EverydaySpy Podcast - When Assets Confess: The CIA's Most DANGEROUS Scenario

Episode Date: August 30, 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. Confession is, confession is, again, this makes me sound like just an incredibly horrible person. Confession is the worst of the two options from the point of view of an intelligence officer.

Because if someone confesses, then they're no longer providing access to information. But they're also potentially admitting that you were the one handling them. So now that brings a whole world of pain on you. plus if someone starts to investigate you then how long before they start to take apart the network that supported you in that country or in the field right now all of a sudden there's like secondary and tertiary levels of risk exposure

so confession is our worst case scenario we would rather an asset self-destruct or just go dark go dark meaning they just shut themselves off from the world and I mean it's still scary if they shut themselves off from the world because you don't know who they're telling what to but we can control suicide. The blowback from suicide,

we can't really control the blowback from somebody who confesses. Do agents, and I don't know if this is something that you can talk about, but when that happens, like, the person goes dark, do agents like get me out of here? Like, is it extraction time? Usually it's extraction time

is what we would call a non-emergency extraction. An emergency extraction is like, no shit. Black airplanes are going into the sky with boxes, that have oxygen tanks and you're like getting extracted, right? That's, we think that your threat to life or threat to survival is imminent. So we need you out ASAP, right? We don't have time to tell borders and custom that you're going to be leaving.

We don't have time to tell anybody. We're just getting you out. That's an emergency ex-filteration. When we have a non-emergency evacuation or a non-emergency exfiltration, then you can usually, you can go through the established lines. it's a race against the clock because the question becomes can you get across the border

faster than the person who went dark can turn themselves in, submit your name, and the bureaucracy of the local police force can get your name to the border crossing agents, right? And sometimes, I mean, if someone goes dark, if someone goes dark and you've, in 12 hours or less,

you can get yourself across the border, you're safe, right? Sometimes it can be three days, sometimes it can be two weeks. And sometimes you're, you're on a mission that's so sensitive that it's actually better to wait until you see signs that people are coming for you and then trigger the emergency expil. Whoa. Right?

So how, so let's say that moment happens. Do you have like booby traps or something that you sat on the door? I mean, this is like straight up movie stuff. Are you like paper in the door and if it falls out, you know somebody's been in? Like what signs do you look for that somebody's coming after you? Yeah. So I'm going to stick to the unclassified version. Of course.

So generally speaking, when you think that you're under scrutiny, what we call scrutiny or advanced scrutiny, you are looking first for some sort of active surveillance because the dude who lingers too long outside your apartment. If they're what we would call a bumbling surveillance, then yes. And bumbling surveillance exists, right? There's different levels of surveillance.

So let's reverse engineer. You've got an asset. The asset knows that you are getting their secrets. Asset turns you in. Well, now the question for the local police force or the local intelligence service is, do we wrap up the person that we know is collecting secrets? Or do we observe the person who's collecting secrets to see who else are they collecting secrets from? And who else are they meeting with to report their secrets too?

Because now you have the opportunity to unfold an entire network. It's a very similar problem to what the police have. Do you take out one drug dealer? Or do you follow the drug dealer to find, you know, the larger kingpin? So the first thing that we do when we suspect that we might be under scrutiny is amp up our situational awareness to observe whether or not we think we're being observed. So, yes, bumbling surveillance would be a potential that you're being observed. Usually bumbling surveillance exists naturally. Like there are countries where you just being a tall, wealthy white guy, as soon as you walk in a,

that country. There's going to be some bumbling person who's always like 17 feet behind you with a newspaper walking around, just keeping an eye on you. Right? For any number of reasons. We would expect to see more refined, sophisticated surveillance. So we would look for a team.

We're trained to see teams of surveillance, foot surveillance, vehicle surveillance. We're trained to know when and how to look for closed television, close circuit TV and or aerial drones. We know when we can spot them at the right time to confirm if they're after us. Right?

And if we see sophisticated surveillance, then we can trigger the next step. So that's one way that we would go about doing it. The other thing we would look for is electronic signatures that were being electronically surveilled. There are certain signatures. There are certain behaviors that you can look for in your cell phone, in your computer, in your laptop, in your smart TV, you know, on your smart devices. There's certain things that you can keep an eye out for that demonstrate that you might

be tapped or you might be under any of those unclassified that you can tell me about um i'm pretty sure that it's unclassified to talk about um gaps like delays if you start to see performance delays in a device that is performing normally that's a good sign that it's being it's got an additional drag on its internal CPU or its internal memory i'm going to be so paranoid now so if your smart watch is always working, and then all of a sudden your smart watch has this delay. It's not catching the right time. It's not connecting to the Wi-Fi. It's got some kind of gap, some sort of digital gap, right? That's usually a sign that something in the internal unit is draining it of its processing power. When a hack happens, when an information or a data hack happens, they're not usually very clean

and they're not efficient. So they are very energy intensive. So for your watch or for your phone for your smart TV to be sending your signal out to another location all the time, right, is going to constantly fill up. It's going to take all the demand on your RAM that's being carried in your smart device. So when you see that, it's an indicator. Does that mean you run and hide?

