EverydaySpy Podcast - The CIA Made Me Look Homeless… Here’s Why

Episode Date: September 6, 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 pmcfwalk.ca.ca. This would be a place where being sort of ethnically ambiguous or being able to blend into different, like I have a friend and you can't tell if she could be Italian, she could be Greek, she could be Eastern European,

she could be Russian, right? Like that would be an advantage because you could like blend in different places. Can you give us two very different examples of places you've had to blend in? Absolutely. So a lot of my operations were actually in East Asia. And the reason I was so effective in East Asia, And the reason I was so effective in East Asia is because they are incredibly racist against anybody with brown skin in East Asia. So if you have brown skin, you're like less than, you're less than the bottom of the social hierarchy. So the last thing they would expect of a brown person is that they were smart, trained, or trying to steal secrets. They're too busy looking for all the tall, six foot tall, like six foot five, Captain America, white American-looking people. That's your spy, James Bond, right? So I operated a lot in East Asia

where nobody knew that I was anything important. And I operated quite a lot in Latin America, where I looked just like every other Brown guy in Latin America, right? Even though I don't speak Spanish well or... I mean, your name is Bustamante. It's like a fantastic last name. It is, but it's an Italian Spanish Bustamante that I borrowed from my wife. Okay. Another silly question. Did you have to have different facial hair for disguises? I did.

I did. And usually it wasn't very well-groomed. It was more like as nappy and homeless as you could make it look. So one of the things that I'm still getting used to being on YouTube is actually trying to make myself look like I care about my face. Did you have to use prosthetic beards and things? Or it was just your natural beard? You would grow it out. So we do use prosthetics.

This is, again, I'm going to geek out with you for a second here, M. The way that we use disguise, we call it costume like we talked about, but the way that we use disguise in the field, there's three different levels. The most advanced level is also the most dangerous level because it's the least predictable level, and that's when we use prosthetics. So, I mean, nobody thinks about this, but if you don't use the right kind of adhesive, in the cold, it'll fall off. In the heat, it'll curl, right? If you don't use the right kind of matching skin prosthetic. It'll look fake. You'll blow your cover.

Right away, exactly. Your nose will be like half falling off of your face. So what we try to do as much as possible is not change ourselves with prosthetics. And then if we have to use prosthetics, then we use prosthetics at great distance from the people who are trying to observe us. So for me, they would rather dye my beard or shape my beard or even like let me grow a beard, you know, on vacation for six months and then bring it back and get it all nasty and dirty and then let me go out in the field. That's easier than shaving me and trying to put me in a straight-haired beard. Have you ever had to be costumed as a woman? No, not something I had to do operationally, but I have 100% worn female costumes.

to see if I could push the skills, my own skills, in costume design. And you could not? No, it's hard to pull off looking like a girl when you're this ugly. Hey. I think you're ugly. No, but I was curious, because in some places you can cover your face as a woman. Like, I've seen that in the movies. Who hasn't seen that in the movies?

Or a cartoon. It's true. It's true. And that's, you know, when you're talking about a full cover, like when people wear a burqa or some sort of hijab, When you're talking about that, that is a different level of disguise. We don't consider that prosthetics. We consider that still level one disguise, a very basic disguise, because it's just fabric. I mean, anybody could do that.

Correct. Well, the eyes are the giveaway. And if anybody's ever seen... Eyes are the window to the soul. If anybody's ever seen an Arab woman in full garb, like, she puts a great deal of effort into her eyes, usually. Here's another question, which is not as silly. And you don't have to answer, but I'm going to ask.

Have you killed people? Not intimately. And yes, we have different levels of killing. I'm sure you're not surprised to hear that M. We have intimate killing and we have non-intimate killing. Intimate killing is when you deliver the death blow with your hand. Non-intimate killing is when you participate in the demise of a target, the neutralizing of a target, by executing your portion of the job.

So the government sends you to kill people? The government sends all of us in a way to kill people. We just have different. It's like an assembly line. Nobody does it all. We just some people put on the bolt and some people put on the tire. And I didn't mean to make this a personal attack on you. I'm saying that like when we think about...

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the description below or scan the QR code on your screen right now to take the test. I want you to discover your hidden spy skill and use it before someone else uses theirs against you. I think about, let's say, the Army, you know, and I have great respect for people who, you know, who serve our country. And it is a method of our government sending often, you know, poor kids who they've promised a college education, you know, sending people to do the, the dirty work of a government that also isn't always transparent about why they're sending us places. Do you see your role as kind of an extension of that bureaucratic killing machine? Dishonesty. Yes, absolutely. And no, you don't have, I love this conversation right now because

that is a very real element that we have to come to terms with after our first or second field tour. after you've been in the field for about two years, you start to see through the smokescreen, and you start to see what's really happening, right? And what's really happening is you were promised an opportunity, and then you were brought into this very bureaucratic organization where you signed a lot of promises that are legally binding, and now all of the sudden, you have to go, you know, fight for a cause that you don't believe in. You have to go participate in a cover-up that you know is not being disclosed to the American people because you've been told that to disclose it to the American people would also mean disclosing it to your adversaries,

so we're going to keep it secret from everybody, right? It's a very difficult world to live in, but again, we are psychologically predisposed to understanding that there are secrets that need to be kept and there are secrets that need to be shared. So it's not an easy lifestyle. That's why many people who have made it 15, 20 years in the agency, they come out psychologically flawed for the rest of their life. They can't recover, right? I mean, you would, we now have a larger understanding of what happens to soldiers. And I think that this is true, even if you feel that it is a just cause, you know, I want to set aside the notion of like, you know, participating in murder, assassination, what do you call it, non-intimate killing, you know, that's going to do something.

