Former CIA Super Spy Speaks Out | Andrew Bustamante

we're going to start posting each podcast episode that you see on youtube a week earlier on patreon so feel free to join for early access to all episodes plus we're going to start doing bonus podcast episodes every week so if you want to join patreon it's patreon.com concretevideos next week's episode is already posted there so feel free to go check it out [Music] hello world today my guest is andrew bustamante andrew is a former covert cia intelligence officer and u.s air force combat veteran he spent seven years in the cia as a clandestine operative for the agency's undercover arm he not only lived plotted and fought in dangerous spots around the world but he had to lie to everyone he knew including his parents and everyone he met manipulation was part of his job and his podcast which is called everyday espionage teaches the psychology of being a covert spy by being able to understand who you are so you can manage the experiences around you in a very deliberate way andrew is so smart it's scary and some of the knowledge he drops on this podcast blew me away without further ado please welcome andrew bustamante bustamante is that how you pretty good announce it cool well andrew thanks for doing the show um for people out there who don't know can you give me just like a brief uh explanation of who you are yeah what your background is absolutely my name's andrew bustamante i'm a former cia field officer i left the agency in 2014 and uh went on into corporate america and then started my own gig now i teach spy skills to everyday people uh from uh from individuals who want to learn increased security to corporations and even going back to government enterprise as a private intelligence consultant so what what exactly did you do in the cia so i was a field officer there's i mean cia if you know anything about the military or the government it's a whole separate world right you've got cooks and chefs and everything else so inside the agency it's the same way so i did what was known as human intelligence for field operations which is completely different than the stuff that you see from satellites and the people who collect radio signals with sigint and nsa uh so yeah just as a as an overarching definition human intelligence or what's known as humans okay what what do you think is the some are some of the biggest misconceptions about the cia with all the conspiracies going around and yeah i think you nailed it right one thing to talk about so the biggest the biggest misconception to me is that people think that cia is somehow behind conspiracies that work against american interests i i get that that cia has secrets and i get that it's done some kind of crazy stuff like trying to kill people in the past and make fidel castro's beard fall off like we've done some zany stuff you just had you had a guest on here not long ago talking about mk ultra and yeah and mind control and experimenting with drugs absolutely cia has done some whack-a-doodle stuff but to ever think that a government organization is working against its own country against its own people is absolutely ludicrous and that's the biggest misconception that i that i see out there is there are people who genuinely believe because of conspiracy theories and otherwise that there's something to gain from cia hurting the government american people uh like that people who think it's behind 911 it's just insane right the mk ultra thing's weird because it's not necessarily i don't think he was saying that they were trying to hurt the american people they basically were just taking in certain people as test subjects like prisoners and stuff and doing wacky experiments on them to try to whatever gain influence in foreign countries or yeah learn leaders yeah learn how the human mind works right yeah and that's i i think mk ultra is like that's out there that's people know that that's true right and the stuff that was done in mkultra you know when it comes to the details i don't know if i didn't know i couldn't say but does it make sense that this cia of the 1960s and 70s would take people who had like lifelong prison sentences and take them out and then subject them to increa like downers and uppers and all kinds of crazy transitions to see how the brain works it totally makes sense man yeah um but at the same time they were doing that to increase national defense to all people i'm not saying it was the right or the wrong decision but i am saying it makes sense that they would do something like that because they had a justification that was in the best interest of the american people right that's what you see with so many uh things that happened with the agency i know one of the things that that is popular to talk about is edward snowden snowden's entire story is based like hinges on the question of whether or not it was legal or illegal for government intelligence agencies to collect information on people like like big data on cell records and who was talking to who and record all that information and it was ultimately discovered to be illegal so that's a good thing but the justification was always in the best interest of protecting america so that's what's so hard to understand about the intelligence world and that's what drives those misconceptions yeah so what is your view on on the edward whole edward snowden thing you know a lot of people a lot of people are against him saying that you know he gave up too much information to countries like russia and china and other people say that you know he did what was best for everyone in the country yeah and when i look at snowden i and i've said this and i'll say this until the day i die right the dude did the right thing the wrong way right it's the it's the it's what you see happen mostly like at work or in your family like people try to do the right thing yeah there's a noble intent behind what a lot