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When this story hits the airwaves, it's going to transform people's opinion about the CIA and the depths to which
00:00:05
CIA will dive to collect intelligence that protects Americans. But one of its own officers became a spy reporting our
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secrets to a foreign adversary. My wife and I were included in an operation to bait the mole to make a mistake so that
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the mole could be found and disclosed. Your wife is here today and you've never told this story before, have you?
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No. And your curiosity right now is a major issue with CIA because they don't want the world to know who those people are. It's a dangerous game. Well, obviously my research team tried to figure out who it was.
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So, was this the mob? Married CIA spies Andrew and Jihi Bamante were tasked with unraveling one of the greatest intelligence operations in modern history. Their untold story
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shows you how to build trust, manipulate, and thrive under pressure. What actually happened? A foreign ally contacted CIA and said,
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"You have somebody inside your organization sharing information on operations, officers, assets to an enemy
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country." They deployed us to the country and crafted new identities, new aliases so that we could build new
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sources of intelligence and try to find the mole. And we were really successful in doing that. Nobody felt like they were in imminent
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danger. But then that changed. My presence in the enemy country became known. I called G and said, "I'm coming
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home early." And from that, I knew that something was wrong because it is very real that you
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can be disappeared by a foreign adversary. Or worse, being captured and the president can plausibly deny that you're
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CIA. So, I had to try to escape this country. But everything went wrong. And what happens next? A horrible story.
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So, [Music] this is the first time I'm setting you at home a challenge when you listen to
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this episode. Can you figure out which country Andrew and Jihi were undercover in as spies from what they say? But also, our team here have figured out
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that the mole in the CIA was one of these three people. Can you figure out from what they say which person was the mole? It might make sense for you at
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this moment to screenshot these three faces and the details below so you can remember their profiles. And by the end
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of the conversation, I want you to comment below which country you thought Andrew was undercovering as a spy and
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which one of these people was the mole within the CIA. Let's do this. Listen to my regular listeners. I know you don't like it when I ask you to subscribe at the start of these conversations. I don't like saying I don't like it being
00:02:36
in there. None of us like it. It's frustrating. Do you know what's also frustrating? It's also frustrating when
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I go into the back end of a YouTube channel and I see that 56% of you that listen frequently to this podcast
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haven't yet subscribed and so many of you don't even know that you haven't subscribed because I see in the comment section you say to me, you go, I didn't
00:02:52
even realize I didn't subscribe and that actually fuels the show. It's basically like you're making a donation to the show. So that's why I ask all the time
00:02:58
because it enables us to build and build and build and build and we're going for the long term here. So all I'd ask you
00:03:03
is if you've seen this show before and you like it, help me help my team here. Hit the subscribe button and we'll
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continue to build this show for you. That's my promise. Thank you to all of you guys that do subscribe. Means the world to me. Let's get on with the show.
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[Music] Andrew, you've never told this story before, have you? No, I have never told the story of my own operational background. It's been uh
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it's been something that CI has forbidden for a long time. And what's written in this book has
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taken you a long time to get approved by the CIA. Correct. So, uh, all CIA officers sign a
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lifetime secrecy agreement. And that secrecy agreement, uh, gives CIA the right to to approve or disapprove any
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operational elements of our background that are still classified and that fit under this very kind of narrow rubric of sources and methods. Sources and methods of active intelligence collection.
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because of my time at CIA, my work at CIA, and the sensitivity of that work, I just kind of assumed I would never be
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able to talk about it. And then all that changed with the first Trump administration. What was the CIA's response when you
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said that you wanted to talk about what you're going to talk about today? Well, that's what's interesting. They had two different responses. When I
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first submitted the request in 2019 to CIA to write about my operational background, we went through kind of some normal bureaucratic back and forth and they ultimately said yes, you can write
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about it in in detail. And then in 2021 when we submitted the manuscript and it was complete, the world started to change. In 2022, uh, multiple major
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issues, uh, erupted between major adversaries of the United States and CIA came back and and removed their previous
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permission. Uh, they basically said that in light of current geopolitics, everything in the book was now
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reclassified. How did you get the CIA to change their mind so that you could release this book and talk about what you're going to talk
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about today? We engaged with an attorney, one of the top attorneys in the space of classified information and publishing information.
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So the attorney believed that because of the effort that my wife and I had put into the book, CIA would back off. And
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ultimately that is what they did. When we threatened them with a First Amendment lawsuit, they came back and said, "We don't want to go down that
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road. We think we can collaborate on this. We'll approve your book uh and you can move forward."
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Why do you think they didn't want you to publish this book and this story to get out? When this story hits the airwaves, it's
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going to transform people's opinion about CIA in two big ways. First, they'll understand that CIA is not what
00:05:36
the movies portray it to be. It's not superhuman spies who go out there like James Bond or Jason Bourne who are one man against the world. That's not how espionage works. Espionage is a team
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sport. You have wins, you have losses. The second thing is they'll actually they'll start to understand the depth to
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which CIA will dive to collect intelligence that protects Americans. Inside this book, we talk about a mole
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that actually penetrated CIA that CIA has never acknowledged. Inside this book, we talk about new tactics that CIA
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learned from terrorism and then used against our own most strategic adversaries. I don't think people
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recognize that CIA is morally ambivalent to how it executes espionage operations.
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The goal is to keep Americans safe. When you say in this book you disclose that there was a mole within the CIA, what does that mean for someone that doesn't know what a mole in the CIA is?
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One of the worst things that can happen to an intelligence service is that one of its own officers
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becomes a spy for a foreign adversary. That is what I'm referring to when I talk about a mole. And you were involved in that operation to find the mole within the CIA.
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Correct. More specifically, my wife and I were included in in an operation to kind of f it out the mole to bait and and tempt the mole to make a mistake so
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that the mole could be found and disclosed. And your wife is here today, correct? And we're going to bring her in and talk
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to her as well. But for the for anyone that doesn't know your backstory, which would be pretty remarkable seeing as you've been on this channel now a few
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times. Um, could you give me a whistle stop tour of your professional background up until the point that you
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met Jihi? Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm from a rural place in Pennsylvania. Uh was like the
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only brown kid in a white high school, but I ended up going to an air a military academy. I went to the Air Force Academy. And from the Air Force
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Academy, I go into the Air Force. The Air Force teaches me how to fly. They teach me a foreign language. And then
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they teach me about nuclear weapons and nuclear missiles. And I serve as a nuclear missile officer in the Air Force. So, CIA picked me up. Uh and in
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my first my first day on the job in CIA, that's the day that I met my wife. Um she was sitting in the back of the
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classroom. I of course worked my way to the front of the classroom and uh and from there our training just kind of
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overlapped and we we became close. Well, Ji is here so I'd like to hear her version of events.
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Was there any inconsistency in the story he told? What was your perspective? There's always another perspective. And are you
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allowed to date in the CIA? Oh, yeah. It's encouraged. Um because it's really hard when you're keeping so many secrets to date somebody outside of
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the CIA and not be able to tell that because we had friends who did that who did that. You have to keep your whole life secret. So you're lying to them
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about where you're going and what you do dayto day dayto day every single day. So you're building a relationship
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and lying all the time and it's really difficult. So, if you date within the CIA, you know, if you're in different
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divisions or whatever, like maybe you can't talk about everything in detail, but you at least know what's going on.
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You know why somebody's going TDY or where they're going for a training um session or we can explain to each other like, "Hey,
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I'm going to go work with the Spanish. I'm going to go work with the with the Canadians." Mhm. But when you're dating somebody on the
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outside, you can't say those things. So, it becomes, "I'm going on a business meeting. I'm going on a trip." crazy.
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And we've had many friends who have had relationships explode or melt down because the the partner starts to
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ask very logical questions. We had one good friend of ours who was an outsider who was dating one of our good friends
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who was an insider and she pulled me aside one day and she was like, you know, he goes on all these
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business trips but he never takes any suits. She's like, I think he's cheating on me. And I was like, "No, he's
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actually going to a tactical training course where you don't need to wear anything except BDUs, but I can see your
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concerns." So, you have to walk your like there's a lot of walking people off a cliff because they start to come to
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the wrong conclusion about what their actual uh partner is doing. Chihi, what's your journey into the CIA?
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Mine was kind of an unexpected journey because I went into social work working with um survivors of torture from other
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countries, with refugees, with asyles. But before I got that job, I'd actually I'd spent my entire last year of grad school going to job fairs. And I wanted what I really wanted was to work for the
00:10:02
federal government for like the larger mission for the United States, for like the people of the United States. But
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then nobody was calling me back. And I was like, okay. I was like, I'll just submit an application, like an online application to CIA, which I thought was
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funny. And then a few months later, I got a call back. She was like, come to the information session. So, I went in
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like a random hotel with these like nondescript signs outside and you walk in and you're like, I don't know if I'm
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in the in the right place. And then they close the door and they're like, welcome to the CIA recruiting session. And
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you're like, this is so bizarre. And um do they tell you what your role is? Cuz I know there's several different roles
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in in the CIA. Mhm. Targeters began uh during the war on terror. And because what they initially did was target individuals for capture or kill for the military.
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Okay. So what what does that mean? They targeted people for capture or kill for the military. So you would
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find the person to capture or kill. Yes. In a foreign country. Yes. And so because you know everybody
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else is doing their job of you know logistics or weapons or fighting or strategy. So the targeted position was really important because it takes time
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to to go through all this data to piece together this puzzle of who is important, who is important to capture, who's important to kill, and how do you get to them? The how do you get to them
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is the piece that like everybody else wants to know, but they don't really have time to do that and their other
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job. So they carved out this targeter role. So one person can do all this research and identify and the you know
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terrorists were really fascinating because they had how their organizations were structured and so you really needed
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somebody who could look I mean it's like u like targeting the mafia right like everybody has a role like there's a big organization everybody has a role it is
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in your favor if you're t if you're going after them to find out who who's who connected to who how Can you get to different people? Cuz you're never going to be able to just get the top person
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right away. So, how do you get there? Right. And you became a targeter. Yes. So, your job was to figure out who to capture and kill or capture or or
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And what was your role in the CIA? How was your role different? Can you explain it for a layman? Yeah. So, where Ji was trying to find
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the individuals that were of interest, my job was to learn what to do after a target identified those individuals. How do you actually meet the person? How do you befriend the person? How do you win their trust? How do you collect their
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secrets? What's known as a a field officer, an operations officer, a case officer? Those are the different
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terminologies that we use internally. But you essentially have every case is kind of handed over from person to
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person. So raw information, sometimes open source information is handed to a targeter who creates a profile, a dossier, a targeting package who hands it to an operations officer who goes out
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and actually makes that first contact. And then when first contact is made, we pass all the information back and it
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goes back to all the same people to build the next package for the next target. So jihei would identify the individual
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and then your job was to fly overseas, go undercover and make first contact with that individual to extract intelligence from them. And not at first by the time that CIA
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started utilizing us as a tandem couple. A tandem couple is a term that means a married, truly married, CIA trained
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couple. When we started becoming a tandem couple, that's how we were a one-two punch for operations. Prior to
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that, we were in separate offices in separate divisions doing separate work. So, we got along uh and we were
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complimentary because I understood the challenges of her job and she understood the challenges of my job, which made both of us better working with our
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counterparts in our different offices. So, where where does the story begin? Andy, you know, you you wrote this book to tell a story. So, I'm asking you the
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question. Usually, I' I'd hazard a guess where to start, but where does this story begin? From my perspective, the
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story really starts on uh on I think it was a winter day when we were both called in to a counter intelligence office that was a massive oak table. It
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was a it was a senior executive leadership type of room. But there were only three people there.
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It was she, it was me, and it was the leader of what's known as Falcon House, which is this group of specialists
00:14:33
inside of CIA focused on one particular adversary, an adversary that we've had to codeename Falcon to maintain
00:14:40
confidentiality with CIA. And so Falcon is a country basically. Falcon is a country. Correct. And that
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leader revealed to us that they believed there was a penetration, a mole that was
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inside of Falcon House, inside of CIA, and that they needed us to agree to do an operation so that the mole will make a mistake here. Cuz if the mole makes a mistake here, we'll find him. But we
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can't have you be here cuz if you're here, the mole will find you. And then we don't know what happens if the mole finds you. So, we're going to send you
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across the world to go work in this other country, Falcon being the country, while we here as the experts in Washington DC try to find the mole. And that was privileged information that
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neither of us as junior officers ever thought we would hear. And I think that I know for me I was kind of giddy with
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excitement and gi was a little bit more apprehensive with this can't be real. But that was for me that's where the
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story starts is when these two people her and with her anxiety disorder and and me with my kind of lackluster CIA
00:15:44
career when we got pulled into this office that was clearly outside of our league and invited to do this operation um without that first meeting Shadow
00:15:56
Cell would have never happened. So from that moment onwards, how long was it before you flew to the foreign country
00:16:03
in question? And what was your objective when you got to that foreign for foreign country? So
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I guess it's like a subobjective to find the mole and there was another main objective which was going to help find
00:16:14
the mole. You got to I mean you're using great terminology. There were primary objectives and secondary objectives. And
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the primary objective was to build a new set of reporting assets, a new source of
00:16:26
intelligence, several new sources of intelligence in Falcon, the actual country. And to to help you frame what
00:16:32
Falcon is, there's only a handful of countries that are true stark adversaries to the United States. Every
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one of those countries has limited to no diplomatic relationship with the United
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States. That's how hostile they are. Any one of those countries could be Falcon.
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The reason that we have to codeame the country is because CIA in today's geopolitical world has has demanded we
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don't disclose the name of the country. So we call it Falcon. What are the United States adversaries where we don't have any relationship
00:17:02
with them? There's also like North Korea, there's Russia, there's Iran we know of. Are there any others?
00:17:09
Cuba. Cuba. Mhm. Yeah. There's and those are uh there's a mix there of countries that we do have a
00:17:15
relationship with, but it's not a warm relationship versus countries we have no relationship with. So, we have no
00:17:20
relationship with North Korea. We have a cold relationship with Russia, right? We have a cold relationship with
00:17:27
China. We have no relationship with Iran. So, they're all considered hard targets,
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but of various levels. Okay. So this the objective is the primary objective is to build a new team in this country, but the subobjective is
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in building the team, you're going to find out hopefully who the mole is because the mole is going to make a
00:17:48
mistake. The mole's going to try to find us because the mole's job is to prevent CIA
00:17:55
from collecting secrets about Falcon. Cuz the mole is working for Falcon intelligence. The mole is working for that country,
00:18:02
right? The mole is part of the CIA but working for the adversarial country. Bingo. Which is the worst combination
00:18:08
you can have. Um, so some of the most famous moles in history are Aldrick Ames. Aldra games was a CIA penetration
00:18:14
that worked for the Russians. Robert Hansen. Robert Hansen was an FBI penetration that worked for the
00:18:20
Russians. So these are famous moles in history. We were essentially being told that these earthshattering 1990s era
00:18:28
moles were were still relevant, but now in 2010ish, there was a new one that had made its way into CIA and and that's a big deal.
00:18:40
So, it was a very exciting reveal for me because it meant that we were not just doing something that was relevant and
00:18:47
interesting inside of CIA. We're doing something that is quite possibly the most important work that can be done
00:18:53
inside CIA at this moment in time. How did the CIA know there was a mole? There's a lot of complexity there that
00:19:00
is part of why they didn't want us to write this book. But what they have allowed us to disclose is that a foreign
00:19:07
ally contacted CIA and said, "We have collected intelligence that suggests you have a mole. You have somebody inside your organization who's a turncoat, a
00:19:19
spy for somebody else." So a foreign ally warned CIA. Otherwise CIA would have had no idea. Okay? And foreign allies are people like the the United Kingdom, Canada, Canada,
00:19:29
Australia, Australia, Australia. So you can imagine the disruption that that would make. Not
00:19:35
only did we did did CIA proper not know they had a mole. It took an ally to tell us. And then when the ally told us, we
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have to assume that the ally is sharing as much biographical detail as possible.
