Speaker 1: It's great to have Andrew Bustamante
back on the program. Andrew's a former covert CIA officer and also founder of
the everyday espionage training platform. Great to have you back on, Andrew.
Speaker 2: Hey, David. It's great to be here, man. It's been a while since we last a while.
Speaker 1: It's been a while. We were joking. We both were a lot younger last time you were on.
So, listen, I mean, for people in my audience who don't know about some of your experience, give
us, like, a brief overview of your role at the CIA and the sort of things you worked on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. I, my name is Andrew Bustamante. I'm a former CIA intelligence
officer. I served with CIA from 2007 to 2014. And, I've served primarily in a clandestine operations
role, which is what most people call an undercover role. I left in 2014, started a business. And
my business is how I currently make a living teaching the same skills I learned at CIA
to everyday people in a way of making them, teaching them how to break barriers.
Speaker 1: So I want to get to some of those skills in a moment. In terms of your work at CIA,
when you talk about clandestine. Give me, some or all of the above people then didn't know what
you were doing. You still can't talk specifically about you were what you were doing. Family didn't
even know generically what your job was. I mean, like, what degree of clandestine are we talking?
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So I was part of the clandestine Ops Corps, which is the second
deepest core. The deepest core of clandestine operations is essentially a program that's that
I can't even talk about with by by the real name of the program. Right. And that's where you have
your individuals who are so deep that there's no attribution of them at all on American records. I
was one step above that, working for what's called the National Clandestine Service or the NCS. My
parents did not know what I did. My my girlfriends did not know what I did. My siblings did not know
what I did. They all thought that I worked for an organization that that I was attributed with
meaning. My tax records, my pay stubs, my health insurance all came from a completely different
organization. And that's who everybody thought I worked for, when in reality I was working for CIA.
Speaker 1: So to be clear, not only did the people you just mentioned not
know that you were part of NCS, they didn't even know you worked at CIA.
Speaker 2: Correct? Correct. That NCIS, the National Clandestine Service is
essentially a, an office within the larger CIA. And that's how CIA is structured, just
like any other government organization. Only it's obviously much more interesting.
Speaker 1: What can you tell us about the recruitment process where so when you start
talking about this role, the CIA, presumably they know that at the end of the rainbow, there
is this level of secrecy around the role. You may or may not know that right away, but it would
be normal to talk to people in your life about I'm interviewing or whatever the term would be,
how earlier you told us we need secrecy. Even as far as the process that is going on here.
Speaker 2: That's an excellent question. So, because there's so much sensitivity around, these
clandestine roles, the first phone call that you get is a very generic phone call, the invitation
or the the offer to the first interview, because it's very much a recruiting type of organization.
They don't wait for. You can't apply. Yeah. For that type of role, you can apply for a different
role but then get flagged for a clandestine role. Yep. So there's a number of different ways that
they find you. But either way, a recruiter will call you and a recruiter will basically speak
in generic terms and say something along the lines of, hey, we saw your application for XYZ.
We think you would be a good fit, potentially in a different national security role. Would you be
interested? And then they'll kind of outline that that national security role is managed through
in-person interviews, and that they will fully fund and pay for your travel and, relocation for
an interview at this location. And then in that first interview, they go through a very generic
I mean, everybody's been through a job interview before. They go through a very generic interview
that gets more and more intense as you show, the right types of behavioral, tells that you
would be good at a clandestine role. And then by the end of that first interview, that's where
they tell you, we would like to recommend you for a clandestine role with CIA, or thank you very
much for your time. You know, you'll hear from us a different day. Yeah. Once they kind of disclose
that they are recruiting for CIA, then they will tell you if you plan to move forward with this
role, we need you to effective immediately start telling people this different story. Right. You
came to Washington, DC because you're applying for various government jobs, or you're coming to,
McLean, Virginia, or you're coming to, Nashville, Tennessee, or you're coming to Chicago, Illinois
in order to, apply to, you know, something else other than the National Clandestine Service.
Speaker 1: Now, presumably I have not been in this situation, but it seems to me that there
would be some psychological weight to this, ability or lack of ability to talk about what
you do. I would guess as you get further into it, maybe you receive training or guidance about
managing the psychological aspect of it, but I'm guessing that that first time
you're told that these are the stakes, you don't necessarily have the those skills. I
mean, talk a little bit about the impact of that. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So what you find
later in your career that you don't know when you're first being recruited, right. Is that as
you become a recruiter of future officers, that whole first interview is an assessment. That's
all it is. It's a psychological assessment that is informal, executed by an experienced officer
to determine whether or not the person who's, who is a candidate is a suitable candidate. And
then after that, that, that experienced officers assessment, then when they introduce the idea of,
hey, you, you are being invited to work for CIA, that's when the next interview is organized and
the next interview is the very clinical, very hard hitting, multi-day psychological evaluation.