of people do yeah but they do it the wrong way and when you turn to support when you get support from places like russia and cuba and some of the places in central and latin america that snowden got support that's a big hint you're dealing with bad guys right but you're doing the right thing to call into question secret courts that landed on the conclusion it was okay to collect information on the average american yeah that's that needs to go up the chain but there's a chain that you're supposed to follow there's a there's a series of of steps that you're supposed to take to make sure the information the the threat the hostile actors out there don't know that it's happening if you recall back in the days when we were hunting osama bin laden i think it was the new york times came out with a story that was talking about how the intelligence services were following a bin laden based on his use of a satellite phone and then like the next day guess what we lost all contact all ability to trade to trace bin laden because this open source newspaper basically told the world that the agency was tracking him through his his satellite phone so he just stopped using a satellite phone and in ushered the era of of covert communications for taliban and extremists and we had to relearn how do you track these guys if they don't use satellite phones so there's all this damage that can be done in the intelligence world the national security world when people do the right thing the wrong way i love one of your video one of your videos i was just watching earlier which was super eye opening was you you were talking about i guess you spent a lot of time in china right i i can't say where specifically but yeah asia was one of my specialties so one of the things that you mentioned which was like wow was you said like the united states is only 200 something years old and china is almost 3 000 years old and it was crazy to like think about that like i never thought about that like how china is people think china's i mean crazy communist there's a whole bunch of issues with china um their culture people you know we can we think of china as just this crazy outlandish place yeah but it's they have three thousand years of history it was interesting your perspective on it yeah so i mean that a lot of that goes back there was a time my wife is also a former agency so my wife and i met at the agency undercover got married we had two different disciplines the agency saw right away that we were an operationally useful couple so they sent us around the world doing what we did kind of what's known as a tandem operating couple so just she and i against the world it was like mr and mrs smith yeah but you know i don't look anything like bread but we were in japan on tourist just traveling and we went to this water this like historic site and it had this old-school water mill where water was coming down off a mountain turning a mill grinding some like corn or whatever right and the the tour guide the english-speaking tour guide who was with us looked at us and said it's it's beautiful right we both looked at him we're like this thing is gorgeous i can't believe it's still running and she's like yeah it's two times as old as the united states and that just the way that the tour guide explained that to us right she didn't say it was 200 years old right she didn't say it was 400 years old excuse me she said it was two times the age of my country which just that means that that little flower mill that little corn mill has been doing its job twice as long as the united states has been demonstrating that democracy works and that put everything into perspective for me and now all of a sudden you know when we left that tourist trip and went on to continue our operations i started realizing how big the world really is the the average chinese person that you sit across the table from whether they're here in the united states or whether they're in beijing that person doesn't just have pressure from mom and dad like you and me they don't just have pressure from you know what school they went to or what their future's supposed to look like or making people proud or or putting food on the table they've got 3000 years of cultural pressure how are you going to do something in your life that moves the center kingdom right zhongguo the chinese word for china is the center kingdom right the center of the universe what are you going to do that moves us forward because guess what for 3000 years people have been moving us forward are you going to drop the ball like in the united states we're kind of like eh i can help the country that i live for or not right like i'm free to leave any time freedom you know you can't hold me back don't tread on me that's our attitude that is not the attitude in china that's not the attitude in japan where you're basically given a trade at the age of 12 and you do that trade your entire life and you smoke and you drink and you like drive yourself to work off of four hours a day of sleep like it's completely different the mindset when you start traveling the world and seeing how people think wow it's super cool but it's one of those things that when i come back from from a big trip when i come back from operating abroad i still operate abroad just in the commercial sector right you come back and you just take a big deep breath of god bless america man it's it's an awesome feeling why do you think it is that those countries have turned out the way they have after i mean they are being so old what do you think it is what do you think time how time has affected the cultures like why do you think we're going to end up there in 2000 years well you know it's an interesting question when you consider china right china's been through how many they've been through multiple emperors and then they had a nationalist movement that turned into a communist movement they've had democracy that