00:19:48
So they're telling you the name. Hey, Bob is a spy in your organization. But now that CIA officer is an American citizen protected by American rights and privileges and CIA obviously has no
00:20:01
information to show that that person's a spy except for the word of some foreign ally which is still in the in the eyes
00:20:07
of the US government a foreigner is a foreigner ally or not. So even if it is the UK or Canadians telling us so and so
00:20:14
is a spy until we have our own body of evidence we can't prosecute. That person can't be fired. That person can't be
00:20:20
discharged. That person can't be sued. that person can't be arrested. So now CIA has this mess where they are
00:20:27
actively losing information, actively losing uh intel because of this mole because of a mole, but they can't take any action because they have to now build a legal case against the mole to
00:20:39
prove that that person's actually breaking the law. So the ally that calls the CIA and says
00:20:44
you've got a mole in your ranks, they named the person most likely. most likely they would have
00:20:50
never made the the notification without also sharing the name which is a courtesy we do to others as well. If we
00:20:56
come across information that we know an MI6 officer has been compromised or a Canadian CSIS officer has been
00:21:02
compromised or an ASUS officer in in Australia, we will share as many biographical details as possible.
00:21:08
And did you share the name? Did when you were called into the room that day, did they share the name with you?
00:21:13
No. It's hard for people to wrap their minds around the culture at CIA. And I get it
00:21:19
because how do you wrap your mind around an organization you don't know? And the only exact the only insight is from
00:21:24
movies. So culturally CIA is a is a group of people who value secrets. And that need to know is very important inside those walls. It's just something we toss around like movie jargon
00:21:38
outside. But inside CIA need to know is very very real. And you are only briefed to the minimum that you need to know. So
00:21:46
inside of this tiny group of of spy hunters which is known as the the um counter espionage group CEG inside this
00:21:54
very small group they have the need to know basically everything and then as you go out in rings from that group they
00:22:01
reduce the information they share. So they might know the name but then when they share it to the next ring they just say hey there's an officer who's in this
00:22:08
office and then it goes to the next ring there's an officer in this division and it goes to the next ring. So the people talking to us as senior leaders, the
00:22:15
people talking to us knew the minimum we needed to know was that we were going to build new operations, but we were also
00:22:22
going to be most likely targeted by a known threat inside CIA. That was why it mattered to us. Interestingly, that
00:22:29
decision is why we had a First Amendment case with this book at all because CIA was knowingly putting our lives in danger of a foreign adversary by
00:22:40
intentionally creating operations that would tempt that mole to disclose our identities. That was one of the things I
00:22:45
was thinking when I was reading the book is you knew that you were being sent to an adversarial country and you also had
00:22:52
the knowledge that working amongst you was a mole who was revealing secrets about the CIA and potentially yourselves to that foreign country. Correct. So that foreign country could have
00:23:06
po could have killed you. Absolutely. And and that's the second kind of cultural element that people
00:23:11
don't understand about CIA. You don't really turn down an operation if you're invited to take part in an operation. You have the right to say no, but if you
00:23:23
say no, you're committing career suicide. Jihei, and anybody who reads the book will find this out, Jihei was a stellar officer on a phenomenal trajectory,
00:23:33
doing incredible things, kind of really charting the course for what targeters have become today.
00:23:40
For me, I proved to be a not very good case officer. And if there was anything I was really hoping for, it was a second
00:23:47
chance. So, when we were pulled into this meeting and they said, "Hey, here's this exciting opportunity. Here's an operation that we're we're literally
00:23:57
inviting you into this executive suite to invite you to this operation, and we're going to put you together, and we need you to do this." That's not that's
00:24:04
not a situation that I was going to say no to. I think you considered saying no, but for me it was it was a they knew me
00:24:12
well enough to know I was not going to turn that down. Yeah. I mean, I think when you have anxiety, you consider saying no to
00:24:17
everything. It's like you're always thinking about the risk. But I think that what was the risk that you were thinking about? It is very real that you can be
00:24:25
disappeared by a foreign adversary, that you can be, you know, killed by them with no explanation, that you can be
00:24:31
just put in jail and then you never get out because the government's not necessarily going to come to your aid.
00:24:37
And if they do, it might be still might be 20 years before you're out of their prison. Every sworn officer has plausible
00:24:43
deniability, meaning the president can plausibly deny that you don't belong to whatever organization you are claiming
00:24:50
to belong to. So, a CIA officer arrested in a Russian prison can can avoid all questioning and say, "Hold on, guys. I'm actually CIA. You caught me. Good job. Now, please send me home. Don't have a
00:25:03
diplomatic incident." The president has the right to say, "That person is not CIA." Yeah. That person has never worked for me. I
00:25:10
don't know who that person is. uh that their American passport might be verified, but but they are legally in
00:25:17
your possession of of um you know legal requirements. So we we don't really know who they are. So, so just to clarify then, you were being
00:25:29
told you were going to be flown, both of you, to a foreign country, an adversarial foreign country, and you
00:25:35
were told that there was a mole amongst your your ranks that was feeding information to the foreign country that
00:25:40
you were being flown to. So, we they actually stationed us in a neighboring country that was friendly, but we knew that Andy and anybody we
00:25:52
worked with would have to go into Falcon. So they flew us to a country Falcon being the adversarial country
00:25:58
adversarial country. So we actually lived in a third country called wolf but we were operating in both wolf and in
00:26:04
falcon. So the danger was still there and then that's when jih's targeter mind set in and that's when she started
00:26:10
thinking through well how could our operation be reverse engineered by Falcon and actually find us and if we can think like the enemy we can stay one
00:26:21
step ahead of the enemy. So the whole idea of going to wolf and building our team from the very beginning, jihei
00:26:27
started to architect how we could do that in a way that would foil the foil our uh aggressors from being able to even discover our existence. And what was the objective when you so
00:26:37
you've got this subobjective which I understand which is to find the mole but the main objective is just to spy as
00:26:43
usual and collect information on this adversarial country. Yes and no. The main objective was to
00:26:48
collect information, but the spying as usual is the part that was a no. CIA specifically told us they didn't want us to do the standard spy mo.
00:26:59
Spying has really been the same since the days of Egypt, the ancient Egypt, right? You find somebody who gives you
00:27:05
information about something that they have access to and that's it. And that's spying. Then you turn it into a report and you pass it up to somebody who reads
00:27:11
it and they make a decision. They wanted a new a new kind of mouse track. They wanted a new way of doing espionage.
00:27:18
And when they deployed us to the friendly country, that was their only request was whatever you do there,
00:27:25
coordinate it with the local leadership and then don't tell us because we have to make sure that the mole doesn't learn what you're doing. That's going to be how we tempt the mole
00:27:37
to start probing around and asking questions that are outside of the norm. That's how we're going to reverse engineer this and find the mole. So, we
00:27:43
need you to go do something new and we need it not to be standard. And don't tell us. And don't tell us, but tell your
00:27:49
leadership in the friendly country. Your CA CIA leadership in the French friendly country. Correct.
00:27:55
Yes. Okay. Because the and he's going to tell or she's going to tell them. No. So, it's completely
00:28:01
compartmentalized. So, need to know, right? Because if we kept all of our operations
00:28:07
um centered in Wolf than in our in our friendly country, then the mole would never know what we were doing. So we would be gathering intelligence which would then be further compartmentalized
00:28:20
to maybe a specific office where like one or two people at headquarters might know about one particular operation and
00:28:26
then one or two people might know about another operation. But it's because not all of Falcon House would know, the mole
00:28:34
would not have access to any of these new, any of these new intelligence sources. And that's what was really
00:28:40
important. That's why they wanted us to rebuild because he currently had access to all of the legacy intelligence
00:28:45
sources. Okay? And so if he wanted to, you know, pass any information to Falcon from all of our legacy sources, he could. But if he doesn't have access to our new sources, he can't pass any of
00:28:56
that new information on. And now here we are. We're able to gather more intelligence and then hopefully if we're
00:29:01
lucky we, you know, we strike gold on finding out who he is or who he's working with or other things. But yeah,
00:29:07
compartmentalization was the is the key. So we were really very um you know uh kind of siloed in Wolf. I'm trying to understand how you doing what you were doing was going to help
00:29:19
the CIA discover who the mole was. One of the things in in double agent operations, which is what you're talking about when you talk about a mole or a penetration, a double agent,
00:29:31
meaning I'm a sworn officer of CIA, but then I've also agreed to work with the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Cubans, whatever. That's a double a double agent. double agent
00:29:42
operations are very difficult to maintain long term because if my information isn't relevant to my foreign adversary anymore if the if I'm collecting secrets on Cuba but I'm being
00:29:55
paid by the Russians the Russians may not care that I keep collecting secrets on Cuba. So they might cut me off and
00:30:01
then all of a sudden I'm a double agent culpable of crime but without protection from another country. So when you think
00:30:07
of your Edward Snowdens, when you think of some of your famous turncoats from the United States, they flee to the
00:30:13
country that they were working for ultimately. So if you don't have that escape path, then it becomes very very
00:30:20
stressful and scary for for a double agent. So what CIA was counting on is the mole who was reporting our secrets to Falcon.
00:30:31
If we could create new operations and that mole didn't have access to those new operations, then the mole would
00:30:38
start to stretch. They would start to make mistakes, ask questions they shouldn't ask, steal information, try to
00:30:44
hack onto systems they shouldn't get onto. And that's all stuff that CIA can use to build a legal case to arrest that
00:30:50
person. But without knowing, without having something that that person has to stretch to collect, they're not going to make a mistake. So our job was to create something new so that the mole would
00:31:02
make a mistake that CIA could track and that would build a legal case that would allow CIA to arrest an American citizen
00:31:08
for espionage. Did the CIA have access to the information the mole was sending back to the enemy country? No. That's one of the most dangerous
00:31:20
parts about double agent operations. We often we have a lot of nicknames, a lot of inside terminology, but we usually
00:31:26
call it the keys to the kingdom. When you have a foreign penetration, you have the keys to everything in that foreign country's um all of their secrets
00:31:37
because you have access to an intelligence officer who can pull anything. So our double agent, our mole
00:31:43
had access to essentially everything related to Falcon that CIA had. So CIA didn't know what he was sharing, what he wasn't sharing, how much he had been sharing, or even how long he had been
00:31:54
sharing it. But they suspected he was sharing something because there was something that our
00:32:00
ally picked up on, something that allowed them to identify the person and communicate it back.
00:32:05
So you land in this friendly country next to the enemy country. And do you have to adopt new aliases, new names, new new stories? Do you have to pretend that you're normal people living a
00:32:17
normal life? You do. Um there's different ways that you can craft it. So um Ji's job as the
00:32:24
targeter was to find our targets in Falcon. A big part of what we had to do when we got to Wolf, our friendly
00:32:31
country, was do whatever the leadership there told us to do. So CIA crafted everything for us to land in the
00:32:37
friendly country. Once we were in the friendly country, then we had to start crafting new identities, new aliases so
00:32:45
that we could travel out of the friendly country and into Falcon into the enemy country. Mhm. But while living in Falcon, we
00:32:51
were, you know, Ji and Andrew Bamante, newlywood couple where we worked was covered, you know.
00:32:57
Where did you It's undercover. We still can't disclose it. Yeah. Like as far as this enemy, did you like run a when you were in the enemy
00:33:04
country working? Were you like running like a like a coffee shop or is it Yeah. When going into Falcon, there were different um you had to have a a different cover and a different cutout.
00:33:16
And we would use what's what you're referring to is called commercial cover or commercial activity, meaning we would
00:33:22
act as if we were part of commercial business going into and out of the country. But you'd use your normal names.
00:33:27
No. No. We This is one of the other things that's really fascinating about the book and one of the reasons that CIA
00:33:32
push back is we get to disclose whole new levels of tradecraftraft that have never been talked about in previous books. So the trade craft that we use
00:33:40
here is is something that the Brits actually call um dry cleaning. And what that means is we would clear our path before we would go into Falcon. So we're
00:33:51
in a friendly country and we need to go into a hostile country. In order to go from the friendly country to the hostile
00:33:58
country, you can't go directly because if you go directly, the hostile country can track you back to your friendly
00:34:04
country and then they can send a team to to hurt you if they need to in the friendly country. So instead, what you
00:34:10
do is you create a cleansing route. So you travel from the friendly country to a neutral country and in that neutral
00:34:17
country you'll change identities and then travel into your target country. So now if the hostile country tracks you, they track you back to a neutral country and they have no idea that you
00:34:28
originated from a friendly country. But if you go from a friendly country to a neutral country when you get to the
00:34:35
neutral country, do you need like a new passport and stuff? Because that neutral country presumably they don't know that
00:34:40
you're spies. Correct. So do you have to have a new passport to then get on a plane to fly into the
00:34:46
Yes. And it's what we would call a passport swap. And there's different ways of doing a swap. You can carry your own swap. You can have somebody meet you
00:34:51
to do a swap. You can have a cache where you hide a swap. But that's the benefit of always using a consistent cleansing
00:34:59
route because you can always go back to the same neutral country. And from the hostile country's point of view, every
00:35:05
time they track you, you always go back to the same place. So they start to build a pattern of life, what we call a
00:35:11
pattern of life, where they believe you're originating from this country when in fact you're not. So you you land
00:35:18
in this friendly country. You're making your way into the hostile country. What was your objective? What were you trying
00:35:24
to do in that hostile country? The first thing that we were trying to do was find targets.
00:35:30
And then we knew that as we found targets and built targets, we would also need to support the operations against
00:35:37
those targets. And there's a logistical element to espionage where you need to have encrypted phones, you need to have
00:35:43
satellite satellite phones or SIM cards, you need to have money, you need to have specialized gifts. Like there's there's
00:35:49
a there's a logistical supply chain that needs to be built. Specialized gifts. So, um, things that are appealing to a target that they may not be able to get
00:35:59
themselves. gold bullion, high-end liquors, child pornography, foreign currency, whatever they need, your job is to make sure they have a way of getting it.
00:36:10
Child pornography, some some targets, especially in the in the world of drugs and uh and terrorism
00:36:18
and weapons, they they feed off of the strangest things. Mhm. So, the C CIA would supply that pornography in a way. um we would more like
00:36:29
facilitate the transfer. Some other friendly country might actually be who acquires it. So for example, Germany
00:36:37
might actually uh have a raid where they where they carry out a raid against a pornographer and they have terabytes of
00:36:44
porn, right? And then the UK might have a case where they need porn to pay an Iranian. So now they can trade with BND so that BND can use this cache of porn
00:36:56
and they can give it to the Brits who give it to the Iranians and that can be a currency of types.
00:37:04
Again, morally ambivalent, the goal is to protect your people at the end of the day, right? So when it comes down to it,
00:37:11
that's the same way CIA works. If we're giving gold, if we're giving minted American gold coins to an evil person in
00:37:20
North Korea, do we really care if it's keeping Americans safe? There are some people who would say yes. And there are
00:37:26
other people who would say, "Whatever the price is, let's keep Americans safe." So, tell me about what you did then. So,
00:37:32
what was your what did you accomplish while you were there? And what was the you talk in the book about using
00:37:37
terrorist tactics to build your operation there? Can you you run me through what is it what it is you
00:37:44
accomplished there and the role that both of you played? So, I'll start it and I'll let you take it over. But the uh the the book's
00:37:51
title, Shadow Cell, is really about the cell model and the terrorist cell model that we recreated in our friendly country so that we could execute operations against our hostile country
00:38:03
that mirrored tactics and techniques that terrorists had used to foil Americans for the last 20 years in the
00:38:09
global war on terror. So what Ji and I learned is that CIA was not very good at beating terrorists. America was not very good at beating terrorists. That's why after 20 years of
00:38:21
fighting in Afghanistan, we left and we gave it back to the same terrorist group that we went in there to fight. We had
00:38:28
learned a lot from fighting that adversary. But we were the only country in the world fighting the global war on
00:38:33
terror. The Russians, the Iranians, the Chinese, the Cubans, the North Koreans, none of them engaged in the war on
00:38:39
terror. So everything we had learned from al-Qaeda, we were the only ones that learned it. So we found that to be
00:38:46
kind of a competitive advantage. So we started building our operations, modeling our operations off of the way
00:38:51
the terrorists structured their cells. And we called our cell in Wolf the shadow cell. And we had to find the people, recruit the people, and train the people inside our cell, our actual
00:39:04
CIA peers. We had to get them to learn how to run the same model. That's really what the book explains is how we built that and what those people did because
00:39:15
espionage is not about one superhero overseas. It's about a team of people doing incredible things.