Not necessarily, it's just an indicator. Oftentimes we find indicators as very comfortable things because if there's an indicator that we're being surveilled, then that means it's not an indicator that as soon as we step outside, we're going to get wrapped up into a van. Now we have time. We have time to get off the X

as long as we don't fucking melt down. Right. Right. So, and that's the big thing too. When you see surveillance on your smart watch or surveillance on your smartphone, your TV starts to, your smart TV starts to jigger.

And then you also see surveillance on the street. Guess what every fiber in your body wants you to do. Run. Run and hit that self-destruct button, right? Just run. I'm out of here as fast as I can. maybe if I get on a tuk-tuk and it takes me to a local airport and I pay some local pilot $300 US dollars, he'll just fly me to Cambodia.

Maybe. No, it's not going to work that way. You're going to get intercepted 15 minutes after you start the run. Like the way the human brain can rationalize through a dangerous situation and come to the wrong conclusion, it's incredible. What tools do you use to keep control of your mind? I can't fathom being a spy and having to manage. my anxiety like that'd be nuts no way I would not excel at this so I mean anxiety is a

challenge anxiety is a challenge but I will also tell you that CIA recruits heavily for people that have anxiety for people that have people that have so what what are some of the superpowers about having anxiety you're paranoid all the time yeah huge advantage damn I worry that I would give myself away so here's what the other nice thing about people with anxiety is that they have a very real idea of where their true limits are. Because their true limits are tied oftentimes to their level of comfort. So you're like, I would never do these things. You can fathom espionage because we've been talking this whole time and you clearly have a very

strong line of sight into how it works. Right? It's just psychology. You said it yourself. So absolutely you can fathom it. So it's really just a question of whether or not you have the competency and the skills to execute it. Today you might not. Well, guess what?

we spend three, four, five weeks together, even doing just superficial training, and all of a sudden you're going to be like, I think I could do this. Like, I've got anxiety, but I think I could do this. My wife has deployed all over the world. She is general anxiety disorder, what's it called, when you're diagnosed,

and she has been medicated for her own anxiety disorders. She's operated all over the world, right? Because she learned the skills. Another lesson that I think is really important that the agency gives us. Yeah. And I apologize if I'm stepping on your toes in any way here. No, step away.

People sell confidence, right? There's books out there about how to be confident. There's fucking TED talks about, all you got to do is stand like this and you're going to be confident, right? Confidence is a perception, not a real thing. Confidence is how you perceive your own emotional reaction or your own emotional relationship with the environment around you. Confidence doesn't exist.

It can't be measured. It can't be improved or, or, or ridiculous. Confidence is a non sequitur. It's an empty word. What we mean when we say confidence is competence. We want competence in what we're doing because the more competent you are, the more comfortable you are executing, right? The more comfortable you are executing, the more comfortable you are taking risks, which

is when you take a risk, it's called courage, right? So there's this relationship between confidence, competence, encourage that we just because of all the unethical business owners out there, they just summarize it all as confidence and they try to sell you some course that tells it if you look in yourself, look at yourself in the mirror and say, you know, you're worth it, you're worth it, you deserve to succeed. Somehow you're going to have more confidence. Or if you stand like this, you're going to have more confidence. Confidence is tied directly to competence. If you increase your knowledge in something, you increase your competence, you are able to give your rational logic side of your brain, the left

side of your brain, you're able to give it more accurate information from which it can use to process a probability matrix of your successful outcome, right? It's all about making good decisions. Another bill you quote, right? It's all about making good decisions. You make good decisions when you have superior information. You have superior information when you have superior competence. The more competent you are in a skill, the more courageous you are to take risks revolving around that skill. That's all there is to it. So, CIA can take anybody off the street, anybody, teach them the competence, increase their competence in the right skills, and then deploy them to execute an operation.

They have to be able to do that because the diversity of the targets that you need to talk to are as diverse as the gene pool in the United States. Sometimes you need somebody who is on the spectrum. Sometimes you need somebody who's on the non-neurotypical person to go out there and execute an operation So you have to be able to teach them the competent skills to go do it sometimes you need somebody who's Handicapped sometimes you need somebody who's obese sometimes you need somebody who's old Sometimes you need somebody who's like surprisingly young you need all sorts of people because the The individual who executes the operation is tailored to fit the operation because they need

need to get through the public life and the private life into the secret life as quickly as possible. Do you know what Stuxnet is? Yeah. Okay. So give people a quick primer in the context of that was the moment that I realized, oh, there's a whole world happening that I just didn't realize was real. I thought it was only in movies, but like this whole espionage game is deep.