basically failed and then they've turned over and become communist and now their communism has adapted into like this hybrid communist government uh but bull market economy that like grapples with itself uh what you saw it do it in hong kong is a perfect example of how like what does it want to be in the future so it's still evolving what i will say is that if you just look at our election cycle just look at what happened in in november the country is split half the country wants donald trump half the country wants joe biden the the advertising that was going out to try to encourage people to vote and encourage people to participate very little of it had to do with what the how our country should look 10 years from now 20 years from now right it wasn't based on the vision of the country that we wanted to make it was basically based on the vision of the country that existed right right like fear yeah it was fear-mongering that's exactly what we were doing right and that's what we have been doing increasingly every electoral cycle every time that we have a new president or every time that we go back to vote we fear monger if you look at the results or if you look at some of the studies that have been done on attack ads hate ads you'll literally watch them double and triple in the amount of money that's been spent going all the way back to like 2008 i want to say so it's just insane but the reason that's important is because we're going through that now after being in existence for about 200 years right if you look at where china was about 200 years into its existence it was basically fear-mongering too like really which emperor is going to take over which which house is going to take and own like the largest chunk of land who's going to live where um it was you know back in the days where there was no running water or electricity but there's a very natural cycle there's an evolution to all things just like you watch a child and you watch the child go through these simple mistakes that you as an adult don't make anymore and then you know you you talk to some person who's 80 years old and the big problems that you have right now being 30-something are problems that they laugh at they're like dude my heart may fail tomorrow right i don't really care if you have you know if you pulled your calf i have an exercise in 30 years so it's that same kind of thing so what will happen to america three thousand years from now if america is america right three thousand years right who knows how we're going to have evolved this great democratic experiment is either going to be kicking ass and taking names or it's going to evolve into some kind of hybrid so i mean i don't want to hijack like your questions right but just as another example what china does right now right what russia does right now the reason that america looks at iran and china and russia as such powerful threats isn't because they make more money than us we're the largest economy in the world like we we make what like i think china's entire economy is like 60 of the united states we dominate financially we dominate in technology and innovation we just we crush these countries in every kind of measurable aspect but what they have that we don't have is authoritarian rule they don't need to ask permission from a senate they don't need to go to congress to get money approved it's like it is literally a handful of people who make all the decisions and then everybody else follows suit right imperial japan that we went to war with in world war ii was the same way and they were a freaking powerhouse yeah right my point here is that the threat isn't necessarily that our economy is going we're never going to get eclipsed by china if people somehow think that we're going to become chinese in the future that's not how it's going to work you don't think no okay what's going to happen is we're either going to just i'm scared for a second [Laughter] we're going to implode from the inside and then in the vacuum of confusion like we left in iraq somebody's going to step in and we're going to we're going to reevaluate you know what our what our purpose is and what our values are just like what happened in rome china's not going to like invade america china's goal is to just keep being china because every year that they succeed they just grow a little bit more and they grow a little bit more and that's that chinese mindset that's the japanese mindset that's the vietnamese mindset that's the asian mindset stay alive today you're gonna get more tomorrow wait till the bad guy dies you basically outlast your injury right right and one of the ways one of the tools that they can use to outlast yep is simply they don't have to ask permission they're just like we're a police state you are now being observed and you don't have a right we're listening to your phone calls and you don't have a right to say anything about it you know you're going to jail you don't get a fair trial that's the end that's kind of but doesn't that kind of seem like that's where it's going in the u.s like with the patriot act and with what snowden revealed with them listening to all everybody's phone calls without permission and and with the prison system here and the war on drugs everything it seems just like that's the direction that we want that the government wants to go i absolutely think that there's some experimentation going on in that direction and it's just a matter of how we justify it right it's the same if you look at calling it something like the patriot act it's easy to justify exactly so i mean if you just look at the house right look at congress originally our country was built so that public servants were servants right you went out and you were like super successful selling cars or you were an inventor and you created lights or something right you did something important with your life and then you stepped out of that important