Speaker 1: What are some of the maybe more either mundane or obscure things that you learn in
training for the work that you did? That could be surprising to some people, either because
of the level of obscurity or just how mundane it might sound to the everyday person.
Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, one of the most interesting things, man, is, is how powerful
questions are. And it's it's fascinating because, you know, we all talk about questions and we
read about questions in questions or something that you you covered in exhaust, you know,
ad nauseum in college. But in everyday life, in the interactions between people, questions are
a very powerful thing because they they control the conversation. The person asking the questions
controls the conversation. However, the person answering questions is the person who feels the
most fulfilled by the conversation. So in essence, when you're asking somebody a question, you're
making them feel good about themselves, especially if you're asking them questions where they know
the answers. You see this all the time in your work, David, because you interview experts all
the time about what they're good at. So they never have, they want. And for the most part, they walk
away from a conversation with you feeling very good about themselves. That applies everywhere in
the world, whether you're talking to your boss, whether you're talking to a car salesman,
whether you're talking to your kid's teacher, whether you're talking to your kids themselves.
When you have when you ask questions that people can answer, they feel good about themselves.
And by feeling good about themselves, they feel like they can trust you. And that
gives you an incredible amount of control over where you take that relationship.
Speaker 1: That's very interesting. And so this was relevant in your work insofar as
you had to deal with all sorts of different people in all sorts of different situations, and
understanding the way your questions to them would make them feel was relevant to your goals.
Speaker 2: Right? Because espionage is illegal and this is something that people get.
They don't understand. Espionage, which is the fancy word for spying, is illegal everywhere,
including inside the United States. The only way that CIA can execute espionage is because there's
a very specific carve out in American law that says that a U.S. citizen working at the direction
of CIA is granted authorities by the president to break this law. You know what I mean? Yes. So when
you're spying, when you're carrying out espionage, it's illegal everywhere. You never want to
get caught. So everything you do is Serap tissues. When you're collecting secrets from
somebody, you can't just come out and say, what's the secret? What's the code to your nuclear
missile program? Iranian general what's the plan for Taiwan? Chinese military general? You
can't ask those questions. You have to have some kind of conversation where you elicit those
intelligence nuggets. And the only way you can have those conversations is by asking pointed,
intentional, strategic questions that make people talk about things they shouldn't talk about.
Speaker 1: When you think about the work that you do did, what do you think would be most surprising
to the average American about the substance of the sort of things that you were working on?
Speaker 2: The most surprising thing that I think people don't understand is that secrets
are very, very boring. Very, very boring. The kinds of stuff that is truly kept secret, it's not
what kind of missile Russia has in its arsenal. Right? Hypersonic missiles is not a secret. But
what is a secret is the specific pressure that's maintained in the hypersonic missiles chamber for
where it combusts the fuel source. That number is a secret and a very, very well guarded secret
that if the United States could get Ahold of, we could essentially neutralize or sabotage the
entire Russian hypersonic missile force. Right. But nobody thinks like you can't make a James
Bond movie about James Bond trying to find out the pressure ratio inside the combustion engine
of a hypersonic missile. That's not a sexy idea, right? So instead, we believe that secrets are
sexy when really secrets are very, very boring. Speaker 1: All right. So this is really good
context kind of for the sort of stuff that you worked on. So in the five years since we
last spoke, and for disclosure to the audience, as far as I understand, you're more politically
conservative than I am, and we'll see if I'm right about that and we'll see if that kind of comes out
in this conversation. Over the last five years, there has been a contingent of the American voting
public, people who pay attention to what's going on that has been increasingly hostile to
American intelligence agencies. And this includes FBI prominently. It also applies to
some degree to CIA, NSA, etc. much of it was catalyzed by the investigation of Donald Trump, by
Robert Mueller, and other events that are sort of we are publicly aware of you as someone who was
inside this system for a while, has your opinion generically about American intelligence agencies
in the context of the sort of news stories we've seen over the last five years? Has your opinion
changed about American intelligence agencies? Speaker 2: It's a two fold answer, right? I
would say yes and no. So my opinion about the American intelligence services has always been
that their job is to protect American interests, protect national security interests. But here's
the kicker. National security interests are not the American people. And that's something that the
American people misunderstand. FBI is not there to protect individuals. CIA is not there to protect
individuals. It's there to protect the priorities that are set forth by Congress as national
security priorities that protect the institution of the United States. So I very much believe that
the CIA of today and the CIA of the 1970s and the CIA of the 2000 was always and remains very
focused on that mission, protecting national security interests as set forth by the Congress.
