EverydaySpy Podcast - The CIA Secret to More Opportunity

Episode Date: August 3, 2021

CIA operations work a lot like your everyday job. You can spend a lot of time plotting, planning, and waiting like everyone else... or you can do something different. In this episode, Andrew tells you a story about one of his current undercover CIA colleagues and how he plans to short-cut success the day he leaves CIA. If you are looking for the ultimate CIA cheat-code to success... you just found it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is everyday espionage. I recently got a call from a friend of mine who was in his final days undercover with CIA. It was an awesome phone call because he was going through all the same mental and emotional processing that I went through and the Ghi went through when the two of us chose to leave CIA. Also, it's a common experience for anyone who chooses mid-career to leave CIA. It's a completely different response, a different reaction, a different level of risk taking than those officers who are retiring after 25 or 30 years with CIA because we're leaving in our youth. We're leaving in our prime.

And more importantly, we don't have a career's worth of networking throughout federal government and contracting to lean on to help us after we leave the agency. Now, when I talked to my buddy, he was in terms. transition planning the final days at the agency, but also planning for a big move away from the Washington, D.C. metro area. So not only was his career changing, not only was his lifestyle changing, but he was also physically changing his location. And he was getting ready to start up a new business, which is something so many of us do when we leave. We go into corporate security, corporate due diligence. Some of us keep our kind of cover identity, and we don't ever admit

our CIA affiliation, others of us kind of wear our CIA affiliation with pride and move forward and are very open about it. But here's the thing that got tricky for him. And this is why I think it's so important to talk about my conversation with him today with you. CIA, since I left in 2014, has been going through a revolutionary high level of attrition. Attrition is a fancy way of saying people are quitting, people are leaving, people are terminating, self-terminating themselves out of CIA because they've had enough. They don't want to be there. They don't want to work there. There's something about the federal intelligence life that they no longer want to invest their career and their well-being in service to CIA. Now for me, when Ji and I left in 2014,

Like, we were one of the first to ever make that decision. We were shamed. We were guilted. Nobody understood after the shame and the guilting didn't work. Then people started talking to us trying to kind of partially bully us and then partially bribe us into staying. But it was the right decision for us for family reasons to leave CIA and do something on the outside.

So when we left, there was still a working system where our cover could get rolled back. Our operational history could be reviewed. and we could start this very productive, long-term partnership or long-term secrecy adherent relationship with CIA, where we were officially recognized and outed as CIA, but we still maintained the secrets of what we had done in our operational past. Now, since 2014, the attrition rate has more than doubled, which means that for every two people that used to quit, there are now four or five people quitting. The estimates from what I'm understanding right now today are that CIA is losing one undercover officer a day.

That's the rate of attrition. That's massive considering it used to be that they would lose less than three undercover officers every month. And the majority of those undercover officers were actually retiring and then coming back the next day as intelligence consultants. So now with that massive increase in attrition, CIA is seeing some of their youngest, most talent, Most hungry officers leave mid-career before they ever get a chance to really contribute at their maximum potential to the U.S. intelligence infrastructure. And with that massive increase in volume of young people leaving, it also means that the system that CIA had in place to review covers, to roll back covers, to acknowledge people who had

served with CIA in a undercover role, that system and process has been. broken down. So in the last few years, I've met at least a half dozen former CIA officers who still can't formally tell anyone that they are from CIA. The only reason I know of their true affiliation is because a friend of a friend or a contact of a contact or some previous operation where we work together, I was aware of their true affiliation. They can't simply go to an employer. They can't simply go find a business contact, shake hands and say, hey, I'm so-and-so, I'm from CIA. That was the case with my buddy who I just spoke to this week. He not only cannot disclose his true affiliation, but he's probably three to four years away

from the day that CIA is able to scrub his operational background and confirm to him what he can and cannot say about his own operational background. For me and Jihe, that process took about nine months back in 2014. Now people are saying there's over a two-year wait on a process that was already reserved to take two years. So why am I telling you this? I'm not telling you this because I want you to sympathize or pity or I'm not trying to talk you out of joining an organization like CIA or FBI or Secret Service. It's got nothing to do with that. The reason I'm talking about this is because in that conversation with my ex-CIA peer, he was feeling the pressure of transitioning into a non-intelligence career when nobody even knew what he had actually done for the last 10 years,

because he couldn't talk about it. So he's making this transition without being able to disclose his true talents, his true skills, his true potential. And that's a very real, very difficult situation for anyone transitioning out of the IC and into the corporate commercial or business world. So he was asking me how I did it. And he was asking me what it was that I did to make everyday spy and everyday espionage such a success. Because from his point of view inside CIA and from the peer group inside CIA that watches me from within, they look at me and they see. I am one example of a former CIA officer who claims my overt CIA relationship. and continues to do productive, positive work on the outside.

Now, I told him, just like I tell you, that advice is worthless, right? There's feedback and there's advice. And advice is just people talking about whatever they think is right, whatever they think is helpful. And that's really not actually helpful. And that is most definitely not right. So I corrected him right out of the gates, and I told him I didn't want to give him any advice. But I did want to give him what I have viewed as feedback of my own. performance. And I want to share that with you. That's the purpose behind the entire story.