00:39:21
And were those people on the ground in the friendly country next to the hostile country? Yes. And so did you when you recruited these
00:39:28
people to build this team, did you recruit them from America or were you recruiting them with inside that
00:39:33
friendly country? Inside of Wolf. Everybody who was in the cell was already w working in wolf.
00:39:39
And the word cell basically means team. Team, right? Team. So you built this team in the friendly
00:39:45
country next door to the enemy country. And this team consisted of how many people, right? So James was our senior most
00:39:52
case officer. Tasha, Luke, and Beverly were our second tour case officer. So they were more junior. That's why they were hungry but but still kind of uh flexible. Whereas James was in James was
00:40:05
at a place in his career where if this didn't work, his career would be tanked. And then Ji and I were not case
00:40:11
officers. We were kind of the I was the the mission planner, if you will. And Jihi was the targeter. And then uh Diana
00:40:18
was our linguist. Will was our tech support. And we had that was our that was our cell. That was our little group
00:40:24
of people that would sit in the bullpen. Now, it's important to note that none of them and this was their primary
00:40:30
mission. It was our primary mission for all of them. Helping us was just something they were doing because they
00:40:37
believed that if we were successful, it would be good for them. They had primary missions to do all sorts of other
00:40:42
things. Yeah. Oh, okay. And were these people locals? They're all Americans and they're all Americans assigned to Wolf. So, they're all American CIA officers, all sworn
00:40:54
officers that are assigned to our friendly country in various different covers to do various different primary
00:40:59
missions. Okay. And how did you guys like communicate? Did you like meet up for like dinner?
00:41:05
Like what's the how does it work? Yeah, I mean all of our communication and hangouts were in the office because
00:41:10
we couldn't really be seen outside together. We had connect us. We had what's known as a skiff, a specialized compartmented uh information
00:41:18
facility. So it was a it was a hardened soundproof office that we could have meetings in. Couldn't the adversarial country like watch you walking in there in the morning? The adversarial country
00:41:30
arguably didn't even know we were in Wolf because every time they tracked anybody's travel, it would take them to
00:41:36
a different country. Oh, so you were just people going to an office? Yes. So you could be doing anything in there, correct? Yeah. And it's an office and a large
00:41:43
office building, so we could really be going anywhere. Okay, fine. So it's hard to track.
00:41:48
So what was your what was your first mission together as a as a team? Like what were you what were you doing in the
00:41:53
enemy country? What was your objective to you were finding you were working as a targeter to find interesting
00:41:59
individuals and then Andrew you were predominantly trying to make contact with those individuals
00:42:04
sort of my because I couldn't as the node of the of the cell the node is a term that we're using to say I was the piece that was exposed to CIA. So the mole if the mole went hunting the mole
00:42:18
would find me I was the one that was exposed. Okay. So for me, it was important that I actually didn't meet with any of the
00:42:24
targets that we had in Falcon. My job was to go to Falcon to start sourcing the information that she would use to
00:42:31
identify those individuals. Like what does that mean? So uh whether it's something stupid like
00:42:36
a phone book or a thumb drive, uh whether you're picking up a dead drop from somebody else. So consider in
00:42:41
Falcon, we would have already had other case officers carrying out operations. Yeah. So we might have a case officer who was
00:42:48
able to extract information from a military database and that military database has all the weapons engineers
00:42:55
for Falcon's Air Force. That case officer spy that spy that spy can collect the thumb drive and then they can put that thumb drive in what's known as a dead drop. A dead
00:43:06
drop would be something that you hide anywhere in the in the country, in a city, wherever else. Like in a bush. Yeah, like in a bush. I would then go
00:43:13
into Falcon and I would go to that dead drop site, the bush. So you go into the enemy country, right?
00:43:18
You'd go to the the bush and take the thumb drive and bring it back by our cleansing route to Wolf,
00:43:24
where I could give it to Jihi. Ji could then extract the information from the thumb drive. And now she has a list of
00:43:29
all the engineers who are part of the enemy country's air force. And then from there, she has a starting point for her information to start finding targets. Now, as she finds targets, that's when
00:43:41
we tap on our case officers, James, Tasha, Luke, Beverly, and we say, "Here's somebody that we think would be susceptible to you because you're a middle-aged woman, you're an older man,
00:43:53
you're a younger man, you're a younger woman, right? We think that these people might be susceptible to your interests,
00:44:01
your backgrounds, your voice, who knows what. And we need you to target them." And then we would send those those spies
00:44:07
into Falcon to meet the targets that Jihi found. Okay. Okay. Got you. The game of espionage is not an easy game. It's a fun game, but it's a it's a
00:44:19
chess game, not a checkers game. So, there's a lot of moving pieces and a lot of moving parts. And um for me, it was
00:44:24
always very exciting, but I also understand that it can be very difficult to to express it. Well,
00:44:30
was there ever a time when you felt most at risk when you were in that hostile country? At some point it my presence in Falcon
00:44:40
in the enemy country became known to the local government in the enemy country and they dispatched a surveillance team to track me. It was a major turning point in our operation. We kind of went
00:44:53
from a place where we felt like we were winning to a place where we wondered if we were losing. We went from a place
00:44:58
where I felt very safe to a place where I felt like I could immediately be apprehended. And then all the worst
00:45:04
thoughts start to creep in. Not necessarily about being shot. Oftentimes a CIA officer being shot in a foreign
00:45:10
country is a welcome experience because being shot at least means everything ends. The worst is being captured and
00:45:17
being interrogated and being used for diplomatic leverage and being used for policy leverage and being being forced
00:45:24
to do uh you know into brainwashing and propaganda videos. Like that's a much worse experience than than a clean
00:45:31
death. You said earlier that it would have been the mole that was exposed to your presence and that knew that you were in
00:45:36
this enemy country. So was it the mole that told the enemy country? That's what we believe. We don't have
00:45:42
the evidence to prove it. Um, but what CIA's conclusion as well as the conclusion inside of our own shadow cell is that our operations had reached the place where they were significant enough
00:45:55
that the mole took a risk to find out that I was the exposed member of the cell and then the mole reported my name to the hostile country's police force.
00:46:07
So, you're now inside that hostile country, that enemy country, and they know that you're a US spy. Was there a
00:46:15
day when you realized that they knew that you were a spy? Yes. Well, there wasn't a day that I
00:46:21
realized that they were that they knew I was CIA. There was a day that I realized they were surveilling me as if I was a
00:46:28
threat. When you travel, when any business person travels to a hostile country, they're almost always
00:46:34
surveiled. They're Hotel rooms can be rifled through. There's there's people called bumbling
00:46:40
surveillance or watchers who will usually follow you. Um I'm not sure what your travel looks like, but I can almost
00:46:46
assure you that if you traveled to Russia, if you've traveled to China, if you travel to Cuba, you had a watcher. You had a surveillance team
00:46:51
really that was watching you. Me? Yeah. Why? Because you're wealthy, you're successful, you're an influencer, you're
00:46:56
of significance. At the very least, they want to make sure that some petty criminal doesn't hurt you in their
00:47:02
country cuz that could be a big deal. Thank you. But please continue to surveil me. But at worst, they could also be
00:47:08
scraping your cell phone to pull all of your contacts off the cell phone so that they could then reach out to any of the contacts that you have on your cell
00:47:13
phone. They could scan and duplicate your hard drive as you go through uh secondary or go through immigration in a
00:47:19
foreign country. They can scan my hard drive as I go through immigration. Absolutely. We can do that here in the
00:47:25
United States, too. Well, so if I land in the United States, they they How do they do how would they do that? So there's uh there's there's
00:47:32
different authorities that exist for different agencies. So here inside the United States, one of the authorities
00:47:37
that we give to our border patrol is the authority to essentially scrape data off of all of your electronic devices. So if
00:47:44
you're deemed a target of interest and if you're moved into what's known as a secondary screening, they will separate
00:47:50
you from your bags. They'll actually open your your bags. They might even tell you to unlock your cell phone or unlock your laptop. And then from there
00:47:58
with with technology that's proprietary and technology that's also commercially available, they can scrape and scan your
00:48:04
hard drive. Because I've been through security before in various countries and sometimes when I get to the other end,
00:48:10
there's a letter in my suitcase and the letter in my suitcase says, "Hey, we had to go through your bags for some reason."
00:48:16
If you had a technical if you had a technical device in your bag along with that letter, there's a good chance that
00:48:22
it was cloned. But I didn't give them my password. Sometimes they don't need your password. Really? Oh, yeah.
00:48:33
How are they going to get into my my laptop without my password? There's ways. So, yeah, there's password generators.
00:48:38
There's password cracking codes. Your password is the I mean, I have somebody I could call right now and within about
00:48:44
30 minutes, we would probably have all of your passwords that you use for all of your devices in your personal home.
00:48:53
That's the end of the podcast. Can I quit the book? Pass me my phone. And this is a bit of a tangent, but it's
00:49:04
an important one. So, what devices do you guys use? If you have that knowledge that it's really easy to break into devices, do you use the same devices
00:49:10
that I use? Yeah, I mean, for me, I assume that once you if you become a target of interest,
00:49:16
there's nothing you can do to protect yourself. So, I use devices that are actually easy to crack and clone because
00:49:22
I don't want my device to get broken. So that when the Chinese or the Russians choose to go through some back door on my Android system, my Android doesn't shut down. Whereas there are more
00:49:33
complex systems like a Glacier phone where if somebody penetrates your Glacier phone, this the whole phone will shut down and you'll be without a phone.
00:49:39
Is there any phone or device that's safe? I would argue the answer is no. No, I would say no. Awesome.
00:49:46
Because anything that you create that claims to be safe becomes priority number one for all the adversaries out
00:49:52
there because they know if they can be the first ones to crack that phone or crack that hard drive or crack that operating system, then they have the
00:49:59
competitive advantage over everybody else. Yeah. It's possible for something to be safe for a short period of time, but
00:50:05
eventually it's going to get cracked. They'll find the back door. They'll figure out how to open it. And it's not just foreign intelligence
00:50:10
that wants to do that. It's also all of your criminal syndicates. It's all of your dark web syndicates. Everybody wants to do it. So whenever I see
00:50:16
anybody come out and promise that they got the new hardest device, I just I don't believe it. It might be
00:50:22
hard, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. Yeah, there are levels of security, but nothing is 100% secure, at least when it
00:50:29
comes to technology. And so we just assume that it's not secure. And so you just treat your device in that way, you know, with whatever liberal security is convenient and makes you feel secure.
00:50:41
But knowing that at any point somebody could just hack in from, you know, they could hack in remotely. They could,
00:50:47
you know, scrape your drive when you're going through immigration or if you're in a hotel room, somebody comes in. I mean, it's always possible.
00:50:52
They can steal your encryption key from somebody else that you are having an encrypted chat with. They don't have to target you.
00:50:58
Do you use like cold storage? I.e., do you use like a a hard drive that's not connected to the internet or something? We will air gap.
00:51:04
Air gap. Air gapping is cold storage like what you're talking about where you take something off the actual cloud,
00:51:10
take something off the internet and it just lives in a standalone server whether that's a we have drives that we
00:51:15
save our information to that are that are airgapped. They're not connected to the internet, not connected to a cloud. They're only connected whenever we
00:51:21
choose to transfer information. Um so we'll do things like that to keep our information safe. But the I think the most important thing is that if you if
00:51:29
you show if you make yourself easy to be hacked, then you'll actually get hacked less
00:51:36
because you're not a risk. They can see what you have. They understand that you're not important and they move on to
00:51:42
the next target that's more more uh clandestine or trying to hide. Okay. So, you you figure out going back to the story, you figure out that you're being surveiled. How? Just like the the
00:51:54
whole idea of a cleansing route through a third country, that's a a piece of tradecraftraft that has never been
00:51:59
exposed before. I actually get to teach a number of people. I get to teach in the story how we do what's known as a
00:52:05
surveillance detection route. So the the core of surveillance detection is understanding something that we call
00:52:10
multiple sites. Multiple sightings over a period of time. So I need to see the same person, the same vehicle, the same face, the same profile. profile meaning you know tall tall caucasian male
00:52:24
mid-50s I need to see the same profile several times over a period of time where I'm changing locations.
00:52:31
So what happens inside shadow cell is I identify one car that follows me through
00:52:38
multiple turns and then falls off only to come back on later on. That's kind of my first indicator that there might be something going on. So then I go through this route, a predetermined, pre-planned
00:52:51
route through a city. And the only reason I'm doing that route is so that I can drag people along with me to see if
00:52:58
they're going to behave like surveillance. And from that route, I find that it's not just one car, it's
00:53:03
actually two other cars. And when I get out of my own vehicle to walk on foot, there are very specific people who then follow me on foot. And then in the third part of the surveillance detection
00:53:14
route, I find that the same people who are following me on foot are also the people driving the cars that are
00:53:19
following me inside vehicles. So most surveillance detection routes are executed in this very prescribed, very
00:53:26
specific process so that you can see who's actually following you. And you did that. You discover that there's multiple people following you in multiple vehicles.
00:53:37
And when you discover that, it's terrifying. Yeah, I was going to say it's absolutely terrifying, but it's
00:53:43
comforting because you know they're following you, but they don't know that you know that yet. So, they still think
00:53:51
that they are discreet. They still think that that you're operationally active. Meaning, they're following you because
00:53:57
they expect you to commit espionage. They're following you because they expect you to meet with a source, do a
00:54:02
dead drop, acquire some kind of equipment that you shouldn't have, right? They're waiting for that. If they
00:54:09
don't see that, then they don't get the evidence that they need. They don't win. So, you go straight to a strip club or
00:54:14
something. Exactly. Right. You go to a strip club, you go to a library, I went to an arcade in this book, and you go somewhere to
00:54:20
just waste their time because as long as I'm collecting their information, when I come back to my friendly country and I
00:54:26
meet with my shadow cell teammates, I can now tell them this license plate is a surveillance vehicle. This profile is
00:54:32
a surveillance vehicle. If you see a woman or a man wearing these types of clothing, this is a surveillant, right?
00:54:38
And we can ex and now we can build a database back in Wolf that shares the surveillance team members in Falcon.
00:54:44
Were you scared when you figured out that you were being followed? I was terrified. I was terrified because
00:54:50
I had so many thoughts going through my head from how did I [ __ ] up to what if I
00:54:56
don't go home. I'm trying to think about what they're going to do as their next step. How long are they going to follow me before they just say [ __ ] it and just
00:55:02
wrap me up? Are they even going to wrap me up? Meaning meaning apprehend me, capture me? Do they already have evidence that
00:55:09
shows that I'm committing espionage? Right? I haven't committed espionage on this trip yet, but have they seen me on
00:55:15
a previous trip doing a dead drop, retrieving a dead drop, dropping a cell phone, taking a battery? Like, what what
00:55:21
do they know? I don't know what they know. And then you've got all this panic and at the same time you have to recall
00:55:29
three and a half hours of very specific activity across a city to run an SDR. An SDR, a surveillance detection route. You have to recall I turn left on Front Street. I go two blocks. I turn right on 22nd
00:55:41
North and then I turn left on an alley. You have to recall this thing that you memorize that you work through at the
00:55:47
same time that you have this spike of adrenaline and panic. And you were on your own. I was on my own for that operation. So
00:55:53
you you go through this route through the city that you is predetermined for you to go down and presumably this
00:55:58
particular route is designed in such a way where it gives you opportunities to expose them. You realize that you are being followed. What do you do in that exact moment?
