaway and the cop staring right at him and they're like, just look at him like this and then the cop goes. He didn't see anything and he just walks away because he's like that wasn't supposed to happen. I don't remember the town, but probably. Oh, you got to watch that movie. Yeah. But it doesn't feel good. And it feels so naked and dirty and and then however long it was is irrelevant

because what it feels like is I just I just stepped on a hornet's nest like this whole thing is going to explode I thought for sure that this dude he saw me, I saw him he's going to step away

and he's going to call it on the radio and he's going to be like I got made and as soon as he says he got made the commander of the unit is going to be like this person's intelligence trained because you can't

You can't in the game of espionage, you can't be on the surveillance team and claim that you got burnt or claim that you got made and have it be because of your own error. They all cover each other's backs that way. So it can't be your mistake that made you get caught. If you got caught, it's because they were trained and they saw you. That's how you always escalate cases. That's how you make sure that nobody ever questions the surveillance report, right? So I was like, oh, this is a standard procedure. This person's going to get out.

He's going to say, I got made. commander's going to call in to command and say, hey, we've got an intelligence trained operative. At that point, either they're going to send in the capture squad because they've been waiting for me to give them a cue that I'm intelligence trained, or they're going to escalate the case and I'm going to have a new team on me in the next two hours,

or I'm going to have a team that picks me up in the morning. It's going to get worse. There's no way it goes from this to better. It only goes from this to worse. And I don't even know what worse is going to look like. which is just incredibly disheartening. You were saying that you were doing some things during this time that I guess you were trained on, like at the farm or at CIA to...

Reduce stress. Yeah. Prepare your body for what's coming next. Like, is this strictly like breathing type things? Or they're also thought exercises? They're both. Yeah, it's a great point. There's breathing exercises.

I mean, things that you can learn in... Anybody who's been through adult therapy has probably learned breathing exercises that we learn at CIA, from box breathing to deep breathing to resistance breathing, where you take a deep breath and then you resist as you exhale it. There's all sorts of ways that you can artificially slow your heart rate, which reduces your blood pressure, which allows for clearer thought. So, of course, I'm doing that as best I can without looking like I'm doing that as I'm in like a crash-bang, wreck-up car game, trying to burn more time. But then you're also going through thought exercises where you're creating multiple hypotheses about what may have happened

and what may happen next and you're trying to identify what's the most probable, what's the least probable, and what can you do next? Because you want to create the most important thing when you feel overwhelmed with emotion, the most important thing is to create time. Because your logical brain works much slower than your emotional brain. So when you feel emotional, you feel the pressure to make fast decisions when in fact what you need to do is you need to give your emotions time to do whatever they're going to do but but don't make a decision until you give your logical brain a chance to catch up because your logical brain will catch up i i think i've given you this example possibly but at some point i'm sure when you were a kid you were walking through a dark room

and you saw something in the corner that spooked you oh it's a rat oh it's a snake oh it's a monster and then a split second after that, you realize it's just a crumpled up t-shirt or it's just a book that fell off the bookshelf laying open, right? And then after you have that, you feel a sense of relief. That's exactly how the brain works even as an adult. Something triggers you and you jump or you startle because your emotional brain works so fast.

It takes a half a tick or two before the logical brain is like, oh, wait a second, that's not a monster, that's a book. That's not a rat. That's a t-shirt. right? The same thing happens when you're making decisions in business, when you're making decisions in the field. It's never as bad as you think it is first. You just have to give yourself time to work through it. So that's what I was trying to do is give my logical brain a chance to catch up so that

instead of just thinking a SWAT team's going to show up and I'm dead, I think, well, maybe not. Maybe something else will happen first. When did you start the process that maybe you had dodged a bullet? Like how long after that? I didn't think that I was safe. Yeah, you never thought you were safe, but when did you think like, oh, they're not literally sending in like the SWAT team to take me to the torture chamber this instant? Oh, this instant? Yeah. I would say it, the last stop that I made before I called it a night was at a men's clothing store. And when I walked into that men's clothing store and I still had surveillance behind me and it was still the same team with the same people and the same vehicles, that's when I started to think like, it's not game over yet.

something else is happening, there's still room somewhere. There's still room for flexibility. You were trying on belts, you were saying? Belts, jackets. You're trying them around the neck or? No, just, there's, if you've ever traveled,

it's just shocking how predictable men's stores are. They all have the same thousand options for belts and jackets and hats. All right, so you get back to the hotel and you're still thinking like, oh, maybe they're going to take me at the hotel. And it was cool. You were calculating like the most logical times they might like burst through the door to take you based on what the attention would be from the people on hand. And you thought it was going to be between 10 or 11 o'clock at night?

Why did you think that? Because it's the right time of day to make the biggest scene with the least reaction. Here's what was so fascinating to me in hindsight as I was going through writing the memoir. you know, everybody makes a big deal, especially the United States. We all promote training. Like, oh, get training and we've got the best training. And, you know, we go out of, we spend money out of pocket to go through, you know, survival training and seal training and all this other kind of training to try and make

ourselves tough. What nobody ever talks about is how that fucking training can work against you. And what happened for me as I was reviewing, as I was going through my memoir, as I was writing the memoir, I was like, holy shit, man, my training in a lot of ways, created a whole hell of a lot more stress and effort than if I would have never been trained. Don't get me wrong, the training saved my life. But nobody talks about the fact that when you actually need to use that training, all the other shit that's going through your head is just burning and burning.

It's burning resources. It's burning cycles. It's burning speed. It's burning all sorts of stuff. So I thought, like, I'm exercising my surveillance detection route because I think I know how to do it, because I was trained a certain way, and then they actually reacted in a way different from my training.

And now I'm going through this exercise in the hotel room where I'm like, well, if they're going to burst into my room, here's how I would do it. So then I'm building up this reaction to something that's going to happen in my mind at a certain time, because that's how I would do it, doesn't happen that way.

They did it differently. And it's like, there's these instances throughout the memoir where I'm like, I was trained to do it this way. they did it a different way. I was trained what I would call best in class. They were clearly not operating best in class. So then that makes it really difficult to predict how someone's going to operate.