EverydaySpy Podcast - Ultimate CIA Survival Guide: DON'T Make These Mistakes!

Episode Date: September 2, 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. Once I realized that we had both made the same mistake, he darted off in one direction, and I felt burned. Burned is the term that we use whenever we are spotted, identified as trained intelligence officers.

But I didn't want to act on being burned right away because our training says that just because you believe something to be true, you can't act on that truth. If you act on that truth, then you're verifying to anybody observing that you already know you screwed up. So I kind of ambled around the arcade and played another couple of games, kind of half-handed, half-hearted, just to kill some time before I left and finished my SDR route, and finished my collection, and went back to my hotel for the night. The whole process that I go through during the surveillance detection route, the whole process that I go through to evacuate the country safely is all part of the details that we put inside Shadow Cell. But the feeling that predominated, that dominated my thought process was just this feeling of failure, this feeling like I was a bad spy. I'm bad at what I do, bad at what I collect. When I think I'm good, I'm not good. It was just this humiliating and humbling experience.

And it wasn't helped as I went through the process of writing the book. Because when you write a book, it's cathartic in a way because it gets all this stuff out. But it's also this black and white kind of stark reminder of all the things that you've done wrong. What did you do wrong? Whatever I did that got caught was wrong. If they caught me on my own behaviors, if the mole was the one that identified me to them, then I lost the ability to operate inside a falcon on that day. I could no longer support the rest of the shadow cell.

I could no longer support my team. I had a role to play, and I couldn't play that. that role anymore. And I think that's especially powerful to me because, I mean, I'm not a case officer. I was supposed to be a case officer. But I'm not because when CIA assessed me for that job, they determined that I wouldn't be good enough. Okay, so you already had an insecurity there. And that was the first year at CIA. So even though I built this career and I had a chance to carry out this operation, I got to do these amazing things, all that plays that in the back of my head, is I wasn't good enough then.

I'm not good enough now. One of the things that the CIA does is they teach you how to deal with head trash. What is head trash? It's funny, actually. So head trash is all the terrible things that you say about yourself in your head. That's the colloquial term that we use is head trash.

I'm not good enough. I'm ugly. I'm fat. I wish my smile was better. You know, I lost my true love when I was 14. Whatever, right? My parents didn't love me because I wasn't a good enough kid.

whatever it was, all those things are head trash. They're subjective thoughts that you have, because of your experience, that don't have any basis and objective reality. CIA teaches us how to deal with that to a point. They teach us how to counter that when we are operationally active so that we don't get distracted by the head trash going on. This is what happened whenever I first knew I was under surveillance. They teach you how to handle stress, mitigate cortisol levels in your bloodstream,

lower your heart rate so that you can get back to the task at hand. How do they do that? Techniques like box breathing. What's that? Box breathing is a process that that's common in anxiety as well. Yeah, breathe in four counts, hold four counts, breathe out four counts, breathe in for, you know, just, it's breathing, there's various breathing techniques where you breathe in for a certain amount of time, you hold it for a certain amount of time, you release it for a certain amount of time. And the goal there is to reduce your heart rate, to reduce your blood flow, to reduce the speed at which the cortisol that's being released from your brain gets spread to the rest of your body.

So you can start to take back your physiological movements and actions in a hope that it also brings back your cognitive functions and capabilities. So the visualization process, just like when you're meditating, and you visualize a victory if you're a professional athlete, if you visualize a beach if you're stressing out at work. You can visualize your way through an operational sequence to get yourself back to a place where you're in control. So they teach us how to deal with that head trash,

but what's really interesting is CIA relies on loyalty in its people to keep them at CIA. Because the worst thing for CIA is for a CIA officer to realize how capable they actually are. Because when that officer realizes how smart, how capable, how resilient, how resourceful, they really are, that person can leave CIA and go do amazing things. So a big part of what CIA does is they train you to be operationally useful, but then they still condition you to be like loyal and needy

of outside validation specifically from them. So it's a very strange flywheel that exists. A lot of businesses are like that as well. It's not a healthy relationship, but it's a very effective relationship. So you get back to your hotel. Are you not at that point when you're back at your hotel thinking, right, I'm going to find like how to get through

the restaurant kitchen door and like out the back and I'll cycle back to a friend. Because I'd be up all night thinking about going through that bloody restaurant kitchen. A big part of that is what you do in the second phase of your SDR. And I had those thoughts. I thought about I could get on a motorcycle, I could ride to a local airfield,

I could pay in cash for that airfield person, like a little private pilot to just fly me on a puddle hopper, a puddle jumper, somewhere where I walk across on foot and then I can make a phone call from another plate. Like I thought about all that shit, right? The problem is, if you actually act on that and you're being watched, what sense does that make? The only person who would do that kind of crazy shit

is somebody who's trying to escape the country. So what did you do? I went back to the hotel. My plan was to literally just leave, was to walk across the border like any other law-abiding citizen and just evacuate. Walk across the border.