role to basically sacrifice four years of your life to being a two-term senator or congressman right or i'm sorry a two-term congress person or like a one-term senator for six years but you you took a hit that's why you were called a public servant the president was supposed to be like a business tycoon who then steps out of his role and takes a hit and he lives as a president right instead now we have these professional politicians now you make 250 000 a year to sit on your butt in congress doing nothing except making sure that you get in like invited back again it's like a two-year thing right there they're constantly raising money yep that's it and then because they want to get elected again and again and again right and they make their entire career being a professional congress person so when you've got that kind of engine driving us right you've got to find creative ways to to fight an evolving bad guy and you've got these people who are in power and want to stay in power so what do they do they basically subdivide themselves into intelligence committees so i'm on i'm a congressman but now i'm also a congressman that sits on an intelligence committee which means i keep secrets from other congressmen and the secrets that i keep are like a subset of the secrets that cia keeps and then we start we take our entire judicial system and we make a second judicial system in the secret courts so now it's like the secret court's job is to keep secrets from the public courts right like all we're doing is just adding layers of of segregation right which keeps the everyday person who's in charge of voting for the right congress person uninformed about what's happening so that's why snowden's revelation was such a big deal because your elected officials who sat on the congress congressional court who appointed the judges to the secret courts who are supposed to support cia in nsa basically all approved yeah it's okay if the government collects your private data on your cell phone right that's a big deal yeah it's terrifying it's [ __ ] terrifying um isn't that a big problem with democracy too i remember i don't remember the exact name of the guy the philosopher who had the quote about i mean i'm completely gonna botch this but basically he questioned democracy as being like everyone should every idiot in the country be allowed to make a decision that changes everyone everyone's lives or should it be the most educated people who vote yeah so this is i think it's a fascinating question and i i the reason that it's a philosopher who asked that kind of question is because everybody else who would ask that question would just be called an [ __ ] but yeah you've got we live in what's known as a republic uh a representative republic so we elect people to represent us so even though we want to believe that every vote counts all those people out there who say my vote doesn't count yeah you're like 40 right your vote my vote it doesn't really count our vote only counts if we are part of the majority votes that are able to swing the representative letter ladder right so that we get representation that we want if you don't get a representation that you want then your vote doesn't really matter um but that's our model so we try to pick the right people to represent us so it's like picking an attorney right you have a family attorney your one attorney represents all 12 people in your family but guess what your dad wants something different than your mom you got you want something different from both of them your six-year-old sister probably doesn't have the right to say what she wants anyways but somehow she still gets an attorney right that's exactly what we have here the person who busts their ass to build a business and turn that business into a five million dollar a year enterprise who puts 200 people to work you know that person has exactly the same amount of voting power as the person who like cheats on their taxes collects unemployment you know illegally and just doesn't do anything with their life right the person who lives off of food stamps and whatever else what what kills me about our country sometimes is that you've got both sides attacking each other and what they're attacking each other with is totally correct there are absolutely the top one percent who could care less about low like poor people who just want to collect more wealth and become stronger and wealthier that's how all human beings are and there are absolutely the bottom one percent who are out there scavenging you know off of loopholes and taking advantage of people committing crimes and stealing from whatever those things exist so the attacks are true but the attacks like the complaints are about such a small subset of society that we're just blind to the other 98 right the all of the people out there who are just trying to do the right thing the right way for the right reasons um and it's just it's hard so and that's part of i think the evolution of what we have to get through as a democracy so what made you want to get into the cia how did you get into the cia how does somebody start a career in the cia mine was kind of accidental so i was an air force uh officer okay and i was coming to the place where i could leave the air force and i was so excited man i i'm not cut if you can see me now i'm not really cut out for short hair and clean shaving and polished boots um and honest to god all i really wanted was to meet a nice hippie girl and have like 12 kids that's really what i wanted yeah so i applied to the peace corps and uh i'm i still remember the day like in uniform taking like a four hour break in between shifts and i went to like the computer lab because that's what we had back then and i logged in and i started making an application of the peace corps and about halfway through the application this screen pops up and it's like hey you might qualify for other government positions