00:56:10
That first moment that I realized it was true, I had this realization, this moment of
00:56:18
fear and vulnerability where I just it was a very it was a moment of self-loathing where you just you realize that you're not as good as
00:56:29
you think you are and you realize that however this happened, you're the only one to blame for what
00:56:36
comes next. In that kind of moment of humility, I actually called Ji in our alias identities that we had built for these
00:56:47
operations. We had what's known as a throwaway phone or a disposable telecommunications. And I called her and
00:56:54
I gave her a coded message to let her know that something was wrong cuz I wanted her to
00:57:01
know that something was wrong so that she could take it back to the cell so that they could start their systems on their end to protect me if I did get
00:57:07
arrested, if I did get wrapped up, if I did get shot. You gave her a coded message via cell phone. What is that coded message?
00:57:13
Um the I think I just called you and said I'm coming home early. You said you you called her and said I'm
00:57:19
coming home early. Yeah. which is a bad sign because you would never come home early from an operation ever. So as soon as I heard he
00:57:27
was coming home early, I knew that something was wrong. Take me into your world at that time. The phone rings.
00:57:33
I get the call from my burner phone and which was unusual anyways. I mean I always had it because that was part of
00:57:39
our like communication plan was for us to do that when we were apart. So a burner phone is a secondary phone
00:57:44
that you just use for these kind of things. Yeah. Just for this. It's never used for anything else. it's not connected to a
00:57:50
name. Um, and that's what keeps it anonymous for us. And so he calls and he says, you know, hey, I'm coming home early. And I'm like, okay. Because you can't like if if the
00:58:03
line's being tapped, you can't be like, oh my god, what's going on? Like, are you okay? Because somebody's listening
00:58:08
to it. It has to sound like we knew that his alias had a fiance. I was the fiance. So, you know, it was totally
00:58:14
natural for anybody listening in to to hear him say, "Hey, I'm coming home early." So, then I had to be like, "Oh,
00:58:20
that's really exciting. That's great. You know, I can't wait to see you." And he's like, "Okay, I love you." And then that's the end of the conversation. And
00:58:26
that's all I get. And so, after that's all I get from Andy, I go back to the office. I'm starting to look like scour all of our cables. I go talk to James
00:58:36
like, "Have you heard anything? Like, is anything happening?" You started to scour all of your cables.
00:58:42
Yeah. So, you know, we have our all of our databases, you know, all the CIA databases. So, you know, there's
00:58:48
reporting that comes in all the time um that you're, you know, especially regional reporting that you're privy to.
00:58:54
And so, you know, I talked to James because he was he had more access than I did to things all things Falcon. And so,
00:59:00
I was like, have you heard anything? Is there anything weird going on? And he said no. And so I started just kind of
00:59:06
looking through all of my stuff to see, you know, was there any reporting that was of somebody being captured or
00:59:11
somebody, you know, something going wrong and there was nothing. Um and so Andy and I have um we created on our own
00:59:18
just a it's called a combo plan, a communication plan where you know if anything ever happens you know whether
00:59:24
natural disaster or you know espionage faux like we had a system of communication where you know I wait 8 hours and you know check this fake email
00:59:36
that we share that's not attributable and then he gives me a sign of life and then we have these timings 8 hours 12
00:59:43
hours 24 hours, 48 hours where all I need from him is a sign of life to know that he's okay. And then that also gives us the opportunity if it were a natural disaster, for example, to put, you know,
00:59:55
I meet me at this location. So that that's an email address that Andy emails. Yeah.
01:00:01
It's an email address that we both have a login to and you create a draft email inside of it.
01:00:07
Oh, okay. Also learned from terrorism. Also learned from terrorism. Okay. Oh, is that what terrorists do? Yeah. So they create a draft email, they just
01:00:13
leave it there. Yeah. Someone else logs in and looks at it. Correct. Yeah. So there's it's never sent so it never goes over the internet. Really?
01:00:19
Yeah. So we had this communication plan in place. So even though I was concerned and I couldn't find anything to discover
01:00:25
what was happening, I knew we had this communication plan in place. So I knew that at some point he was going to give
01:00:31
me a sign of life and I couldn't do anything until that point. So you're you discover that you've been discovered by this adversarial country.
01:00:41
You call Jihi. You let her know that you're coming home early. Then what do you do? Then I have to plan my escape. So
01:00:48
another thing that people that movies don't show you is that when the first effort to escape is always self-rescue. It's always on the part of the field officer alone to try to escape. There's
01:01:00
no Navy Seal team. There's no evacuation helicopter. There's no high-speed boat or or classy yacht just waiting for you. you have to get yourself across the
01:01:12
country's border yourself before you can hope for any kind of evac from there or what we call an Xfill. So, I knew that
01:01:20
it was on me to come up with some evacuation plan. And I had to come up with an evacuation plan that wasn't
01:01:25
going to let the surveillance team know that I knew I was under surveillance. So, you're still in the car at this point? I'm I'm in between the car and on foot. uh depending on where I am in the
01:01:38
surveillance detection route, right? It was surveillance detection routes generally break into three phases. It's
01:01:44
in the first phase that you suspect that you're under surveillance. It's in the second phase that you confirm it. So,
01:01:49
it's in the second phase when I confirm I am absolutely under surveillance. That's when I contact Ji and that's when
01:01:54
I start coming up with my own self-rescue plan. And then the third phase, the third phase is a collection phase.
01:02:01
You know what? You know that you're under surveillance. you know that you've communicated to somebody that you're
01:02:06
under surveillance and now the mission becomes collect as much information as you can about the surveillance team
01:02:12
before they realize that they're being collected against. So you you see this car behind you, multiple cars behind you and the same
01:02:19
people following you on foot. Are you writing this down or are you just trying to memorize it? At first it's all memory. Um and we have
01:02:26
a methodology for trying to memorize this stuff. We actually talk about this in the book as well. you start to come up with short codes to describe the
01:02:32
people. Um, and the codes that you come up with mean something to you, but they wouldn't mean anything if they were if
01:02:38
they came out in an interrogation or if they came out in writing. So, like for you, I might call you black t-shirt. A
01:02:43
black t-shirt means something to me. So, if I see black t-shirt behind me three times in the next 45 minutes in three
01:02:49
different parts of the city, I know that I have an image for what black t-shirt means. But when I write down black
01:02:54
t-shirt, nobody else knows what that means. When I see a woman, it was cold. uh the the season that I was carrying
01:03:00
out these operations. Um I saw a woman in ear muffs, so I would call her ear muffs. I saw a guy in a bomber jacket,
01:03:07
so I called him bomber jacket. And you just recall these people. You rec you you blue sedan, yellow SUV, right? White
01:03:14
taxi cab. You you start to come up with these nicknames that mean something to you but don't mean anything to anybody
01:03:19
else. And then when you get back to a place where you can document your notes in detail, you have a reference point to
01:03:26
document in detail. So, I start by memorizing. When I got towards the end of my third phase of surveillance
01:03:33
detection, I actually wrote down my notes. In the book, it explains I went into a like a clothing store and then I
01:03:40
started making notes in the clothing store. Presumably, if somebody came in and arrested me at that moment, what they would see is a bunch of notes about
01:03:47
clothing, ear muffs and black t-shirts inside of a clothing store. That's not espionage. But then when I was able to
01:03:52
actually get back to uh to Wolf with myself, then I was able to deconstruct what black t-shirt meant. Black t-shirt meant uh black male with a goatee uh
01:04:05
approximately 65 lbs, 5 foot, 11 in, 38 years old. So, how did you get from phase two of your process of figuring out if you were
01:04:17
being followed to the arcade? like what was the why did you get to the arcade? So, I went to the arcade because I was
01:04:23
trying in a surveillance detection route, one of the things that you're actually trying to do is called bore or
01:04:28
lull your surveillance. You never want to in movies, it makes it look like you're trying to to ditch your
01:04:34
surveillance team. You're trying to lose your tail. That's not what professionals do. What professionals do is we drag the tail. We keep the tail with us for as
01:04:42
long as possible. And one of the things you do is you make yourself very predictable. You move very slowly. You
01:04:49
hang out in public places which makes it very easy for them to observe you. I was actually going to the arcade to try to
01:04:56
collect more information about my surveillance team. But I was trying to give them time and space so they could
01:05:01
observe me in a public setting. It it backfired because what actually ended up happening is that when I went into the
01:05:07
arcade, they lost me. They lost sight of me, which put them into a position where
01:05:12
they started panicking to try to find me even though I was just sitting inside the arcade.
01:05:19
I mean, it doesn't sound like it backfired if they lost you. That's a terrible thing when they lose you because when they lose you, they
01:05:25
start to panic and they start to assume either they made a mistake or you're a trained officer. If you're a trained
01:05:31
officer, if that's the conclusion that they make, they can come in and arrest you. If they lose you, then they start to make mistakes. And when a
01:05:37
surveillance team starts to make mistakes, it means that they might stumble across you. They might have two
01:05:43
different surveillance people find you at the same time. And for for them that's a scary thing because for them
01:05:49
they're trying not to be identified. They're trying to be discreet. They're trying to not be seen. So when they in
01:05:55
this case in in the story that that we share in Shadow Cell, when the surveillance team broke into a starburst, a starburst means they went
01:06:01
they broke ranks to try to find me in the arcade. When they broke ranks to try to find me, they presented themselves to
01:06:08
me in the arcade face to face. And it was in that moment that I realized they know that I see them and I know that they see me and this is bad.
01:06:21
You locked eyes with them, which you're never supposed to do. You're never supposed to do.
01:06:26
You're never supposed to lock eyes with your surveillance. You're never supposed to lock eyes with anybody who's a threat
01:06:32
ever because that's threatening behavior, right? That's one of the reasons that people share strong eye
01:06:38
contact with peers is to it's a show of trust. Well, whenever you're locking eyes with somebody who's a threat, it's
01:06:44
a it's a sign of aggression or dominance. So, whenever you're being surveiled, you never want to make eye
01:06:49
contact with your surveillance team because your surveillance team will see that eye contact as a threat. When you say you sort of bumped into
01:06:56
them in that arcade, what's the distance? 3T. 3T. And And how long did you lock eyes
01:07:03
with each other? It felt like an eternity. In reality, it was probably two and a half seconds.
01:07:09
I mean, two and a half seconds is a long time, especially when you're trying not to be seen. So, recreate that moment for me. You're
01:07:14
in the arcade pretending you're playing with games. You turn a corner. It's horrible, man. It's a horrible It's
01:07:19
a horrible story. I'm I'm in the arcade. I I'm I again, I think I'm doing everything right. I'm like, "Oh, I'm in
01:07:26
the arcade. They watched me come in. This gives They're probably taking a smoke break outside. They've got nothing to worry about." And I'm kind of going
01:07:32
from game to game and spending whatever credits that I bought in the arcade. And I go to this dinosaur hunting shooting
01:07:39
game, right? Almost like Big Buck Hunter or like Jurassic Park. And I pick up a rifle and I'm shooting at dinosaurs and
01:07:47
I'm just killing time. And then the [ __ ] surveillant comes around the back of the machine looking for me. He
01:07:55
comes around the back of the machine and he sees me and I'm holding a [ __ ] gun and I look at him and he looks at me and
01:08:01
that's that's when our two and a half seconds happen. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, what just happened? Why is
01:08:07
why did I just see Bomber Jacket come around my video game console and stare at me in the face. And that's when I kind of realized, oh my gosh, like the team is in panic. I can see multiple
01:08:17
people in the team. They lost me. They're trying to find me. Bomberjacket just found me. What did Bomberjacket do
01:08:23
when he looked at you? His jaw dropped. He went slack. Like he looked at me and he knew that he had
01:08:29
[ __ ] up too. And I looked at him and in my mind's eye, I was just hoping that I didn't look as stupid as he looked.
01:08:36
In that moment, is is it true to say that you should have just looked back at the dinosaur game as fast as you
01:08:41
possibly could? What I should have done is I should have seen a person come around the corner and just kind of stayed in the game. That's
01:08:46
what anybody else would have done. Anybody else would have just stayed in the game. They're focused on the game. They don't even realize there are people walking around, right? But the fact that
01:08:53
I identified I saw him and then looked at him and the fact that he saw me and looked at me as two professionals on
01:09:00
opposite sides of the of the playing field, we both made the same mistake. We both made the mistake of showing our
01:09:07
recognition to our intended target. And before we continue, you as far as your alias was in that country, you were called Alex Hernandez, right? Correct. Correct. And you were running a business called Acme Commercial.
01:09:20
Correct. What was Acme Commercial supposed to be doing as a company? Acme Commercial was a company that was
01:09:26
built to source new disposable goods from foreign countries for uh for uh transport and distribution across Western countries. And the intelligence services build a
01:09:42
lot of fake businesses. You said yes. It's a It's the easier it is to build a business, the easier it is to
01:09:48
collect information. So, what we've discovered is that just as anybody with $127 in their pocket can create an LLC,
01:09:55
that's about how much money it takes to start an intelligence operation. It says that um the CIA operates
01:10:00
numerous fake companies. The CIA also operates numerous real companies, too. Not just the CIA. I mean, every intel organization has commercial fronts.
01:10:12
every Intel organization. The CIA operates real companies. What does that mean? There there are real companies out there owned and operated by CIA. Inel is one of those companies. It's a investment
01:10:24
vehicle where CIA invests money and invests in new technology and all the technology that goes through InQel knows that it's going through CIA. Okay. That that's a that's that's public
01:10:35
though, right? Correct. But the the ones that aren't public. So the CIO will create a company
01:10:40
and then they will use that company to pretend to be doing something in a foreign foreign land basically.
01:10:46
But the primary mission is intelligence. This is one of the most fascinating things not only about CIA but about all of your first world intelligence
01:10:52
organizations. You've heard of what's known as the black budget. The black budget is the budget of of um
01:11:00
discretionary money that can be spent on military and intelligence operations that isn't tied to the taxpayer. So,
01:11:07
it's a giant pot of money that isn't tied to tax money. So, where does that money come from? Part of that money
01:11:14
comes from anytime law enforcement or intelligence agencies seize assets. We seize cryptocurrency. We seize drugs. We seize child pornography. Right? When we seize that money and we use it for
01:11:27
other operations, that's part of the black budget. The other part of the black budget is when an intelligence organization creates a business and that
01:11:33
business turns a profit. When that business turns a profit, where does the profit go? It can't go to the case
01:11:39
officer, that person's being paid on the US payroll. So all that profit goes into the black budget.
01:11:44
Do you think the CIA has some big profitable businesses that are set up as fronts that just like went really really
01:11:49
well? I know it does. Really? I know it does. The the CIA has businesses that it's set up that have
01:11:54
gone wildly profitable. CIA also has officers that built these businesses that then were like, why the [ __ ] am I at CIA and then they leave CIA and they go on to run businesses instead.
01:12:06
I mean, a a couple of things popped into my head as you said that. The first was there's obviously a huge conversation at the moment around Tik Tok because Tik
01:12:13
Tok was started in China. become this massive global success and I can't think of a better company to have started than a platform like Tik Tok where everybody's putting their information
01:12:24
and data in and it's tracking your location. So what is your perspective on something like Tik Tok? Do you think Tik
01:12:29
Tok's was started as a tool to spy? I don't believe Tik Tok individually was started as a tool to spy. I believe that what happened is Tik Tok became wildly popular and the government in China
01:12:42
realized, hey, everything in China belongs to the government anyways. We can step in and take advantage of this.