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Fly. To leave like anybody else would leave and just gamble that they're not going to take me down. Just gamble that I'm going to be more boring than they will be confident. that before they arrest Alex Hernandez and make some sort of public international incident, they're going to think twice and they're going to let me just leave. What actually happened? So what actually happened is I get back to the hotel. I don't really sleep at all.

I try to use sleep techniques to get me to sleep because I am certain that at any given time, someone's going to burst through the door and just take me down. Because they already know I'm changing my flight. They already know I'm updating my itinerary. I've made all the phone calls. I've worked through my cover company, my cover company, to get me home early.

So I'm just waiting for something to break in. They never break in. I go to the airport the next day. And on the path of the airport, I'm looking for surveillance, and I'm surveillance-free. And I get to the airport first thing in the morning, and I'm waiting.

And every step, I'm waiting for someone to jump out of the dark shadows and take me down and drag me off to prison. And it just doesn't happen. until I get to the first entry point for the airport. I show my passport, I show my ticket, and then they move me into secondary. Secondary meaning where you try to leave a country

and the Border Patrol says that you're not, you can't leave through the main gate. You have to go through a second round of interview. So they pull me off into a secondary room and I go through a light interrogation with two local Falcon officers at like 7 o'clock in the morning, first flight out,

and they're testing my story and they're interrogating me to understand what have I been doing in the country? Why did I change my flight? They're going through my cover story. They're going through my meetings from the day before. They're going through everything two and three times, which is an interrogation technique to see if somebody's lying. And I'm sitting there going through this whole process

watching what almost feels like like two untrained border patrol agents trying to crack me. And it was a funny feeling because they were so bad at their job that it made me feel confident in myself again. Are you trained on how to deal with those situations in terms of body language and how you speak? Absolutely.

CIA trains us on how to deal with interviews, how to deal with interrogations, and even how to deal with actual capture and strategic, almost like enhanced interrogation, like what you would call what we do call torture here in the United States. And so from your training, what were you implementing at that moment in time? Mirroring is a big piece of what you're supposed to do in an interrogation. So, so you want to, you want to reflect back to the interrogator what they expect to see in a person of innocence. So you try to keep your, you keep yourself from jittering, you, you calm your nerves, you try to match their curiosity. So if they lean forward, you actually want to lean forward too. And if they lean back, you want to lean back. And if they lean back,

If they're using their hands to talk, you want to use your hands to talk because you want to show them that you and them are the same, that you're not better or worse or guilty or anything else. So mirroring is one of the techniques that we're using. We also, I also used minimum information. There's a process called elicitation, and you use different elicitation techniques to get individuals to share more information than they're supposed to share. One of those elicitation techniques is silence. So oftentimes, if you want someone to speak, all you have to do is sit there and be quiet because it will force them to talk. This is something that many interviewers use, especially when they're border patrol agents or when they're like law enforcement or local law enforcement, they'll just let somebody

kind of admit their guilt. So for me, they ask a question, I answer their question, and then we sit there in silence for as long as we need to sit there until they ask their next question, and then we sit there and I answer their question, we sit there in silence again. And that's combating elicitation. It's a technique that we call counter elicitation. And that's just one of several elicitation techniques that interviewers can use. And that's useful in everyday life, I guess as well. Absolutely. In what context?

When you're dealing with a negotiation, when you're dealing with a hostile employee, when you're dealing with a hard conversation, when you're trying to find information in another person who you think is holding information back, elicitation techniques are incredibly valuable. You can ask them a question, you can ask them the same question twice that'll help you identify whether or not they're lying if there's a gap in their two answers or if they answer two different ways. And I mean, I'm sure you've seen it as a, you, one of the things that makes you such an effect host in your own house here is that you use elicitation techniques all the time. You ask feeling-based questions. How did you feel about this situation? Take me back to that moment.

If you could be king for a day, what would you do? These are all very advanced elicitation techniques because it gets people to express more than they thought they would share. So you're in that room, in that airport. These two very poorly trained guards are trying to get something out of you. They don't get it out of you. Correct. So at some point they just let you go. Correct. So what ends up happening is they're arguing with each other and I don't know why they're arguing. It seems like from the from the pigeon words that I can pick up, one of them's talking about being busy and not having enough time and this doesn't make sense. And the other person's talking about we have to do this. This is required, et cetera, et cetera. I don't actually know what they're

saying to each other, but I see that their aggression with each other just keeps going up, almost like two colleagues who are fighting, right? But at the end of the day, they couldn't hold me without either releasing me back to my plane or moving me into a place where they were going to retain me long term. So when faced with that kind of decision, they released me back to my plane. And then the biggest stress that I had was not running to my plane because as soon as they let me out of the secondary interview, all I wanted to do was like, haul ass to my plane, get on my playing and feel safe. But I had to continue to show that I was not a trained officer. 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. And at this point, Jehe, are you, how are you feeling back in the friendly country? So at this point, I still have no idea what's happening. By the time I hear from him, he is in the cutout country on his way back. So I know he's left me a voicemail, and I know he's out of Falcon, the enemy country, which is great, but I know he's in that third country. So I'm like, okay, he should be on his way home. But until then, I mean,

all of this that he was going through, I didn't find out until he actually returned home. And then I hear this story. And I'm like, what the hell? Like, this is absolutely like our worst nightmare, like what we did not want to happen. And so immediately we are like, you know, we go into action. Like first, it's like, I'm so happy you're home. And then the next thing is, how did this happen and we just start taking action into, you know, investigating like, did we do something wrong? Like, is there any mistake that we could have made? And we have to research and go back through all of our own stuff. And, you know, and then we have to make the assessment of can Andy ever go back in? You know, was this really what we think it was? Or, you know, is he safe?