Because what I have learned since leaving CIA is going to benefit not just my peer, who I spoke to on the phone, but you, when you listen to me today and every former intelligence officer that comes into contact with my buddy, with me, or with this podcast. And here's the powerful piece of feedback that I learned. You have to do something predileged. every single day if you ever want to change the course of your own future. Now that might sound silly. That might sound anticlimactic. That might sound overly simple.

But here's the true crux of it. When we're at CIA, we spend days, sometimes weeks, not producing anything. We plan, we scheme, we wait. For other people to build alias documentation or schedule our travel or produce a custom weapon, we'll spend weeks in this waiting pattern waiting for something to happen instead of producing something every single day. Now, the big production thing that every CIA officer is kind of expected to produce is really a report.

Sometimes that report is an intelligence report. Sometimes it's a contact report or an operational report. it's different types of written content. And as you professionalize as an intelligence officer, you start to see the benefit of just creating that one written report as often as you can. My career as an intelligence officer completely transformed when I started creating one report every single day. Again, that sounds super simple.

It sounds almost comical. But right now, the thousands of undercover officers who are out there are not producing one report a day. Many of them produce one report every three to four days or less because they're in that pattern of waiting, anticipating, planning instead of producing. So when I knew my buddy was getting out of CIA and I knew he was going to come into the corporate world, I wanted to make sure I encouraged in him the understanding that the same rule that led to my success at CIA led to my success on the outside to produce. something, something tangible, something recordable, something physical every single day.

Because what happens is as you produce each day, something unique, something interesting, something different, something productive, you start to build this record of prodigious content. You start to be a prolific creator and that tale of documentation, that tale, that tale of available content, that tale of historical production becomes a tail that drags through the wake behind you, almost like a fisherman who's dragging a net behind them. They may not catch many fish if they put one line in the water and drag one line. But when they throw a whole net and drag a whole net, they catch all sorts of fish. And that's exactly how it worked at CIA. And that's exactly how it's worked for me since leaving CIA. So I wanted to make a whole net. So I wanted to

make sure he knew to become a prolific professional. Create new business development plans. Send emails to new contacts. Make daily contact with some of your best, most promising clients. Create social media content. Create free content that educates and empowers and motivates and inspires people. Whatever you do, put something out that's meaningful, that's productive every single day. You're building this big net when you do so, this net of prolific creation, and all that net is going to do is catch these awesome opportunities. Because of the net that I've created with Everyday Spy since 2018, I've had awesome opportunities in film, in television, in the U.S. abroad, in U.S. DoD contracts, and foreign military contracts. It's been this awesome ride, and every day, more opportunity presents itself.

That's just me and my own business. Prior to starting everyday spy when I left CIA and started in the corporate world, I did the same thing. I was a program manager and a Fortune 100 company and all I did was produce something tangible, something demonstrable every single day, whether it was a visible product, a visible project plan or some kind of analysis, some kind of report, some kind of proposal. and that put me and it put my production level in front of my supervisor and my boss's boss every single day. It didn't take me long to produce something. A single email might take you seven to ten minutes to produce at work,

especially after you edit it and proofread it before you send it, because you should. If you're creating something like a proposal, three or four paragraphs is all it takes to make an informal entry-level proposal. And what happens is the person who receives that proposal from you, they don't look at it as three paragraphs. What they look at it as is initiative and innovation and courage and investment in the company. So the audience who receives whatever prolific product you're creating interprets it completely different than you as the creator. And that's what I wanted my friend to know as he left CIA and made his own start in commercial business. The client,

the customer, the target, the target. that person will always interpret what you create differently than how you interpret it when you create it. Here's a fact that might surprise you or it might not. I really only like about half of the podcast episodes that I have created. So as of today, I'm pretty sure this puts me at about 79 episodes, which means that less than 40 of all the episodes I've created have actually been episodes I am very, like, fond of. Oftentimes I talk about things and as I turn off the microphone at the end, I think to myself,

oh, I should have said something differently or I should have said something more, or maybe I should have edited this out, or maybe I should re-record that. But the truth is, you interpret it completely different than me. Maybe you sit there disappointed, or maybe you sit there inspired, but I don't know how often you ever sit there and think to yourself, you know what, Andy should have stopped there, cut that part out, re-recorded some other part. He left this question unanswered. He went too deep into that topic. I don't know, but my guess is that you don't do that. My guess is that you listen, you consume, you learn, you enjoy, and then you move on with your life. That's the relationship from your point of view. And you're the only one that matters in the relationship that you have

with me. Because if I'm not feeding you new information, interesting stories, if I'm not giving you something that helps you or moves you forward every day, you're going to stop listening. That's your right. And you not listening is the feedback that tells me whether I'm doing something right or wrong. That's the relationship that leads to success. Once you understand that your success lies when you produce prolifically, produce something written, something verbal, something recorded, some video, some audio file, produce something that you put on social media, produce an email,

that goes in front of your boss. Produce a new proposal that goes in front of an existing client. Produce something that creates new clients. Make a phone call. Send a letter. Anything that you might be able to do to put a mark on the ground today that you were here, that you did something, that you built something today that didn't exist yesterday, every time you do that, you move your operation forward.

And every day that you just sit back and wait, your operation loses a day of potential momentum. Once you understand how to apply momentum by being prolifically productive, by being a professional, prolific producer, once you know how to move yourself, your career, your future, your success forward, by putting a mark in the sand every day that you were here, that is one day closer to being a full-fledged operator. And 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