01:12:48
That is also a way that CIA and MI6 do business as well. When a company does very well and there's an intelligence
01:12:54
benefit, they will approach the company. In a democracy, they can't force the company to cooperate, but in a country
01:13:00
like China, they can. So, do you think the social networks, a lot of the big social networks have been approached by
01:13:06
the CIA or the MI6 and asked to give information to them? I would go a step further and say that they've all been approached and that the vast majority of them cooperate.
01:13:18
Is that a concern for the average person? Not for the for the average person that's a benefit. The average person is not being
01:13:24
targeted. I promise you like there's zero interest and for the federal government and for the intelligence community, there's absolutely zero interest in the average person,
01:13:35
the person who's cheating on their spouse or avoiding $5,000 in taxes or who isn't paying their parking bills.
01:13:41
Nobody cares. The federal government doesn't care about that. Well, you were doing some of that targeting, right? Right. So, did you ever work with any existing
01:13:48
company to give you information? So all of my data depending on what country I was working on had different sources and some some countries had more sources
01:13:59
than others but they're all sources I can't disclose but there's tons and tons of data that would come in to me and
01:14:06
then I had I worked on a number of cases where I had to get FISA requests. What's a FISA request? advisor request
01:14:13
is when you want to um collect information or take information from somebody who is an American citizen. And I just want to remind people that American citizen, most people who
01:14:24
complain about, oh, they're targeting American citizens are thinking about themselves. They're looking at themselves in the mirror and thinking,
01:14:30
oh, they're targeting American citizens. They're not thinking about the Chinese person who just came over or naturalized. They're not thinking about
01:14:37
the, you know, Iranian who's been here for a long time and naturalized, right? like all of those they're not thinking
01:14:42
about, you know, the the al-Qaeda member who claimed to be a refugee to get here to get some sort of
01:14:49
green card, right? So, American citizenship, a lot of people have that and some of those
01:14:55
people are doing bad things and some of those people are our adversaries who have infiltrated the United States and
01:15:01
are here to gather intelligence to get to the our adversaries, you know, or are here to do bad things within the
01:15:08
country. And so we have to get FISA requests to get the data on them. And what does that mean in in reality? A
01:15:14
FISA request, does that mean that you can go into their phone? It means that you have proven a link
01:15:20
from that person to something bad and you've given you've given the court enough evidence to say, hey, look, this
01:15:26
person's doing something bad and we need to gather more data on them. So it just opens the kind of data that you can get
01:15:32
on that person. What kind of data is that? Hey, you can get on their phone. You can get into their computer. You can get into their
01:15:38
private Google accounts. You can get their private Apple accounts. You can kind of data you can get access to. You can now use it to target them.
01:15:45
So, you could get access to their private Google accounts, their private Apple accounts without their passwords.
01:15:51
You would hack their passwords or steal their passwords or Google retains their passwords
01:15:57
and Google would give it you the password. it for many many for most cases if it comes down to national
01:16:03
security American companies will share details and that's what a FISA request does is
01:16:09
it's a judicial claim it's a judicial warrant essentially to say you will let this service onto that person's account
01:16:15
you you guys must think that people like me live in a certain state of uh naivity
01:16:21
and ignorance as to what's actually going on I wouldn't say it's ignorance or naivity
01:16:26
I would say that it's it's conditioned into You're conditioned to believe that you have privacy.
01:16:32
So the reality that we should realize is that we we don't have privacy. It's not real.
01:16:37
Privacy is not real. No. I mean, you know, there's a level like in your when you get undressed in a dark room like that's yours.
01:16:48
Usually no one's watching. There's a good chance that you're not being watched by the federal government. If you're getting
01:16:56
that's a good chance, you know, if you're sending, you know, dirty emails to your girlfriend, that's essentially, I mean, it's private on the
01:17:07
surface, but not really forever private. Somebody could access those. If you write her
01:17:13
dirty notes, that's way more private, especially if she throws away or burns them. Like people just I think people take put too much confidence in
01:17:23
technology and feel too confident in the privacy of technology because technology there's really nothing private about it
01:17:29
to an extent. Yes. But if you think that nobody can ever look at your stuff, that's wrong. Do you think the CIA knew you were
01:17:36
coming here today? I think the CIA knew we were coming on Diary of a CEO and I think they knew
01:17:42
that we were going to talk to you about our book. How do you think they knew that? because we know that CIA as well as other
01:17:47
intelligence services, as an example, the United Arab Emirates, we know that they have a dedicated person that sits
01:17:53
in their office that watches us. So, how would they know you were coming here today? Our emails, I mean, our emails, our
01:17:59
publishers emails, um, our own text messages back and forth, listening in on phone calls, any number
01:18:06
of things could have happened. Uh, like we've tried to have a very collaborative relationship with CIA about this book
01:18:12
because we know how scared they are. We know how nervous this book makes them. So, we're trying to be extra
01:18:19
collaborative to to give them peace of mind like, "Hey, we're not about to go out there and tell the world that you're a bunch of animals and and terrible
01:18:26
anything." Um, they've actually read the book multiple times and and still they're they're afraid that we're going
01:18:31
to somehow like make them look bad because so many other officers have come out to become
01:18:36
authors who who make CIA look bad. There was a couple of other things that we are going to get back to the arcade and what happened next, but there's a couple of the things that sprung to mind when you talked about how people can make real businesses, fake businesses,
01:18:50
have various different covers. The the next one was you mentioned Edward Snowden earlier and in mentioning Edward
01:18:55
Snowden, you used him as an example of someone who returns to the country that they were working for the whole time.
01:19:03
So with Snowden in the Snowden case in in specific, right, whenever somebody flees
01:19:09
their own home country, yeah, nobody gives them protection for free. Even in the United States, we don't give anybody protection for free. You have to earn it. You have to share some sort of
01:19:20
currency and that currency may not be cash dollars. That currency might be information.
01:19:26
So when Snowden leaked to the Guardian the operations at NSA that were collecting against American citizens, the same American citizens that Gihei was just talking about, right? Nobody cares about Joe Bob. Everybody cares
01:19:39
about, you know, the person who's pretending to be an American citizen, but is in fact a terrorist threat. When
01:19:45
Snowden made his escape, his when he fleed the United States, he was essentially trading classified information, not just the the details of the NSA case that he whistleblow, but
01:19:57
other confidential information that he collected specifically as currency to help him basically pay his way through
01:20:03
Hong Kong and into China or into uh into Russia. And so he lives in Russia now. He's a Russian citizen. I'm pretty sure he's also received a Russian award for heroism. And you think he gave secrets
01:20:15
to Russia about the United States to to get that? I can almost guarantee you. Yeah. What he gave, I don't know. But Russia wouldn't
01:20:21
give him that status unless he had given them something in return. And the other one who sprung to mind as
01:20:29
real business, fake, you know, real business becomes successful is the man on everyone's lips at the moment, Jeffrey Epstein. M so Epste's a fascinating case because
01:20:42
Epstein fits all of the primary pillars of a foreign intelligence asset collecting information on American citizens, not an American spy
01:20:54
working for someone else. It's funny because people keep thinking like CIA killed him or people keep thinking that he somehow worked for CIA or maybe even
01:21:00
worked for for MSAD. What I see is the opposite that he if anything was working independently maybe even working for several company or several countries but collecting information on US people.
01:21:13
Is that what you believe? I think that he could have been that. I don't know that I necessarily believe
01:21:19
that it's true cuz he was a very successful business person. He had lots of um successful
01:21:24
friends. Actually, I was interviewing someone the other day and they said that they met Jeffrey Epstein and Jeffrey
01:21:30
Epstein was really really interested in their physics and science discoveries and wasn't interested at all in the finance year stuff that he was pretending to or he was purporting to be
01:21:44
involved in. And um this person said to me it was just really bizarre because he was only interested in the the physics
01:21:50
and science discoveries we had at Harvard. he wasn't particularly interested in finance to me and that person was was like really shocked by
01:21:56
that. What I've learned working with wealthy people and successful people is that they're often very intelligent and
01:22:02
they're often misunderstood and part of the reason that they have grown as successful as they have grown is because
01:22:07
they don't really fit in anywhere else. If they would have fit in somewhere else, they would have been distracted by the area where they fit in. Instead,
01:22:13
they had to carve their own interests, their own passions, their own their own drive. In many ways, when I look at
01:22:18
Epstein, that's that's what I see. I've also worked with many wealthy people who have gone to jail. And when wealthy
01:22:24
people go to jail, their whole identity crumbles and they start to doubt themselves and they start to have these irrational thoughts that sound totally rational to them. I had a client who was
01:22:36
very wealthy, who was going to jail after being found guilty of a crime that that arguably couldn't be proven, but
01:22:42
the court system was set up in such a way that he was found guilty. And he literally thought that it would be better if he if he cut off all ties to
01:22:49
his kids and just went to jail and then even when he got out of jail never talked to his kids again because that
01:22:55
would be better than shaming his children for the rest of their life. Yeah. With a father who went to jail. So
01:23:00
there's when I think about the Epstein case and I think about a wealthy powerful man who was having parties with
01:23:05
the world's elite and then he goes to jail and he kills himself. To me that's not an unbelievable series of events.
01:23:14
the whole thing with the island and the underage sex and all this stuff, you know, people just can't seem to shake
01:23:20
the idea that he wasn't extracting information. And then the fact that they won't release the flight logs
01:23:27
or a list of the names of people that were frequenting his island or interacting with him also raises another
01:23:33
question mark about why wouldn't the US government release that? Why isn't Trump very quick to release that information?
01:23:40
There are lots of secrets that are kept for lots of reasons. And when we talk about like if there's anything that
01:23:45
we've learned need to know the the need part is the driving part. What is the need to know? There's plenty of secrets the government has that it tells the American people it doesn't
01:23:57
know. It's just lying. Of course it knows. But it's working the common good to say if you knew what we knew. It could cause panic. It could cause chaos.
01:24:09
It could cause any number of things. And in the United States, that is one of the rights and privileges that the federal
01:24:14
government has. So, what do you both think happened with the Jeffrey Epstein situation because it smells fishy to everybody? The fact
01:24:20
that, you know, Trump and Cash Patel and various other White House officials were saying we're going to release it the
01:24:25
minute we get in there and then they get in there and they say there's nothing to release.
01:24:31
You you must cuz you understand this much more than I would. you must see like fingerprints of what you think is
01:24:37
actually going on there or the real reasons they wouldn't release it. When I look at it through a lens of probabilities,
01:24:44
the most probable outcome is that somebody in the prison was hired to hurt Jeffrey Epstein. That's the most probable outcome that somebody outside was watching the
01:24:56
Epstein case and knew that Epstein may or may not have compromising information on them and that wealthy well-connected
01:25:04
person paid to have a hit inside the prison. That's just the to me that's the most probable result of things
01:25:10
happening. That explains the missing evidence. That explains the videotapes. That explains the stories inside of
01:25:15
prison where nobody can see what's going on. Also, that's the most vulnerable place for Epstein to have been
01:25:22
neutralized. That's how we would have run an operation. But why why wouldn't the government release that? Why wouldn't they say a
01:25:28
prisoner killed killed him? The government may not know that cuz if a if a prisoner was paid to do it, they
01:25:34
may have covered their tracks well enough. Or they may have paid a prisoner and the guards to also cover the thing
01:25:39
up. Jail's a nasty place. People forget how nasty a place jail is. And jails are commercial. They're not federal for the
01:25:46
most part. So, it's a commercial business that has all sorts of plausible deniability that a federal business or a
01:25:53
federal organization, federal building doesn't have. So that's to me that's the most probable series of events. There's
01:25:59
still a chance that any number of the other conspiracies are true. But when I think of what what I've seen, what my
01:26:06
clients have seen, what what I would do if I was in the shoes of a foreign adversary or a foreign intelligence collection operation dealing with a Jeffrey Epstein type of situation, that's how we would clean it up. There
01:26:19
was a a press conference the other day where the reporters asked the Trump administration, "Does the Department of Justice have any indication that Jeffrey
01:26:25
Epstein was working with the US or a foreign intelligence agency or was he a spy of some kind?" And Pam Bondi um who works in the Trump administration said
01:26:37
to him being an agent, "I have no knowledge about that. We can get back to you on that."
01:26:42
Two really important things here. If they did have information on that in an active investigation, she would say, "I
01:26:49
have no knowledge on that." She would lie to the American public. That's what that's what you have to do if you're
01:26:54
trying to build a current case. Because if they acknowledge, we act we have some reason to believe that he might have
01:26:59
been an agent. Now, all of a sudden, everybody else out there would start destroying evidence and start hiding evidence and start and start making the
01:27:06
case much more difficult. So, if they knew, they would say they don't know. Do you think he was an agent?
01:27:12
I think he could have been. I think he fits the model of a very good reporting asset, but I don't have enough evidence
01:27:18
to say that he was actually one. Do you think he was? I mean, I think even if he I don't know that it matters is what I think. Like even if he was, that doesn't mean that it's
01:27:30
connected because he was a lot of things. So I I think I think people are focused on
01:27:37
it because it's interesting. Yeah. because it would be interesting if he was and it would be interesting if there
01:27:42
was this conspiracy. I think that's why people are focused on it, but I don't know that it really matters because in the grand scheme of things,
01:27:49
I mean, it could be a lot of things that led, you know, why are we talking about a dead guy who's not reporting?
01:27:56
I think it's just the allure, right? People want answers. Once the curiosity gap's open, people need to fill it with something. Correct. When when what the intelligence
01:28:04
community believes is that in any given moment, there are two penetrations of every intelligence service.
01:28:09
So, why are we talking about the dead guy that we don't know about when we're not talking about the dozens of arrests
01:28:16
and cases that are made every year of active moles, active penetrations that are inside of our intelligence
01:28:22
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01:29:19
So, take me back to the arcade. You you lock eyes with this guy, the guy wearing the uh what was he wearing?
01:29:24
Bomber jacket. The bomber jacket. What happens next? Once I realized that we had both made the same mistake, he darted off in one
01:29:32
direction and I felt burned. Burned is the term that we use whenever we are spotted identified as trained intelligence officers. Um, but I didn't want to act on being burned right away
01:29:44
because our training says that just just because you believe something to be true, you can't act on that truth. If
01:29:49
you act on that truth, then you're verifying to anybody observing that you already know you screwed up. So, I kind
01:29:55
of ambled around the arcade and played another couple of games kind of half-handed, half-hearted just to kill
01:30:02
some time before I left and finished my SDR route and finished my collection and went back to my back to my hotel for the
01:30:09
night. The whole process that I go through during the surveillance detection route, the whole process that
01:30:14
I go through to evacuate the country safely is all part of the details that we put inside Shadow Cell. But the
01:30:20
feeling that predominated that that dominated my thought process was just this feeling of failure. This feeling like I was I was a bad spy. I'm bad at what I
01:30:33
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
01:30:40
it wasn't helped as I went through the process of writing the book because as 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
01:30:52
kind of stark reminder of all the things that you've done wrong. What did you do wrong?
01:30:59
Whatever I did that got caught was wrong. If they caught me on my own behaviors, if the mole was the one that
01:31:07
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 a role
01:31:18
to play and I couldn't play that role anymore. And I think that's especially powerful to me
01:31:24
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
01:31:35
that job, they determined that I wouldn't be good enough. Okay. So, you already had an insecurity there.
01:31:41
And that was the first year at CIA. So, even though I built this career and I had a chance to carry out this
01:31:46
operation, I got to do these amazing things. All that plays out in the back of my head is I wasn't good enough then,
01:31:51
I'm not good enough now. One of the things that the CIA does is they teach you how to deal with head trash. Mhm.
01:31:57
What is head trash? It's funny actually. So head trash is all the terrible things that you say
01:32:03
about yourself in your head. That's the the colloquial term that we use is head trash. I'm not good enough. I'm ugly.