Seeing the destruction of war, that's going to do something to you and it's going to change you and it causes trauma. But I think like kind of setting those things aside for the moment and kind of talking the way we're talking right now, it's very interesting because, you know, what is the framework for your or anyone's personal comfort in being hired by a government to do things that you may not agree with? Where is that? line. And what's amazing is you don't ever think of that. When you are a good fit for the job, you don't think about that line on day one. You stumble into that line later on. And then you realize, oh, shit, like maybe I bid off more than I can chew. And to CIA's credit, they're

familiar with this buyer's remorse. So there's a very, a very strong mental health component at CIA. They've got staff psychologists. They've got, you know, staff therapists, they've got staff PT, personal trainers and exercise scientists who are all there to help you develop healthy coping mechanisms to deal with what you do every day. And when the time comes that you can no longer cope in a healthy way, they just take you off the line and then they put you in administrative jobs where you can't do any damage. And then they treat you with, you know, whatever they can treat you with and whatever you choose to treat yourself with, which is why we see such a high rate of drug use and alcoholism, adultery, divorce,

because lives just fall apart when people stay in service that long. Are those mental health providers not incentivized to keep you going and to sort of push the limits of your coping mechanisms? That's exactly what they're incentivized to do. And that's how they climb up their professional ladder by finding new treatments, new combinations, new practices that take a field officer from six years of field utility to eight years of field utility. They take them from one or two war zone tours to three or five war zone tours, right? If you can prolong the utility of a field operator, you've essentially

increased the productivity of the entire workforce. And it's very clinical, very bureaucratic and very mechanical in that way. And I don't want to comment at all on the role of this organization or the people in it. But in a way, you're putting someone into a pressure cooker that you know eventually they're going to crack. And it's like, how do I keep them there as long as possible, functioning to do the job as well as I can, knowing that I'm just waiting, monitoring them to say,

this eventually is going to be too much. They're going to not be capable of doing it anymore. And I'm just waiting for that. That's kind of, that's an intense... You just described a lot of people's relationship with God, right? that God sets us up, like, I know this is not going to go well on this planet, right? But let's just kind of like see what happens. I mean, this is sort of a microcosm, if you can call it that. It's a macrocosmic microcosm of kind of our existence, meaning like I've seen that Twilight Zone episode, right?

Where it's like you're, you wake up and no one else is there and it's just like you're in this planet of no oneness. It's like, what am I doing here? What's my purpose? What am I? supposed to do. Like, guess what? That's your lot in life. I mean, I don't mean to get all existential, but it's kind of interesting. Well, it's also, it's to a, you're, you're right, Jonathan, and I think what's important is going back to the macrocosmic microcosm that M just talked about. What you see at CIA, what you just laid out at CIA is exactly what happens in the military. Why are there VA benefits? Why is there a veteran status, right? Why are we seeing constant support for homeless veterans and suicidal veterans, et cetera,

because the military has learned over hundreds of years and they learned it from the British before them, right? That you're putting people into a pressure cooker, maximizing their utility, hoping they don't die in combat before they have an ROI on their training costs. And then at the same time, you need a certain number of people to quit

instead of retire because only the people who retire are going to get continuing benefits for the rest of their life. it's a strange one of the things that CIA taught me that I make a mantra right you know every day is that you know the United States runs like a business everything runs like a business it's a cost benefit analysis it's a return on investment versus diminishing returns that's how the world really really works and CIA doesn't work any different than that I want to get into the pulling back the curtain because through your time at CIA you've seen how the U.S. operates, how the world operates from your unique vantage point. And I want to get

into that. Just wrapping up what we were talking about in terms of your field work, how much of field work is neutralizing targets versus collecting information? Versus just hanging out, not looking like yourself and seeing what happens. And when you're hanging out, not looking like yourself, usually you're collecting information. So it's about, I would say, honestly, it's like 98% collecting, 2% neutralizing. Because once you neutralize a target, they're no longer a viable source of information. So you need to string that target along as long as possible, maximize everything you can get from them. And only when the calculation becomes that they are more of a risk than a return, would you consider neutralizing them? Do you have to have sex with them? You can have sex with them.

It's an option, but there's a lot of paperwork involved. And is that the main deterrent? This is the paperwork. That is the main deterrent, to be honest. That is the main deterrent. Just like dating me. Second to that, in the United States, we're really funny about sex. Sex in the United States oftentimes means connection, relationship, obligation, blah, blah, blah, blah. Everywhere else in the world, sex is just sex.

So if you go to bed with a Russian, chances are they're going to be way more in a position of power over you than you are over them the next morning. Wait, wait, sorry, just Russians? Oh, no, I mean, it goes on. Russians are just the primary villain in all the movies, right? Oh, got it. Like, I'm thinking James Bond, right? Correct. Yeah.

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.