Right. However, where I have seen my opinion, change is in how they go about doing that. It
used to be that the secret intelligence services, which are many, right. The intelligence community
has 16 different secret intelligence services. The Army has their own service. The NSA is a service.
The NCA is a service. The NRO is a service. The FBI is a service they all have. There's multiple
secret intelligence services inside the United States. What they used to do was was serve in
secret. Now they serve much more publicly. You have more and more leaks of people who anonymously
give their opinions to various news sources. You have more and more people who are coming out
and publicly, leaving service and then publicly, lambasting the administration that they served
under. So you're seeing, like, a change. And it's very similar to the change that you see culturally
across the United States, where people are becoming more politically verbal, more politically
active on the far extremes, whereas the silent majority in the middle is being overlooked.
Speaker 1: And in what way do you see this affect the individual at the expense,
as you say, of this greater apparatus that the intelligence agencies defend?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we need to understand that as individual American citizens, we have the freedom
and the rights that are granted to us by our government to pursue our own happiness. But that
doesn't mean that we can pursue our happiness at the cost of our neighbor's happiness. That's where
the law comes into play, right? That's where our legalistic, nature or our structure as a society
is built upon. It's built upon. My being happy does not cost David Pac-man's being happy. We have
to find a way to coexist and work together. The the individual needs to understand that, because
what happens at the national level is that when we start to, go outside of the boundaries of
the authorities or the mission set that we are given in order to share our opinion or, or,
you know, irritate some existing challenge, like a political challenge when you see CIA
come out and comment on on Donald Trump, that's not their role. That's FBI's role. FBI
is supposed to investigate, right? You see the same thing when you see the constant back and
forth, threats of impeachment or the ousting of the House, the speaker of the House, like you're
an attempted ousting of the speaker of the House, like you're seeing here in Congress. Like this
is not your primary job. Your primary job is to keep the American people safe by protecting
American national security interests and making sure our society as a whole gets stronger, not
undermine the purpose and intent of your office that ultimately weekends our societal standing.
Speaker 1: If you were to put a partizan filter over intelligence agencies generically,
or if you want to just focus on CIA, we can. Do you believe that these agencies are
more aligned with the priorities of either of the two major political parties right now, or that
that would be the wrong sort of filter to apply? Speaker 2: The filter is always changing. You are
100% right by applying a filter, because you have to understand that the the CIA and the FBI and
the national, the the intelligence community serves at the behest of the executive branch. The
executive branch is headed by the president. He is the chief or she is the chief executive. So
whenever the president changes, they change all of their leadership, which means the heads of each
of these, I see, I see, or intelligence community partners is always at risk of being replaced or
changed. And then whoever is replaced is obviously one who is sympathetic towards the the party of
the ruling, executive. So you see this constant rotation, then it filters down and down further
and further. And if you consider presidents that run multiple terms, which is until recently that
was fairly common. You would have these eight year stints where we'd have an eight year conservative
president and eight year progressive president. So over the course of those eight years, multiple
offices within the organizations, within the intelligence organizations would then change to
become sympathetic towards that ruling party. Speaker 1: There's a sense that within many
of these agencies and also non intelligence agencies and large federal governments, there is a
sense that many of the employees, while privately they may vote and they may have opinions. Their
jobs are primarily either bureaucratic in nature or related to intelligence gathering in a
very narrow way. That doesn't really allow for political bias in the sense that we might
understand it. And there are some really just some Republicans who have talked about replacing,
even through something like project 2025. Traditionally bureaucratic or nonpolitical federal
government employees with political activist types, for example, it could be the Department of
Education, could be bureaucrats at the IRS, could be intelligence agencies based by the standard
you're talking about here, which is getting away from politics and getting towards national
security. I would imagine you would be against such a change. Am I right in that assumption?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're absolutely right. That would be a mistake. To politicize government
service is to undermine the whole promise of government service. Right. Government
servants are supposed to serve the government, not a party. And the government is supposed to be
something that is established by the voting rights of the people. So whether you like or disagree
with whoever the people say should be in the administrative powerhouse. Right. Whatever,
whatever administration is set by the people, you and your job is to serve the government
that was set by the people. So we've had a very functioning, effective operational level of
government for a long time. I mean all across the IC for those for anybody who lives in Washington
DC or anybody who's worked in government, you know that at the first 2 or 3 levels of your career,
you are a political. Your job is to execute on policy. Right. And review changes to legislation.