01:32:09
I'm fat. I wish my smile was better. Um, you know, my I lost my true love when I
01:32:14
was 14. Whatever, right? My my parents didn't love me because I wasn't a good enough kid. Whatever it was, all those
01:32:20
things are head trash. They're they're subjective thoughts that you have because of your
01:32:27
experience that don't have any basis in objective reality. CIA teaches us how to deal with that to a point. They teach us
01:32:34
how to counter that when we are operationally active so that we don't get distracted by the head trash going
01:32:40
on. This is what happened whenever I first knew I was under surveillance. They teach you how to handle stress,
01:32:46
mitigate uh um cortisol levels in your bloodstream, lower your heart rate so that you can get back to the task at
01:32:52
hand. How do they do that? Techniques like box breathing. What's that? Uh box breathing is a process that
01:32:58
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 uh it's breathing
01:33:05
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 and the goal there
01:33:12
is to reduce your heart rate, to reduce your blood flow, to reduce the speed at which the cortisol that's being released
01:33:17
from your brain gets spread to the rest of your body. So you can start to take back your physiological
01:33:24
movements and actions in a hope that it also brings back your cognitive functions and capabilities. So the
01:33:30
visualization process, just like when you're meditating and you visualize a victory if you're a professional athlete or if you visualize a beach if you're
01:33:36
stressing out at work, like you can visualize your way through an operation, an operational sequence to get yourself
01:33:42
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
01:33:51
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
01:34:04
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 they train you to be operationally useful, but then they
01:34:17
still condition you to be like loyal and needy of outside validation specifically
01:34:23
from them. So it's a very strange flywheel that exists. A lot of businesses are like that as
01:34:29
well. It's not a healthy relationship, but it's a very effective relationship. So you get back to your hotel. Are you
01:34:36
not at that point when you're back at your hotel thinking, "Right, I'm gonna find like how to get through like the restaurant kitchen door and like out the
01:34:41
back and I'll cycle back to because I'd be up all night thinking about going through that bloody like
01:34:46
restaurant kitchen." A big part of that is what you do in the second phase of your SDR. And I had those thoughts. I
01:34:51
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
01:34:58
pilot to just fly me on a puddle hopper puddle jumper somewhere where I walk across on foot and then I can make a
01:35:04
phone call from another place. Like I thought about all that all that [ __ ] right? The problem is if you actually
01:35:10
act on that and you're being watched, what sense does that make? The only person who would do that kind of crazy [ __ ] is somebody who's trying to escape the country. So what did you do? I went back to the hotel. My plan was to
01:35:23
was to literally just leave. Was to walk across the border like any other law-abiding citizen and just evacuate.
01:35:31
Walk across the border. fly to to leave like anybody else would leave and just gamble that they're not going to take me down, right? The gamble that I'm going
01:35:44
to be more boring than they will be confident and that before they arrest Alex Hernandez and make some sort of
01:35:52
public international incident, they're going to think twice and they're going to let me just leave.
01:35:58
What actually happened? So, what actually happened is um I get back to the hotel. I don't really sleep
01:36:04
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
01:36:10
to burst through the door and just take me down because they already know I'm changing my flight. They already know
01:36:16
I'm I'm updating my itinerary. I've made all the phone calls. I've worked it through my company, right, my cover
01:36:21
company to get me home early. So, I'm just waiting for them to break in. They never break in. I go to the airport the next day and uh on the path to the airport, I'm looking for surveillance
01:36:32
and I'm surveillance free. And I get to the airport first thing in the morning and I'm waiting and like every step I'm
01:36:37
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
01:36:44
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
01:36:56
and the border patrol says that you're not you can't leave through the main gate. You have to go through a second
01:37:02
round of interview. So they pull me off into a secondary room and I go through a light interrogation with two local
01:37:09
Falcon officers at like 7:00 in the morning first first flight out and and they're testing my story and they're interrogating me to understand what have I been doing in the country? Why did I
01:37:21
change my flight? They're going through my my cover story. They're going through my my uh meetings from the day before.
01:37:29
They're going through everything two and three times, which is an it's an interrogation technique to see if somebody's lying. And I'm sitting there
01:37:34
going through this whole process, watching what almost feels like like two untrained Border Patrol agents
01:37:43
trying to crack me. And it's uh 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
01:37:54
those situations in terms of body language and how you speak and Absolutely. CIA trains us on how to deal
01:38:01
with uh interviews, how to deal with interrogations, and even how to deal with uh actual um capture and and
01:38:08
strategic almost like enhanced interrogation like what you would call what we do call torture here in the
01:38:14
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
01:38:19
supposed to do in an interrogation. So, so you want to you want to reflect back to the interrogator what they expect to
01:38:26
see in a person of innocence. So you try to keep your you keep yourself from jittering. You you calm your nerves. You
01:38:34
try to match their curiosity. So if they lean forward, you actually want to lean forward, too. And if they lean back, you
01:38:41
want to lean back. And 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
01:38:48
same, that you're not better or worse or guilty or anything else. So mirroring is one of the techniques that we're using.
01:38:53
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
01:39:05
techniques is silence. So often times if you want someone to speak, all you have to do is sit there and be quiet because
01:39:11
it will force them to talk. This is something that many interviewers use, especially when they're border patrol
01:39:16
agents or when they're like law enforcement or local law enforcement. They'll just let somebody kind of admit
01:39:22
their guilt. So for me, they ask a question, I answer their question, and then we sit there in silence for as long
01:39:27
as we need to sit there until they ask their next question. And then we sit there and and I answer their question, we sit there in silence again. And
01:39:32
that's combating elicitation. It's a technique that we call counter elicitation. And that's just one of several elicitation techniques that
01:39:39
interviewers can use. And that's useful in everyday life, I guess, as well. Absolutely. In what context?
01:39:44
When you're dealing with a negotiation, when you're dealing with a hostile employee, when you're dealing with a
01:39:49
hard conversation, when you're trying to find information in a in another person who you think is holding information
01:39:55
back, elicitation techniques are incredibly valuable. You can ask them a question. You can ask them the same
01:40:00
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
01:40:07
mean, I'm sure you've seen it as a you you one of the things that makes you such an effective host in your own house
01:40:13
here is that you use elicitation techniques all the time. You ask feeling based questions. How did you feel about this situation? Uh, take me back to that moment. How would if you could if you
01:40:25
could be king for a day, what would you do? Right? These are all very advanced elicitation techniques because it gets
01:40:31
people to express more than they thought they would share. So you're in you're in that room in that
01:40:36
airport. These two very poorly trained guards are trying to get something out of you. They don't get it out of you.
01:40:42
Correct. So at some point they just let you go. Correct. So what ends up happening is they they're arguing with each other and
01:40:48
I don't know why they're arguing. It seems like uh from the from the pigeon words that I can pick up, one of them is
01:40:56
talking about being busy and not having enough time and this doesn't make sense and the other person's talking about
01:41:02
we have to do this, this is required, etc., etc. I don't actually know what they're saying to each other, but I see
01:41:08
that they're aggression with each other just keeps going up almost like two colleagues who are fighting, right? But
01:41:16
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
01:41:23
where they were going to retain me long term. So when faced with that kind of decision, they released me back to my
01:41:29
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
01:41:41
my plane, and feel safe. But I had to continue to show that I was not a trained officer. And at this point, Ji, are you how are you feeling back in the friendly
01:41:52
country? So, at this point, I still have no idea what's happening. Um I by the time I
01:41:59
hear from him, he is in the 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
01:42:09
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
01:42:16
through, I didn't find out until he actually returned home. And then I hear this story and I'm like, "What the
01:42:21
hell?" Like, 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
01:42:34
happy you're home. And then the next thing is how did this happen? and we just start taking action into, you know,
01:42:40
investigating like, did we do something wrong? Like, is there any any mistake that we could have made and we have to
01:42:47
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
01:42:54
really what we think it was or, you know, is he safe to like is his alias safe, you know, and then we have to
01:43:01
And what was your assessment? Did you think he could go back in? No, it was too risky. Yeah. We we assess
01:43:06
that Alex Hernandez was burned. Was burned. Yeah. And we assume Alex Hernandez being your undercover spy
01:43:13
name. Correct. The alias the the operating alias that we used. Uh and we assume that the cutout
01:43:19
country, the third country that Alex was traveling through. So anytime Falcon wanted to track Alex, they would track
01:43:25
him back to that third country. Alex would even use the Falcon airline to fly back and forth between the third country and Falcon specifically so that if Falcon intelligence ever suspected Alex,
01:43:37
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
01:43:44
study that Alex was fully burned that that the mole had come across either Alex's operational history or the mole
01:43:50
had come across my true name operational history and tied me to Alex. Whichever one it was, Alex was burned. But we also
01:43:56
assessed that everybody else who had been traveling to Falcon through the cell was still safe.
01:44:02
Mhm. So you assessed that your shadow cell, which was your team in the friendly country, were all fine.
01:44:08
Yeah. But Alex Hernandez, which was your alias, was could no longer be used. Correct. That and that was how the cell
01:44:14
was built. The cell was built where Alex Hernandez was the trip wire where the first person who be compromised would be
01:44:20
Alex and that would be the forewarning to everybody else so they could start to turn up their operational security.
01:44:28
So does that mean it's it's game over for you? For me in Falcon it's game over. I can I
01:44:33
can never go back. I can never go back in my true name. I can never go back in an alias name. Um all of my biometrics
01:44:39
meaning my fingerprints, my eye prints, like all of that is most likely compromised. all of Alex Hernandez, uh,
01:44:46
everything that I carried on me, all the digital platforms that I carried on me, which were all airgapped and isolated to
01:44:51
just Alex, all of those things we have to assume have been collected and and and um, synthesized and reverse
01:44:58
engineered. And you were running a real fake business, right? Well, yeah, I was I was a middle manager. I was a middle manager in the
01:45:04
very fake business. Oh, you're a middle manager. And that was a business set up by the CIA. Okay.
01:45:10
So, is that in part why you both decided to leave the CIA? Did did the shadow cell operation end at that moment? After shortly after Andy was
01:45:22
compromised, we found out that we were pregnant and we were hoping to be able to stay on at Wolf to continue because I
01:45:29
could have kept doing everything exactly the same. Wolf being the friendly country.
01:45:34
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
01:45:41
still could have helped. He just couldn't travel into the enemy country anymore. But headquarters decided that
01:45:47
we had been so successful and we were continuing to be successful by spreading the cell model to these to the other
01:45:54
locations that they wanted us to come home to Washington DC and train officers, train newer officers back at headquarters on how the cell model worked and um the new techniques we had
01:46:06
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
01:46:18
landing on CIA. And we start thinking, how do we not give up CIA to have a family? So we approach the agency and we tell them, you know, that we have this idea. If you'll put us on light duty,
01:46:31
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
01:46:38
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
01:46:45
that for other officers when they're not successful officers. But when you're a successful officer, they have different
01:46:50
plans and they try to just push you and push you and push you. So they rejected our offer and they said no to soft duty
01:46:56
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
01:47:02
very sensitive thing and we don't, your family's not our problem. And it was at that moment, I think, that we both
01:47:07
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
01:47:14
is. That's their number one purpose where if if our number one purpose is to be parents, we need to make a change.
01:47:21
What did the shadow cell accomplish in terms of the information or strategic objectives that it accomplished? So the shadow cell
01:47:33
really did do what what we started out you know what what the miss really did complete the mission that we started out to do and that was to find new intelligence sources and we were really
01:47:45
successful in doing that and it accomplished a secondary goal. We didn't know the effectiveness that the
01:47:51
shadow cell had in feriting 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
01:48:03
in I think it was 2019. It was later. So, but the case file that had identified that mole started all the way back with our operations. So, it was successful in fariting out the mole. It
01:48:16
was successful in building new intelligence sources inside of Falcon. It was successful in maintaining the
01:48:21
United States's intelligence advantage against this adversary at a time when all of our other operations were
01:48:28
compromised by the mole. I think what Ji's talking about is an completely unexpected benefit in that our model
01:48:36
seemed to have become the foundation for a massive restructuring at CIA in 2014,
01:48:42
just two years after our cell model when I was uh when I escaped Falcon. Two years after that, John Brennan, then director of CIA, rolled out a an entire
01:48:54
reorganization of CIA that was based off of the same cell model that we had built.
01:48:59
Was this the mole? We cannot confirm or deny anything about the mole. I will say this that if you if you research the time that that man was arrested, you'll find two other people
01:49:13
who were also CIA moles at the same period of time. same period of time. So, the work that you did overseas, um,
01:49:21
you believe helped lead to the capture of this mole? The work that we did overseas, we believe helped capture the mole that
01:49:28
that Falcon House was out to capture. And do you believe that the mole leaked secrets to the enemy country that ended up being the reason why they knew
01:49:41
that you were a spy? That was the assessment that we reached inside our own cell as well as what the counter
01:49:47
intelligence center which is the covert espionage group that Gi was talking about earlier. Their conclusion of the
01:49:53
facts was the same that we did not make any error in our operations. There was no no uh compromise in my behavior, no
01:49:59
compromise in my operations, no compromise of our systems or our communication methods. That the only way that Falcon could have found out about
01:50:06
me was through a leak from the mole. How did the mole get caught in the end? What did they do wrong?
01:50:12
It's a great question. So, um, FBI created a sting operation based off of the intelligence that we were able to collect through our operations that that brought the mole out. So, FBI created a
01:50:25
series of sting operations where they baited the mole into coming back onto American territory. And when the mole
01:50:32
stepped foot on American territory, they had enough of a legal case that they could arrest him at the airport and then
01:50:37
prosecute him in a court of law. and what was discovered about the mole and the work that they were doing and how
01:50:43
long they were doing it for and what they were being paid or given to do to snitch on the United States. So the details that that I know that I
01:50:54
know we can share. Mhm. Um they were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were not paid into the
01:51:00
millions, but they were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide information on operations, officers,
01:51:06
assets, locations. They were witting, meaning they knew that they were working with a foreign intelligence agency. They didn't believe they were working with a company. They didn't believe they were
01:51:18
working for a research institute. They knew they were working with a known foreign intelligence organization. Um,
01:51:25
and that the original ally who gave us the information about the mole, that original ally actually also retained incriminating data on the behaviors of that person that were shared with the
01:51:37
Department of Justice. And so was this this was an individual who was in the CIA who was approached by
01:51:44
this enemy country and the enemy country said to him, "If you give us secrets on
01:51:50
what the CIA are doing against us, then we'll give you hundreds of thousands of dollars. We'll give you something. We'll
01:51:55
give you cash at least as part of it. We may also give you other things. Here's the the nasty thing about espionage is
01:52:01
cash is usually only one of several rewards. There's also operations where uh where the cash is there so that when you're arrested, the your country that
01:52:12
arrests you believe that that's what your motivation was while all of your real money is kept in a separate account
01:52:18
that's saved within the actual currency of the country that you're serving. So this person, they were in the CIA
01:52:26
as a mole, leaking secrets about the CIA. They then left at some point and then the FBI set up a trap to get them to come back. Correct.
01:52:36
When they left, did they go to the adversarial country? We can't confirm those details because
01:52:42
to confirm those details starts to give more insight into who the mole was. Okay. But they they managed to because I was of thinking I was just wondering if this the other the enemy countries offer them like lifetime protection or
01:52:54
something. They do. So your enemy countries will offer you lifetime protection. They'll offer you multiple generations worth of
01:53:00
payment. So even if you're arrested, don't worry. Your kids will be taken care of and their kids will be taken care of. Uh you've got citizenship like
01:53:07
the case of Edward Snowden who's received citizenship. Sometimes they offer uh rewards and accomod and uh
01:53:13
accolades in their own home country. There's a a number of very strange and compelling offers that come about from
01:53:20
foreign intelligence services. When you think about a double agent, when you think about a spy who turns on their own
01:53:25
country, it's less about thinking that they're paid to do it. Spies aren't motivated usually by money. We weren't motivated by money. We're motivated by
01:53:36
that that very unhealthy relationship where you have to be validated by somebody else. And that same environment that CIA creates where all of its
01:53:47
internal officers have to be able to fight their own head trash but still seek validation from within their
01:53:52
organization. That unhealthy relationship is something that can be compromised and a foreign intelligence service can find an intelligence officer
01:54:03
and fill that void for them and validate for them and say you're talented and you've got promise and you've got potential and we see it and your own home service doesn't understand how important you are and your own home
01:54:14
service doesn't understand how valuable you are. If you'll help us with this, we
01:54:19
can reward you with money. We can reward you with citizenship. We can reward your children with future residency and with
01:54:26
college and and we can make you a very wealthy person. All the things that you worked for that your country would never
01:54:31
give you. Did the mole admit that they had been a mole? I do not believe so. I don't believe so. I also believe that that most espionage
01:54:44
cases when they actually go to court, they're not tried under the Espionage Act. they're tried under some gentler term, some gentler, lesser offense that
01:54:56
is easier to prove, but also helps the government protect its reputation against being penetrated.