we recommend you put your application on hold if you continue past this point you'll be disqualified from you know other from certain government jobs now i'm i was 24 at the time 25 maybe no 27 at the time so i was always on the lookout for the next best opportunity right right so i was like shoot 72 hours i put myself on pause you know accept no problem went home 24 hours later i get a phone call from an unlisted number and they say hey we'd like to have a conversation with you in langley virginia really that's all it took they didn't say who they were they didn't say no they were they were they said uh we are we represent a national security entity in the gov in mclean virginia yeah we're gonna send you tickets to fly up to langley and you know if you if you accept our invitation yeah and you'll have like your first personal interview and then you know after this you'll be able to continue with whatever government applications you want and that was that's how it started and that's how it starts for a lot of people really yeah they get a phone call or they or they get kind of somebody stands in front of them at like a career fair believe it or not cia does a lot with career fairs college career fairs and general career fairs but yeah you kind of get that weird stranger who talks to you and you think yeah this isn't real and then they follow through with something that you're like there's no way how this person this this person who just described themselves as betty or bob on the phone actually just mailed me tickets to flight of virginia next week wow and then you go and you're like why the hell not right so when you flew to virginia what happened uh i got off the plane checked into like a hampton inn or something like that and then went and had a day of or half a day maybe of just generic interviews like hey we see that you're former military can you tell us tell us one big like success in your life and tell us what you're most afraid of and tell us this and tell us that and you know we're we i knew i was interviewing with national security but i didn't know where i didn't know if it was i didn't know it was intelligence or if it was like homeland security or homeland defense or if it was just border patrol yeah yeah so then about halfway through that they're like you know you'd be a good fit for our intelligence services and for me they were interviewing me for clandestine intelligence services so undercover ops so they were like you'd be a good fit for clandestine operations and i was like yeah because i'm ambiguously brown right you don't really know you don't know where i'm from yeah and that's when it kind of got real that's insane and you were 27 years old yeah 27 years old don't they when you when you when you join the cia don't they make you sign like a lifetime non-disclosure agreement yeah it's a lifetime secrecy agreement so that's been kind of the bane of my existence for a while now wow yeah you've got some stuff in your head that you're not allowed you can't say to nobody yeah and like and the thing that sucks about that lifetime security like secrecy agreement is it it's it's for a lifetime so it's not just the stuff that i did in the past but if i have some badass idea of what i want to do right now like for example i i had a collaboration going on with another former intelligence officer a guy who was what's known as deep cover so much deeper than like generic cover kind of like what you see in most movies like super deep cover guys that people don't even they barely know their cia wow so i had a buddy of mine and i was in collaboration with and we were trying to get a book written that represented his life because he was part of a really important like exciting operation that nobody knows about really and i was like oh here's a chance for us to use everyday spy which is my training platform here's a chance for us to use my training platform to tell your story and still protect your identity and we ran up by cia and they were like we we approve in concept we agree with your approach right so we go into this six month just deep dive collaboration writing getting maps together pulling evidence from the past like getting this badass package put together so we can tell the story we have you know hollywood producers that are on board we have uh audio producers that are on board tv producers that are on board people who are super excited to see this thing come to life we get the whole thing finished um finished meaning ready for submission back to cia to say hey you approved of the concept here's the final product man they saw the final product and they were like this is never going to see the light of day you guys we can't let this out and then we went back and we were like oh but you said conceptually it was okay and you know what's the difference and they're like well when you see all the information kind of put together it's just too dangerous it's too dangerous to the op it's too dangerous to the individual it's too dangerous to the people who are you know still associated in some way with that kind of on hop so then boom six months of work just god crashed man and that's but that's the that's what i signed when i was 27 looking for the next best opportunity so it gets to be a pain sometimes but then other times like you know it's really nice to know that everything that lives on the internet for me right now is cia approved like i'm never going to go to jail because they aren't going to come back and be like oh yeah you know this thing that you said you did like we don't like it so now you're going to jail so everything you do you have to talk to them and get approved so yeah you have a good relationship with them still um you don't really ever have a good relationship with the agency but yeah i have a working collaborative relationship they when they like what i do they don't talk to me when they don't like what i do they tell