Like, is his alias safe, you know? And then we have to make those. And what was your assessment? Did you think he could go back in? No. It was too risky. Yeah, we assess that Alex Hernandez was burned. Was burns, yeah. And we assume... Alex Hernandez being your undercover spy name. Correct. The operating alias that we used.

And we assume that the cutout country, the third country that Alex was traveling through, so anytime Falcon wanted to track Alex, they would track him back to that third country. Alex would even use the Falcon airline to fly back and forth between the third country and Falcons, specifically so that if Falcon Intellectual. ever suspected Alex, they would feel that much more comfortable knowing that they had flight manifests on him going back to a third country. So we just assumed from our study that Alex was fully burned, that the mole had come across either Alex's operational history or the mole had come across my true name operational history and tied me to Alex, whichever one it was, Alex was

burned. But we also assessed that everybody else who had been traveling to Falcon through the cell was still safe. So you assessed that your shadow cell, which was your team in the friendly country were all fine. Yeah. But Alex Hernandez, which was your alias, could no longer be used. Correct. And that was how the cell was built. The cell was built where Alex Hernandez was the tripwire,

where the first person should be compromised would be Alex. And that would be the forewarning to everybody else. So they could start to turn up their operational security. So does that mean it's game over for you? For me, in Falcon, it's game over. I can never go back. I can never go back in my true name. I can never go back in an alias name.

All of my biometrics, meaning my fingerprints, my eyeprints, all of that is most likely compromised. All of Alex Hernandez, everything that I carried on me, all the digital platforms that I carried on me, which were all air-gapped and isolated to just Alex. All of those things we have to assume have been collected and synthesized and reverse-engineered. And you were running a real fake business, right?

Well, yeah. I was a middle manager. I was a middle manager in the very fake business. Oh, you're a middle manager, and that was a business set up by the CIA. Okay. So is that in part why you both decided to leave the CIA? Did the shadow cell operation end at that moment? Shortly after Andy was compromised, we found out that we were pregnant.

And we were hoping to be able to stay on at Wolf to continue because I could have kept doing everything exactly the same. Wolf being the friendly country. Exactly. And being in the friendly country, I could have, you know, done all my targeting from there, no problem. And then we could have, you know, Andy still could have helped. He just couldn't travel into the enemy country anymore. But headquarters decided that we had been so successful and we were continuing to be successful by spreading the cell model to these, to the other locations that they wanted to come home to Washington, D.C., and train officers, train newer officers back at headquarters on how the cell model work. and the new techniques we had come up with. The worst part is we had a conversation about what meant more to us CIA or family. And without saying it, we were both landing on CIA. And we started thinking, how do we not give up CIA to have a family?

So we approach the agency and we tell them that we have this idea. If you'll put us on light duty, just give us some cush job for like four years. We'll pump out our second baby. We'll get our first one old enough to go to school. We'll get our second one old enough for a nanny. And then you can throw us back into the fray. They do that for other officers when they're not successful officers. But when you're a successful officer, they have different plans.

And they try to just push you and push you and push you. So they rejected our offer. And they said, no, it's a soft duty. And they put us back and they told us, you know, gee, he's going to go to this office and do this very sensitive thing. And you're going to go do this other very sensitive thing. and your family is not our problem. And it was at that moment, I think, that we both realized

CIA is never going to let us focus on a family. We're always going to be focused on the mission. That's what their job is. That's their number one purpose, where if our number one purpose is to be parents, we need to make a change. What did the shadow cell accomplish in terms of the information

or strategic objectives that it accomplished? So the shadow cell really did do what we started out, you know, what the mission, really did complete the mission that we started out to do. And that was to find new intelligence sources. And we were really successful in doing that. And it accomplished a secondary goal.

We didn't know the effectiveness that the shadow cell had in ferreting out the mole until after we had left CIA. We found out that the mole that we had been plagued by was actually arrested by FBI in, I think it was 2019. It was later. But the case file that had identified that mole started all the way back with our operations. So it was successful in ferreting out the mole. It was successful in building new intelligence sources inside a Falcon.

It was successful in maintaining the United States' intelligence advantage against this adversary at a time when all of our other operations were compromised by the mole. I think what Ghi is talking about is a completely unexpected benefit in that our model seems to have become the foundation for a massive restructuring at CIA in 2014, just two years after our cell model when I escaped Falcon. Two years after that, John Brennan, then director of CIA, rolled out an entire reorganization of CIA that was based off of the same cell model that we had built. 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.