Execute on, on basic, basic operational needs that keep the government running. It's not until
you've been in government for ten, 12, 15 years that you start rising up to middle management,
which is a mandate of government service. You must either escalate or evacuate. Really, as you
start going up, that's when you start having to play this very political game where you have to
understand the needs of your boss, whether they are politically leaning left or right, whether
or not the policy is changing, and that's going to change the funding source and that's going to
change the prioritization. And then that just gets worse and worse the higher you get in a in a role.
Speaker 1: I think there's a notion which may not be true, that those who choose to get into
law enforcement, intelligence and military tend to be more politically conservative
to the extent that you had colleagues and coworkers the way many people do. And
when you're working in a clandestine role, I don't know if you have that sort of relationship
with colleagues and coworkers. Did you observe or even notice the political leanings of
the people you worked with, or was it really kept out of the work that you did?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think this is an example of just how secret these
organizations are, right? In reality, David, the vast majority of people who
go into intelligence work are liberal. Speaker 1: Is that.
Speaker 2: Right? They are actually progressive, and they're hired between
the age of 24 and 28. But what happens is, as they gain years of experience dealing
with the world outside of the United States, dealing with just the the trash and the
threats and the the chaos. And they could the the the corruption that exists everywhere else
in the world that also exists here, but by, by virtue of intensity, it's much less intense
here. They start to see how how important it is to maintain the United States as the world's
global superpower. And then that progressive as they become 30 and 35 and 40 and they become
senior leaderships, they shift to a more center and even right position. But for the most part.
Speaker 1: That's very interesting. Now, obviously.
Speaker 2: Come on, the liberal. Speaker 1: Eye, this is Andrew's opinion. I
have nothing with which to refute it because it's a claim about what's going on within these
organizations. I don't know that that's true, but I understand that that's your opinion,
which is the hiring is overwhelmingly younger, left leaning folks who, through cynicism,
developing a cynicism almost through their work, become more centrist or conservative.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't even call it cynicism, David. I would say that that you got to keep in
mind that the the progressive and liberal ideals are based on ideology. They're based on a future
idea of what things. Will hopefully look like or should look like it not based on a current
acceptance of what the status is. That's why they're called progressive. They always want to
progress beyond where we are trapped right now. That's exactly the kind of person that you want
to recruit for a future oriented organization that is trying to stay one step ahead of its
enemy. If they were to recruit primarily from conservative leaning audiences, you'd get a bunch
of people who are who are focused on the present, who are focused on, well.
Speaker 1: Or even wanting to go back to some prior era to some degree.
Speaker 2: Correct. Exactly right. People who are looking backwards, not people who are
looking forwards. And I think what CIA has discovered and what NSA and what NRO and FBI has
discovered, is that when you can capitalize on talent that is progressive liberal in terms
of their ideology, they are highly educated, they are highly motivated. They are, they are
willing to do a job that's very challenging for a very low government pay in the hopes that
they can make a difference in the future world. And then what happens is, over the years, they
develop a very clear, transparent set of of, of understanding of what the world really does
look like, how the world really does work, what it takes for America to protect American freedoms
while also protecting against foreign threats. And through that transformation, those those people
that were more ideologically driven double down on their their faith and belief in the American
institution, but they change their politics. Speaker 1: And I'm guessing if they don't,
they may end up failing out. Right. I mean, there's like a sort of self-selection
bias that's at play here as well. Speaker 2: Correct. And I wouldn't even call it
failing out. I would call it, just like you said, self-selection. They choose to pursue a different
path, and they choose to leave to go into some other career path or some other, maybe government
service or maybe, political service, or maybe, you know, just standard commercial service.
Speaker 1: You know, it's very interesting. I have friends within, Customs and border,
divisions, let's call it generically. There's a bunch of different departments. They report to me
the exact opposite, which is that often they will see people join, sometimes themselves included
with a more reactionary basis about what one might be doing in terms of dealing with immigration and
seeing the reality of it. They see turns people. I don't know if you would call it through empathy
or pragmatism or whatever, more towards the center or left from the right. And again, these are just
people's opinions. But there could be different dynamics at play in different agencies, I guess.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Because they're different mission sets. Right. So somebody who's
in Customs and Border Patrol is very focused on, just like you said, immigration issues versus
national security issues, which is what your CIA or DoD would see, which is different from,
law enforcement issues, which is what your FBI officers would see. Either way. I think it's a
what your question, what your question really hits on David, is how valuable an empirical survey
would actually be. That gives some transparency. Yeah, we have an entire government office of
this, right. We have we have the Government Accountability Office. Right. Oh, incredible.