01:55:03
So, this individual, they left the CIA, flew to this other country, they came back, and they tried to rejoin the CIA to get more information. Well, they tried to rejoin a federal agency and
01:55:14
that was that was how the FBI was able to to lure them and how they were also able to for for an interview. Yeah. For an interview and how they were able to get them on American soil.
01:55:28
Interesting. So I do want to share that that your curiosity right now is a major issue
01:55:37
with CIA because they already know they already know that very smart people out there are going to know that there's a
01:55:44
way there must be a way to reverse engineer the whole story who to find out who is Falcon or to find out where is
01:55:51
Falcon to find out where is Wolf to find out who is who is the mole right and what's going to be what's fascinating is
01:55:58
that We we have put every effort that we can into the story to make sure that it's not traceable because CIA had several penetrations at the same
01:56:11
time during our tenure at CIA. And that's both depressing and encouraging because it's encouraging in that it shows that what we were doing was
01:56:23
parallel to what many other officers were doing. We wrote the book Shadow Cell, but that doesn't mean we were the
01:56:28
only two people that were tapped on the shoulder to carry out experimental new operations. They could have asked five, seven, 12
01:56:34
other people to go carry out new operations to try to far it out this multi-penetration
01:56:40
of CIA at the time. But it's also discouraging because it's one of those areas that keeps these stories from being shared because CIA doesn't want the world to know that it was penetrated
01:56:53
by multiple people. It doesn't want the world to know who those people were. If it did, it would have disclosed this long ago.
01:56:58
Well, obviously my research team tried to figure out who it was. And the diary of a CEO research team is not a team to take lightly. So, I'm a little bit afraid to hear their
01:57:09
conclusions. Well, based on our own research, um, we thought that the mole was likely Jerry Chung Singh Lee, who spied for
01:57:17
China around the time of the book. Jerry began spying for China after leaving the CIA, then tried to rejoin the agency,
01:57:24
was allowed to leave the country by the FBI, and was arrested in 2018 at the airport when he returned to the USA,
01:57:31
just like the mole in the book. But it also says here, Andrew will not comment on whether he is actually the mole or not. So there's no point asking you if that's
01:57:43
if he is the mole. We have you been to China. We are under legal obligation to to neither confform neither confirm nor deny uh the results of your research
01:57:56
team but also the results of anybody else's research if they reach out to us and and ask for confirmation on who this
01:58:02
who the mole may or may not be. Has being in the CIA changed the way that you view reality and human beings?
01:58:08
Oh yeah. In what ways? Very much so. So I love this question and I really want you to be honest. Can you please share
01:58:17
with Steve how you went from your college beliefs to your postcia beliefs? So when I worked with refugees that was my first big turning point that humans
01:58:29
can be really nasty. Like I grew up Buddhist and so it was always like humans have the potential to be amazing
01:58:36
and I agree that's true. But when I worked with refugees, I realized that humans can be horrible and your you know
01:58:43
I worked with Bosnians and um and I worked with uh refugees from Rwanda where you know their neighbors literally turned on them. People who they had grown up with literally the next day
01:58:56
came over with a machete or came over with a gun and killed their family members and chased them through forests
01:59:02
or through whatever. And that can happen anywhere. That was the first time that I
01:59:07
realized that anytime somebody says that can't happen here, that's a lie. That can happen anywhere. None of those people ever thought, "Oh, yeah, that could happen here." None of those people
01:59:19
ever thought that. People always think that can't happen here. My neighbor would never do that to me. And that's not true. And then when I worked for
01:59:26
CIA, I, you know, that compounded the sense of like the world behind the scenes is a dangerous place and you can't fully. I sound horrible saying
01:59:37
these things. You can't fully trust anybody. I mean, the reason I'm with Andy is because I trust Andy 100%.
01:59:46
But he might be the only person that I trust everything that comes out of his mouth. Yeah. You only trust me like 98%.
01:59:51
Well, you know. Yeah. But I know I can get that other 2% out of you. That's why. So, you know, you really like you
01:59:58
always have to understand that people are a combination of good and bad. And while I wish while I would like to think that people would always try to heir to
02:00:10
the good, I always have to keep in mind that people have a bad side to them and they and there's any set of circumstances that could trigger that.
02:00:21
Do you think we're in one such moment? I think we're always in a moment. I think some part of the world is always in that moment. What about the United States? cuz I know Andy said when we had the conversation
02:00:31
the other day that he was going to try and leave the United States before 2026. Well, it's not just me alone leaving.
02:00:38
Yeah. Well, maybe we have different motivations. I don't know. Are you staying, Ji? Cuz he says he's leaving.
02:00:43
I've been the one who's been pushing to leave for years. Why? How would you sort of summarize the situation that the like western world
02:00:50
and the United States are in right now from your perspective with what you know?
02:00:55
Are these good times? Jiheis was born in Venezuela. What was Venezuela like in the 80s? Oh, it was nice. It was one of the world's best economies. It was a thriving democracy.
02:01:07
It was an excellent place with a large wealth gap. Jihi's parents. Her father came from a wealthy family,
02:01:14
a wealthy Venezuelan family. That's how they moved to Japan. It's not easy to pick up and move a family of four to
02:01:21
Japan or family of three and then have a child in Japan, right? All of that wealth that they had in 1980 when Ji was
02:01:28
born was gone in 19 just a few years later. Yeah. I think 80 85 maybe five years. And Venezuela went from being one of the most successful
02:01:41
thriving democracies with a strong economy. It went from that to what it is now. There is no shaking that reality from Jihei or from her family. M
02:01:51
so if there's anybody in the United States right now who is acutely aware of how fast everything can go sour, it's my
02:01:59
wife. And that's why what I certainly find is this uncompromising commitment to moving in large part because you
02:02:06
can't wed yourself to any one system unless you want to be available to the detriment of that system. Yeah, I believe in being mobile. [Laughter]
02:02:18
We rent. We don't buy. As you might have been able to tell, I'm absolutely fascinated by the psychology behind high performing sports teams. I think it started with my love for Sir
02:02:30
Alex Ferguson as a Manchester United fan. So, when I was told about a new Netflix series that covers the rise of
02:02:36
the Dallas Cowboys, it immediately piqued my interest. And this isn't because I'm mad about American football.
02:02:42
I'm not. I don't even watch it. But I do know about the Dallas Cowboys. And for a lot of Texans, they're much more than a
02:02:48
sports team. I watched this series and it is absolutely brilliant. It centers on Jerry Jones, an
02:02:55
oil businessman with no football background who bought the Cowboys in the late 80s and transformed them into the
02:03:01
most valuable sports franchise in the world. It's all about how one guy assembled a powerhouse team in the 1990s
02:03:08
made up of legendary players and coaches and through fearless decision-making led his team to three Super Bowl victories.
02:03:15
And I really enjoyed it and I think you might too. Check out America's Team, The Gambler and His Cowboys, which is
02:03:22
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02:04:34
Are there any particular skills that people who are trying to be successful in their average life, because this is
02:04:39
called the D of a CEO, that you learned through your time at the CIA that you think are most useful
02:04:44
for people to be successful, however you define that, in their day-to-day lives.
02:04:49
The first thing I want to say is that our book Shadow Cell talks not necessarily about awesome spies. It talks about how we went back to the
02:05:01
basics. We went back to foundational espionage, what we call at CIA, sticks and bricks. We gave up all the technology. We gave up all the fancy satellites. We gave up all the drones.
02:05:12
And we went back to build off of strong foundations. And we didn't do that because we're smart. We did that because
02:05:18
the terrorist groups that won the global war on terror were using bricks and stones and sticks. Mhm. And they were winning over an American
02:05:31
Department of Defense that had a $900 billion budget every year. We spent $8 trillion in the global war on terror only to evacuate Afghanistan. All of
02:05:44
that happened because they were using foundational tools that we couldn't crack. And in the shadow cell, that's
02:05:50
all we did. We used foundational tools that proved to dominate time after time. And there's so much in everyday life. And there's so much in business from marketing to sales to budgeting to
02:06:02
hiring practices to, you know, annual and semiannual reviews. There's so much that businesses can take from this basic
02:06:09
idea of never let go of the foundations. Never let go of your sticks and bricks. What advice would you give to the
02:06:15
average person in generally just generally in their life, you know, about how to live a good life based on what you've seen, what you know now, and how
02:06:21
you look at the world. For me, a good life is a life spent doing the things you want to do, the
02:06:27
things that bring you joy when you have the age and the energy to do them. It makes me super sad whenever I meet people who wait until their 60s and they
02:06:39
retire to be free to try and travel and and that's when they focus on learning the guitar and that's when they focus on art and their body just can't keep up with them. Their body can't travel like it used to travel. They have a shake in
02:06:50
their hand. They can't paint anymore but they they believed for 30 years that it would be better when they retire instead
02:06:56
of acting on it right now. And for me, it's it's all about finding joy in the moment today. My son is 12. He plays chess now. He wants to play video
02:07:09
games with me now. He wants to go deep into details about his favorite manga comics right now. All of that could be different in 5 days. My daughter is seven doing handstands and doing
02:07:22
cartwheels and all she wants is for daddy to to give her a shoulder massage at night and tell embarrassing stories
02:07:27
about my childhood to her while she falls asleep. That's what she wants now. All that could be gone and never come
02:07:33
back in 6 months. I have to do it now. If I don't do it now, it'll never happen. I won't be able to wait until I'm wealthy. I won't be able to wait until I sell a company. I won't be able to wait until I retire and then try to
02:07:45
get these moments back now. So, what can I do? I ask myself every day, what can I do right now to maximize the joy that I
02:07:53
get right now? Because it's not just my joy that's happening. It's also the joy that I'm giving to the people who want
02:07:59
my time and space. My wife, my kids, my peers, my clients. What can I do to bring joy to myself will bring joy to others. Why does that matter so much? I can see it in I can see it in your face.
02:08:13
My life is filled with people who failed to figure that out. My life is filled with a with a mother who kept waiting to
02:08:20
to do the things that she wanted to do and now she still doesn't get to do it. And grandparents who retired poor and
02:08:27
family members who retired poor and people who died early and people who got hurt and can't walk and
02:08:33
you know I called your mother. We spoke to your mother. Did you call my mom? Yeah. And when I asked her this question
02:08:39
I said to I said to your mother I said um what's your relationship like with Andy? And she burst into tears. Did she
02:08:46
really? She went on to say how proud she was of you, but it was telling that she she burst into tears when she was asked that
02:08:52
particular question. That's awesome. I'm I'm glad that you called her. I I I talked to Ji about
02:09:00
this often because I don't I never had a relationship with my father and my relationship with my stepfather was very
02:09:05
bad. I go into some of that in the book as well. And uh I as an adult only project negative assumptions on what they must have intended because that's what I was
02:09:18
shaped to believe as a child. I can't confidently project positive expectations on them because as a child I never believed they were doing anything positively. I believed my mom
02:09:30
was career focused and I believed that my mom didn't really want to be a mom. I believed that my mom didn't really want to be married to the man she was married
02:09:36
to. And that's what I believed as a kid. So now as an adult, that's my foundation. Ji's foundation with her
02:09:42
parents is completely different. Like it's incredible now because like the the disparity between my negative thoughts
02:09:49
of my youth and Jihi's positive memories from her youth are starkly contrasted. And that's why I want to give my
02:09:55
children something like my what my wife had. And what's your answer to that jih in
02:10:01
terms of what you want next? So when I was younger, I was brought up with this idea of a destination. So I did everything I was supposed to do. Got
02:10:12
good grades in school, went to college, went to grad school, got a career with the federal government. It was really good. And then we left CIA. And I was
02:10:20
like, but I had made it. Like I had I rode that train. I did everything I was supposed to do and I made it. So what
02:10:27
are we doing now? And it was a really hard transition for me. But now that, you know, we have the kids and we have our business, you know, and I've gone through a lot of therapy,
02:10:39
you know, I realize that Andy has been right all along. It really is. You never know what the next moment is going to bring. And so, you have to enjoy every moment that you have right now. You
02:10:50
know, don't put off that trip until next year. Do it as soon as you can. Don't, you know, like those dishes don't need to get washed right now. if your kid wants to read a book with you, like you
02:11:01
can just put that off for a little bit. Um, so I've it's taken me a long time, but Andy and I are now aligned on the
02:11:09
like live every moment with as much joy as you can because and to my other point, like you you never know when shit's going to hit the fan. So enjoy it
02:11:22
now because you never know when you might have to, you know, flee your house cuz you're, you know, it catches fire or
02:11:29
flee the country because a war breaks out or, you know, getting arrested in a foreign country. Yeah. Getting arrested in a foreign
02:11:34
country. And I'm a big believer of seeing the the writing on the wall. I don't think that, you know, my advice to
02:11:41
people is don't be complacent. Just like Andy said, you know, don't be complacent in your business, but don't be complacent in your life either. Like
02:11:48
when be as before World War II kicked off, there was tons of writing on the wall of what was coming and people just kept thinking to themselves that can't
02:12:00
happen here. It can't get that bad, can it? You're trying to tell me something. So the writing on the wall for Americans
02:12:05
is that we are transitioning into something new. We will never go back to what we were. And so you either need to be a part of creating the new America
02:12:18
or you need to start thinking about where else you're going to go because the America we knew before no longer
02:12:25
exists and it will never come back. This is new America now. So you either take part in it or you leave.
02:12:32
Okay. So what is old America under your definition? So old America, you know, and I'm I'm
02:12:40
not that old. So, you know, old America in my lifetime has been a series of uh you know, the the government appearing to work together, you know, the appearing to do things, you know, to
02:12:53
improve the lives of people, but also I think becoming complacent over time. Like the last several terms, we've had a strong executive that has slowly become
02:13:06
stronger, which I don't think is the way that we should be going, but that's what's happened. and a Congress who is
02:13:13
constantly in deadlock. So nothing is happening. And so we continue like I mean the the immigration problem. Why is the immigration problem a problem? This could have been fixed decades ago
02:13:25
honestly. Like decide what you want for immigration. Decide what you want your policy to be. Right? And the policy
02:13:32
clearly I think most people agree isn't open doors. So if it's not open doors, what do you want? and then make that policy happen. So, you know, I think I
02:13:43
think we've had a history now of an executive getting stronger. For some reason, the American people want a
02:13:48
strong man. So, when you say the executive, you mean the president? The president. Yeah. The president's getting more power to do
02:13:54
things. Yes. Because for a period of time, it was because Congress didn't want to make their own decision. So, they pushed the power to
02:14:01
the president. And then in probably the last 16 years, we've seen the president take more power, execute more executive orders. So whether you like it or not, we're in a period now where there's a
02:14:12
strong executive. When anybody gets power, it's very unlikely they're going to let it go.
02:14:17
So do you think Trump's not going to go anywhere? I think the executive Trump is the current executive, whoever the next
02:14:24
executive and the executive after that, they will continue to retain their executive powers. Yeah. this doesn't benefit them to let
02:14:30
go of the office of the executives powers. So jih if that's the old America where
02:14:36
it it got slightly more complacent, there was more power and increasingly more power given to the president.