me not to do it so right it kind of works out [ __ ] that's crazy yeah so did you ever have to get i know there's like people at the cia who their job is specifically to disguise people right did you ever have to go under any kind of crazy disguises uh we kind of all do to a certain extent when you work in the field disguise we call it costume actually costume yeah so like the the disguise department is actually like called the costume division so really it's just like hollywood it's just like hollywood yeah exactly so we all do it because it's there's a lot of security benefits to different levels of disguise and by and large there's like three levels to disguise but yeah so sometimes we go under a very light disguise like even what i'm in right now if i were to just do my hair grow and shave my beard straight like shave it so i've got you know clean skin yeah that could be a version of disguise put on a pair of glasses put on a ball cap wear something i don't normally wear so like those are simple disguises we wear those a lot we'll wear those just going for a walk just so that we can shake surveillance if we need to without an everyday thing for you to be disguised to some level it was like a i would say a weekly thing okay yeah so if you consider the fact that we basically execute anywhere from like two to five ops a week then that would be a weekly thing one of those almost guaranteed is going to be in some kind of disguise level but then the really crazy stuff like you might only get into prosthetics that change your face and your nose you might only get into changing your skin tone or your eye color like that kind of stuff you're only going to do that a handful of times in a career did you ever do it every yeah we all do it really yeah yeah i mean you'll the typical like your typical field officer will have two to three field tours before they get pulled in to do like become somebody's supervisor what do they do to you what do they make you look like they make you fat they make you tall they make you they they add right so they can make you taller yeah with like stints that go into your shoes um so they can raise your shoulders so it looks like your neck is smaller but your body is taller there's uh there's the key to disguise is that you can always add you can't take away right you're not gonna make a six foot tall person five foot eight right but you can make a six foot tall person six foot two right you can make somebody who weighs 180 pounds look like they weigh 210 pounds but you can't take them and make them 160 pounds so the general rule is you can always add so they like to work from a foundation one of the reasons why so many intelligence officers look the same you know shaved faces short hair whatever like fit bodies is because you can always add you can make them a little fatter make them grow a beard make them grow long hair yeah easy to add hard to take away right so that's that's basically how it works so for us you know put on a fake tattoo put on 20 extra pounds put like a tack in your shoe so you walk with a limp and all of a sudden you're a completely different person wow yeah but you gotta keep well keep in mind the majority of people don't observe um accurately right we most most of us live our life in what's known as a zone of situational awareness that's called the white or the green zone which means you're really only aware of between six inches and like two feet around you somebody could walk right by you and they could walk by you four times and you'd never even notice right right it's not until you become a trained observer a skilled observer that you start seeing those patterns so it's really easy if you can believe it like i have literally put on a black wig with straight hair i'm a black curly haired guy and i have put on a black straight haired wig and a pair of glasses and that's it and st and sat at tables with friends who did not immediately recognize him what yeah your own friends with my own friends and it's just it's mind-boggling people are like i've seen you before right and i was like yeah we have met before because it's just you know they don't people don't get it they they don't trust their instinct enough so they feel like this tickle that says we've met i know you why do i know you where do i know you're right but they don't trust it they don't trust it because they're like you know whatever this yeah i'm just going to move on whereas for us when you're when you become a trained observer you trust that little tickle you trust that spidey sense and you're like something's shady here like i've seen that guy before so did you have to go through a lot of training initially before you started before they initially shipped you overseas to do all this undercover stuff yeah there's a uh there's two types of training that you go through at the agency in general there's the there's your intro training which is whatever your skill set is whether you're going to be a targeter field officer tech officer whether you're going to do break and entry whether you can do whatever you're going to do right hacking you will go through like a a prolonged training and most of those lengths are classified but my training was the farm just like you've seen in the tv shows right so i went to the farm and then they teach you everything you need to operate independently in the field at that training course and then from there you'll continue going through training that's more like specific where it's needed so if you're going to go into the desert if you're going to go into the jungle if you're going to go into a position where you know you'll only be in contact with your support element like once every month or once every two weeks or something if you're going to create a deep cover alias different trainings right so those are much shorter but essentially all of our training mimics this process of what's known as just-in-time