It's deep. Yeah. So, and I would love to go more into that too. But so Stuxnet, quick primer, Stuxnet was a piece of code that was developed specifically to interact with what we knew at the time to be the software system running Iranian uranium enrichment facilities. Yeah, there was a very specific tool. It was reactor? No. Oh, it's going to come back to me here.

the what is it when something the centerfuge the centerfuge word that's the word I just won whatever game we're playing so Stuxnet was a piece of code that was designed specifically to interact with the centerfuge that was used to enrich uranium and Iranian facilities that's what it was designed to do it was deployed it was successful and then the Iranian facility connected those centrifuges with the larger internet And when that happens, Stuxnet carried out, continued to propagate out of the Iranian facility and into the entire digital universe. So depending on whose story you read, right now, essentially every digital device that's been connected to the internet at any point since like 2007 is infected with Stuxnet. That's crazy.

But Stuxnet was so well designed that it only has a negative effect on. the centrifuge operating system that was used by the Iranian nuclear facility at the time. So bananas. Okay, so how deep does a rabbit hole go? Like, there's like a whole battle being fought. Ray Dalio talks about the five types of war. One of them is technological.

How deep is that war? The espionage war or the technological war? The espionage war. So let's start with the espionage war because this is a point that I love making that not everybody understands. stands, right? 2016, the election where Trump became president,

it became mainstream news that the Russians were suspected to be interfering with the election. And the world went crazy, right? The American people went bananas. FBI, Secret Service, Facebook had to change their algorithms. Twitter was on the chopping block for contributing to Russian covert influence operations, right? You remember.

Oh, yes. Why the hell do we think 2016 was the first time that happened? Why would we think that? Because we caught them in 2016? I mean, if we caught them in 2016, how many elections did they influence successfully before that where we never caught them?

And that's just one country. What about China? What about France? What about Israel? What about Germany? What? What about Brazil? What about India?

I mean, there's as many countries out there. There's 160, what, 64, I think countries right now. Every one of them has something to gain by influencing the outcome of the American election. Why would we think that nothing ever happened prior to 2016? Why would we think that the presidents we've elected, even in just yours and mine timeline? Why do we think Bush was chosen by the American people? Why do we think Obama was chosen by the American people? Why do we think these people came to power of their own independent, uninfluenced, no foreign activity, hard work?

It's probability-wise. It's extremely unprobable. Like, it's improbable that these people came to power. And there wasn't also some country engaging in covert influence that was contributing to the outcome of the election. Jesus. That's how deep it goes. It's silly for us to think that just because we see. see it, that means that it started then. It's like seeing a roach in your apartment, right? If you see

a roach in your apartment, that's not the only roach. The walls are disgusting with roaches, right? We saw it in 2016. That means it's been there for a long, long time. Why do we think George Washington became the first president of the United States? Because he earned it and the American people voted for him? France was the reason we won the American Revolution. You don't think that had something to do with, you don't think France had a say and who became the leader of the new United States? Now, I'm not saying that all of our presidents have been given to us by foreign powers. That's not what I'm saying.

But what I am. It's a part of the equation. It's a part of the equation. And you can't ignore that part of the equation, right? So now we have our entire political system is constantly in some embroiled in some sort of battle with espionage. And that's just our political system. Our DOD, I don't know how much you keep up with.

espionage news. Russia has penetrated the Army's medical corps. Two army officers were arrested just three months ago. Whoa. Recruited spies, recruited by the Russians.

Yeah. We had nuclear naval engineers recruited by the Chinese who have also been arrested in the last three to four months. I heard about that one. Like we are heavily penetrated, heavily targeted,

heavily penetrated by all the services in the world. And there's a famous quote out there in the world of foreign policy that says there are no permanent friends or enemies, just permanent interests. Whoa, that's good. So why do we think anybody is a friend?

Why do we think an ally is a friend? If you recall, there was a major issue. I think it was 2010, maybe 2011, where the German chancellor was notified that the American NSA was spying on the Germans. we have had people go to jail from our Navy who were recruited and working as spies for the Israelis. What? Like this history tells you the story.

It's just that nobody really spends time researching espionage history. So we have to understand how laughably predictable are human beings. We are so laughably predictable that we, you and I can predict that people aren't even aware that arrest are happening every few months of spies in the United States, in the military, in politics, right? In the Department of State, in the Department of Commerce, in the White House, like, it's not surprising unless you let yourself be surprised, which, again, that's a predictable human thing to just, if we don't know about it, then it must not exist.

And then it's also predictably human to assume that a, of, you know, that a person, you know, A friend is a friend. There are no permanent friends, right? There are people from my life 13 to 25 that are not my friend anymore because our interests diverged. And that's normal and that's natural. And it's also normal and natural to feel pain when it comes, when you outgrow somebody or when you have to leave somebody behind because your interests have diverged.

And the saddest thing to me is the people who, when they feel that pain, when they feel that dissonance of leaving behind something from the past, they instead choose to give up on the ambition and double down on the anchor. 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.