02:14:41
Mhm. You're saying we're in a transitional moment now. What does that new America look like on
02:14:46
the end of that transition in your view? So I don't think we have a good idea of what it's going to look like. I think
02:14:53
the current administration is taking a lot of risks that I find interesting. Interesting is a very neuting [Music]
02:15:07
is the real word because I think that he's taking a lot of risks that really break down
02:15:14
how how things have been for a long time. So, you know, getting rid of uh, you know, pulling money from Medicaid and Medicare, getting rid of USA ID, you know, transitioning from soft power to
02:15:25
hard power. So, I think that these are, for me, I use the word interesting because we can't tell right now how that's actually going to play out. Hard power being dropping bombs on Iran.
02:15:38
Yes. So, we're giving more money to military and we're taking money away from, you know, aid basically. So, we're
02:15:45
making that shift. We're making, you know, various economic shifts, immigration shifts, and I don't think we
02:15:52
I think there's a lot of unnecessary panic about all of it because whether I agree with his methods or not, I think that that we just have to wait for things to settle out. And if something
02:16:05
doesn't work, you know, I think he's the type of guy that's going to take another risk and see if he can fix it or that if
02:16:11
it doesn't work by the time the next administration comes in, they'll have to do something with it. You know, like
02:16:16
there nothing stops. Everything keeps going. So, you know, I I don't know that this I don't know that America is heading for a future that I want to be a
02:16:28
part of. I think that's for me. I think that's a true statement. But I think there's a lot of Americans
02:16:35
out there who this is the path that they want to take. What is your perspective on everything Jihi just said?
02:16:40
The transition that's happening right now is a transition where we where the American people have to decide how much
02:16:47
they want to get involved and how much they want to let other people just do it for them. And Donald Trump is a I'll do
02:16:53
it for you kind of guy. And Joe Biden was also an I'll do it for you kind of guy. And Obama was an I'll do it for you
02:17:00
kind of guy. And we are electing people who will do it for us. Do what for us? Whatever whatever nasty thing we don't want to deal with. Budgeting,
02:17:11
currencies, hard work, foreign trade, foreign relations, wars, we don't we want to be able to just talk about it without having any blood on our hands. So we push that responsibility to our
02:17:23
government. When in fact, our founding fathers were the opposite. Our found our founding fathers were, "Hey, the blood is on all of your hands. You tell us what you want us to do. Do you want a
02:17:34
revolution? Then let's go fight a revolution together. Do you want to build a new government? Then we'll build
02:17:40
a new government together." That's that's how our country was supposed to be formed.
02:17:46
So when Ji says that we're in a transition and she doesn't know where it's going, she is accurate. We don't know what the future holds. Except we
02:17:53
know the future holds more pain for sure because we will either come out of this
02:17:59
through a painful transition that makes us better or we will come out of this through a less painful transition that
02:18:06
leaves us in a position that none of us want to be in and then we're going to have to put in more pain to fix it all
02:18:11
again. And how do you think the transition levels out? Where do you think we end up
02:18:17
if you had to guess? I think that we have a solid 6040 right now. I think there's a 60% chance that
02:18:23
we don't like where the transition ends and then we spend 15 to 25 years fixing it again. Fixing our economy, fixing our superpower status, fixing our foreign relations, fixing our fixing our trust
02:18:34
of our own government. I think there's a 40% chance that the the decisive action
02:18:41
Donald Trump is taking right now is adopted widescale and we actually stimulate our economy, get people back
02:18:48
on the same page and and move forward in a way that keeps us one step ahead of our of the threats that we see from
02:18:55
China, the disaster that we see continuing to unfold in the Middle East, the the precipice that we have come up
02:19:01
against in terms of geopolitics. There's a chance that we come out of that. But I think the dominant chance is that we
02:19:08
don't. And I I would say that that's not just my opinion. That's the opinion of economists of of economists. That's the opinion of foreign uh foreign relation experts. There are multiple people out
02:19:20
there who are all saying that our budgetary decisions, our foreign policy decisions, our military infrastructure
02:19:25
decisions, our economic decisions are risky. risky means there's a chance they'll work, but it's a low probability
02:19:32
chance, not a high probability chance. And how do you think the transition levels out? Where do you think we end up
02:19:39
if you had to guess? I think that we have a solid 60/40 right now. I think there's a 60% chance that
02:19:45
we don't like where the transition ends and then we spend 15 to 25 years fixing it again. fixing our economy, fixing our superpower status, fixing our foreign relations, fixing our fixing our trust
02:19:57
of our own government. I think there's a 40% chance that the the decisive action
02:20:03
Donald Trump is taking right now is adopted widescale and we actually stimulate our economy, get people back on the same page and and move forward in a way that keeps us one step ahead of
02:20:15
our of the threats that we see from China, the disaster that we see continuing to unfold in the Middle East,
02:20:21
the the precipice that we have come up against in terms of geopolitics. There's a chance that we come out of that. But I think the dominant chance is that we don't. And I I would say that that's not
02:20:33
just my opinion. That's the opinion of economists of of economists. That's the opinion of foreign uh foreign relation experts. There are multiple people out there who are all saying that our
02:20:44
budgetary decisions, our foreign policy decisions, our military infrastructure decisions, our economic decisions are
02:20:50
risky. risky means there's a chance they'll work, but it's a low probability chance, not a high probability chance.
02:20:57
And in such a scenario, then the economy would would be hurt and then there'd be more wars presumably because if we're if
02:21:03
the society becomes more individualistic and focused on themsel and nationalistic, then they become more of
02:21:09
an island. People get more paranoid. They start building, I know Trump say he's building like the he's calling it the Golden Dome over the United States
02:21:15
so that he can fire any rockets out of the air if anyone attacks. And then you kind of have to unravel that and try and
02:21:21
go the other way potentially. Is that kind of what you're saying? I try to do as much reading as I can. I'm sure you're the same way. And uh one
02:21:27
of my gifts to myself is when I read fiction and I'm reading a book called the the left hand of darkness by a
02:21:35
sci-fi legend named Ursula Din. And it's a book from the 70s. And I'm reading this book and in it she has this quote where she talks about nationalism inside
02:21:47
the the world of the science fiction planet that she's on, right? And the the quote is something like nationalism is not a product of pride. It's a product
02:21:57
of fear. People aren't nationalistic because they're proud of what they have. They're
02:22:04
nationalistic because they're afraid that something might take away what they have. And anytime you are driven by
02:22:11
fear, you don't have the chance for true happiness. And what I found in that that
02:22:18
passage from this sci-fi book was really very insightful to what I see happening across the United States. We're all
02:22:26
nationalistic, left and right, gay and straight. Whether you whether you are old or young, we're all nationalistic. We all love our country. But the things
02:22:37
that's driving so much of our nationalism is this fear of the other side. Not a fear of the collapse of our
02:22:44
society, not the fear of some rising power across the ocean. But for some reason, we're more afraid of our
02:22:49
neighbor than we are afraid of the real threats that are out there. Because at the end of the day, there California and
02:22:58
Mississippi have much more in common than the United States and China. But for whatever reason, we get so distracted and so confused with our own infighting, that we don't realize that
02:23:09
infighting is exactly what all of our adversaries from Russia to North Korea to Cuba to even even uh you know,
02:23:16
Bulgaria, which is a NATO country that's pro-Russia, our infighting just helps them. And and what's the potential worst case scenario of that infighting? Because
02:23:26
people think, okay, it just means people are going to pop off at each other on on X and Twitter and social media and they're going to scream at each other
02:23:32
and then gridlock is the biggest challenge. I I don't believe that we're going to be going into any kind of civil war in the
02:23:38
United States. We're not going to shoot each other. We're not going to go machete our neighbors. Not now. But
02:23:44
gridlock is going to lead to economic collapse. economic collapse is going to lead to very real individuals having
02:23:51
very real problems which is going to lead to an increase in criminal activity. People will steal from each
02:23:57
other. People steal from from stores. People will you know lie and hurt each other to try to take care of their own.
02:24:04
And as that society starts to collapse and we become more and more tribal again all very predictable all all case
02:24:10
studies that we've seen all over the world. As we become more and more tribal, then we will become fed upon by
02:24:17
our adversaries who don't have the same problem. When you said gridlock is the the first sort of domino that falls there. What is
02:24:24
gridlock? I see gridlock as policy gridlock. We don't know how to move forward with
02:24:29
Israel. We don't know how to move forward with the budget. We don't know how to move forward with whether or not we ratify these election results. Right?
02:24:36
And in the p in the time that we don't know how to move forward, it creates an opportunity for somebody else to bypass
02:24:42
the democratic process and just dictate the outcome. And that series of dictations makes it so that the outcome is less collaborative, less well thought out, less welldefined, less palatable
02:24:55
for more people. And then that distrust kind of continues on. We do live in a moment now where the distrust for government is higher than it's been in a long time. We see the we see the largest
02:25:07
decline in American currency that we've seen in decades and in century in a in the better part of a century. We see a lack of public trust. We see consistent presidential approval ratings below 50
02:25:20
for every president that comes through. We we are in a place where the people just don't trust their own government.
02:25:26
And I would say that that's not such a big deal except that we are the wealthiest country in the world. We are
02:25:32
the largest military in the world. We are the largest producer of financial tools and the largest producer of weapons. We are a big [ __ ] deal to not have our [ __ ]
02:25:44
together. Welcome to the United States. Shadow Cell, an insiders account of America's new spy wall by Andrew Bustamante and Ji Bustamante.
02:25:58
It is a fascinating book because usually the public doesn't get to read books like this and for the reasons you said
02:26:05
because they're so highly scrutinized and then ultimately decided to be confidential by
02:26:10
the CIA. But this one managed to get through. So I highly recommend everybody reads it. We've touched on some of the
02:26:16
surface level elements of this, but if you want the details of what happened, then this is a book good book to read.
02:26:21
But it also just gives you a window into a world that most of us live in ignorance to cuz we don't we don't realize these things happen. It's
02:26:27
actually from doing this podcast that I that things that I thought were conspiracy theories became not
02:26:34
conspiracy theories, you know. Yes. Because before I started this podcast and started to speak to people like you
02:26:39
and other guests that I've had, I thought that well I was watching podcast and thinking that that's [ __ ] No, that's [ __ ] That doesn't happen.
02:26:45
There's these like spies that that's not going to happen. There's no way that like one country spies on another.
02:26:50
There's no way that like, you know, people go undercover into countries and get secrets and do all these crazy things. I thought that was movies, but
02:26:57
actually that happens. And all countries are doing it to each other. And I imagine even the United States is doing it to some of their allies. Like I
02:27:03
imagine the United States probably has spies in the UK, for example. The the United States doesn't claim to
02:27:09
spy on the Five Eyes countries, and the Five Eyes have all claimed not to spy on each other. Um, but that's just a claim.
02:27:18
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the
02:27:24
question left for both of you to answer individually is how did a mistake you made shift the trajectory of your life
02:27:32
in a way you could not have predicted? I would say that the mistake I made that shifted the tra that truly shifted the trajectory of my life was staying with
02:27:45
my ex-boyfriend for so long. Um because I we'd been together a year and I knew it then the relationship was already troubled and I was applying to
02:27:59
the Peace Corp right out of college. But I also knew that if I joined the Peace Corps and I went overseas, the relationship wouldn't survive. And for some reason, I chose the relationship
02:28:11
over Peace Corps. And because I chose the relationship over the Peace Corps, I ended up going to grad school. so I
02:28:17
could stay with him. And then because I went to grad school and the relationship
02:28:23
drained me of all of my money, I ended up applying to the CIA. And if I hadn't been in that relationship, I never would have joined the CIA ever. I never would
02:28:34
have met Andy. I wouldn't have the kids I have right now. I wouldn't have the life I have right now. So, arguably a mistake to
02:28:42
stay in a bad relationship for seven years, but I wouldn't be where I am today without that.
02:28:50
It's hard for me to answer the question because I I keep finding myself coming to the same conclusion that Ji came to
02:28:56
that all of the mistakes that I think about making all led to a sequence of events that brings me to where I am now. So I'll actually give a more recent example that is changing the course of
02:29:09
my life right now. In 202 I hired the first executive into my company, the first kind of equal executive to me as a CEO. And I hired
02:29:24
that person because they came well recommended. I hired that person because they had a a long track record of success. I hired that person because
02:29:30
they seemed to understand a lot of things about business that I didn't understand and it was time for for me to scale and it was an important thing to
02:29:38
for me as a CEO to lead the charge by hiring the right people and then in the following 16 months that person lost the company individually
02:29:51
a half a million dollars and then put us into debt almost another $215,000. So, a giant $730ish,000 mistake in one 16-month period of time.
02:30:06
And throughout that whole time, I I saw the mistakes. I saw the errors. And I kept convincing myself not to take action. I kept thinking, "This is just what scaling must look like. This person
02:30:17
must know what they're doing." Like, you have to spend money to make money. Uh we have to we have to prepare for the
02:30:22
future. Like, I kept rationalizing every step. Oh, this was just a misunderstanding. you know, this was just a this was something that will pay
02:30:28
off 6 months from now. And then, you know, that 16 months kind of ended in March of this year. And I'm staring at a healthy company that has zero dollars in it checking
02:30:41
account that's carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. And I realized I can't let somebody else try
02:30:50
to do this because nobody cares as much as I do. I'm the owner. I'm the CEO. The company was built because of my passion
02:30:56
for the lessons and my passion for the people that we serve. We are co-owners of the company together. Gee, he
02:31:01
believes in me and she trusts me and I can't violate that trust by continuing to think that somebody else can do it
02:31:08
better. So I remove that person from their position. I radically change the company and within 3 months we are back
02:31:16
into a profitable statement. We are months away from being able to pay off all the debt that we had gathered. We'll
02:31:22
never get back the money that we lost and all the failed investments, but we are on a trajectory to go in a
02:31:28
completely different direction because I took hold of my company and made it my company again. Instead of thinking that I wasn't qualified or wasn't capable or wasn't good enough to be the CEO that
02:31:41
built the company, why wouldn't I be good enough to be the CEO that grows the company? I think a lot of um young founders can
02:31:48
relate to that. I hear that story so often. I hear that story all the time. I've heard it for many many years of the founder that starts a business and then basically gets like gaslighted by oh
02:31:59
this person's an executive. They've done it for 26 years so they must know what they're doing. I'll give them a massive salary. I'll give them control. And then
02:32:06
they make a set of decisions which because you you know you've not walked that path before, you're unable to have
02:32:11
high conviction as to whether those decisions are good. But because they are so expensive and their decisions are so
02:32:16
expensive, you kind of have to go with it. And then eventually you realize at some point that just because someone has
02:32:24
worked in some interesting places or had some previous interesting job titles doesn't equip them for this challenge.
02:32:30
And especially when it's a small but this is actually the paradox of it as well like the mentality of success in like big scale businesses is not the
02:32:36
mentality of success in like a high startup you know where you're like penny pinching. Yeah.
02:32:41
Thank you so much. I super enjoyable hearing the story. It was actually much more captivating reading your book than
02:32:48
I assumed it would be. Um, and I think that's because of the level of detail you go into in the book, which you just
02:32:54
wouldn't have come across before. So, I really recommend everybody goes and read it. And thank you again for coming back here and it's wonderful to meet you, Ji, because I've heard about you before, but
02:33:00
putting a face to the name is is always useful. So, thank you so much for being here and continue doing what you're doing because you're opening our eyes to
02:33:06
a world that we would otherwise not be able to see. So, thank you both. Thank you, sir. Thank you.
02:33:11
This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the
02:33:17
show. So, could I ask you for a favor? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just
02:33:24
that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my
02:33:29
power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback.
02:33:34
We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.
02:33:41
Heat. Heat. N. [Music] [Music]