Would it be for them to have an ongoing survey that essentially gives the American people a
pulse of the political leanings of different organizations, right. Even if it was just a
five question, you know, very left, very right, somewhat left, somewhat right, totally neutral.
Yeah. To give us a sense of who is it that really is representing us in terms of government offices?
Speaker 1: I would be interested in that. All right. In the few minutes we have left, I want to
talk a little bit about every everyday espionage. So I'm curious what you think are the most useful
skills from your career for the everyday person? Speaking very honestly, because I've read
a bunch of the different books where it's, you know, I'm gonna teach you lockpicking and
how to identify surveillance and run counter surveillance and how to booby trap your house
or things that are certainly interesting, but I am unclear how much they genuinely apply for the
average person. So what? What are the things that really you think apply most for the average person
from your skill set and training background? Speaker 2: You actually, you're totally right,
David. You have to look past all of the alarmist, you know, fear tactic marketing that goes into
things like lock picking and booby trap in your house and whatever else, and it's cells, which
is why it's so common. What I have found is the most useful set of skills are skills where
you have a high probability likelihood that you have to use that skill. Picking a lock is a
low probability skill, right? But being able to engage somebody in a social conversation, for
example, being able to elicit information that is of interest to you without letting the other
person know what you're eliciting. Elicitation is a super useful skill, very similar to what we
were talking about earlier when we mentioned, using questions in the Art of questions. Yeah.
Another fantastic skill is understanding how to use perspective. To overcome perception. So if you
think about it, we all view the world through our own point of view. That is our perception, our
perception of the world around us. I think that is green. I think that is yellow. I think this
taste good. I think that tastes bad. Perspective means that you can step out of your point of view
and step into a third point of view that watches what's happening in the overall environment.
People who can gain perspective rather than be trapped by their own perception. Do better in
negotiations. Do better at making friends. Do better in, in, observing corporate exchanges,
business exchanges, sales, account management, everything. You've also got skills like being able
to master your memory skills, like being able to handle or reduce your anxiety or your response to
fear, because oftentimes people are responding to something that causes them individual fear. Again,
talking about perception rather than something that actually has a high probability of doing
harm. So your classic example is a spider. People see a spider and they get scared. The chances of
that spider being able to actually do you harm are very low. There are some spiders who can do
it, but not many. So if you can understand how to respond to fear inputs by calming yourself down
and refocusing your energy back into something productive, all of a sudden you have to think
about all the people who lose time and energy because they respond fearfully to an email.
They respond fearfully to a Twitter update. They respond fearfully to a headline news scroll.
If you can just learn how to manage that anxiety and manage that fear response, you can dedicate
that energy into something more productive. Speaker 1: Are the, techniques for fear and
anxiety that come from your world at CIA similar to what, for example, the therapy world may offer,
whether it's CBT or eMDR or whatever techniques they would be? Or are they radically different?
Speaker 2: They're not radically different. They're still based in clinical science, which
is what the huge advantages that CIA officers have. We get training that's based in the grounded
science of all the different disciplines that are out there. But then we add to that with a layer
of operational utility. The term that we use, right. Operational utility. It means, it's nice
to reduce anxiety. Yes. It's even better to reduce anxiety and then redirect energy towards what your
mission set is. So if you imagine the person who's having a meltdown at work, who then turns off
their screen and like, takes five minutes of mindfulness, that's great. But then what do they
do after that? Five minutes is over. They turn their screen back on, and they get right back into
the chaotic world that they're in. Whereas for us, it's more like, let's turn off our screen,
enter into our five minutes of mindfulness, and then let's also talk about how do we leave
this five minutes of mindfulness in the most productive way, which might mean going to the
gym, or it might mean following up on a phone call for something that's personally relevant,
not something that's professionally relevant. So you learn how to apply these clinical practices
in a way that gives you operational benefit. Speaker 1: Very, very interesting. We've
been speaking with Andrew Bustamante, former covert CIA officer and also founder of
the everyday espionage training platform. Andrew, great to chat again. I appreciate your time.
Speaker 2: My pleasure. David, I'll see you again.