training meaning you're taught a skill and then you're immediately put into an exercise where you use that skill so it's completely different than what you're used to in college or anything like that right if you could imagine uh like if we had weapons right now i could basically teach you how to put a gun together and take a gun apart right and then the next step would be to force you to do it while i'm keeping a clock and you have real like real risk if you don't do it in less than two minutes you don't complete you don't continue the training right a real risk scenario spikes the adrenaline forces you to to process the information that you had plus the skill set that you have in front of you and then you have to perform that's called just in time learning okay if there's no real risk it's basically like college and you're like uh right i can handle a 40 on this test i'll just make it up on the next exam yeah there's no stakes you just you can plan it out over the course of a semester and be like yeah i'll be fine and where did you go to first when they shipped you overseas and what was your main objectives when you when you when they sent you where do they send you first so we're this is now we're getting into like more classified areas right because our personal operational background is where we start running into classification problems where we start you know stuff is confidential stuff is classified stuff can't be shared but what i can say in general is not everybody gets shipped out right away okay some people will be deployed into positions where they're going to like learn a special skill like maybe you're going to go work with joint military ops and you might honestly go to like paradise you might go to like southern florida and just practice jumping out of helicopters and amphibious assaults that might be your first tour other people will stay at langley you'll stay at headquarters some people might go you know take a tour with fbi or take a tour of nsa and just you know be a joint liaison learn that side of the operation and then other people will go and do different types of field ups some long term field ops some short term field ops some special operation field apps different stuff like that so for me let me think for me it was it was more of a traditional route so traditional overseas assignments domestic assignment traditional overseas assignment traditional domestic assignment and then it was actually in 2012 there were some big developments in like the the world of counter-terrorism and counter-nuclear proliferation where my my military background kind of came into play and i was all of a sudden like fleeted out of this traditional world and into special ops covert action world and that was kind of how i ended my career as a program manager doing covert action with joint us military and other domestic intelligence uh community partners okay and then we had our first kid the long story short we left because we my wife and i left because we had our child and when we kind of did the math looking at how other parents in the agency end up yeah we were like i don't know if it's worth it to like potentially sacrifice our marriage and the childhood experience the parenting experience for a career working for a secret intelligence organization so haven't you said that like said previously where you were like generally like the countries that you were in correct yes okay so i specialize in asia okay asia and what's nice is that when you specialize against the target that's an asian target um things just i mean it doesn't take a rocket scientist to think of the different targets that are in asia they're they're actually all over the world so i've had a chance to travel in latin america central america europe africa you know asia chasing these these bad guys all over the world wow yeah it's been a lot of fun and so your job was basically to just like find yourself in the same environments as these bad guys yeah basically yeah the uh so the way that our ops worked because my wife and i were a tandem couple she she was what's known as a targeter so her job was to find targets and the way we define a target is somebody who's in possession of secret information that the american government wants maybe that secret information has to do with you know nuclear weapons or maybe it has that's with troop movements or maybe it has to do with you know artificial intelligence who knows but she knows what american intelligence needs and she finds the people who have who we think have access to that information and then my job is to build an app where we cult where we meet that person and collect that information or prove whether or not they have what we think they have so a lot of that is it's just social skills it's social skills across cultural barriers dealing with people who have no reason to trust you as an american unless you put on a disguise and pretend that you're not and you were most often than not in a disguise pretending you were somebody else right uh no yeah yeah most often i was not in disguise okay you were not in a discussion not in disguise yeah and then but i also didn't overtly claim to be american right like i don't look caucasian so a lot of times if i'm if i'm meeting with somebody and we're speaking in english they don't have english that's sharp enough to know that mine's an american accent if we're meeting in a foreign language then my foreign language skill would always have an american accent or a western accent right because it would be their native language and they would realize kind of early on that i'm a westerner most likely american but stereotypes about america are super strong overseas like if you're not white six foot two and like 195 pounds people actually don't think you're american they're like maybe you're canadian really well maybe you're european or maybe yeah they don't think like just like when i say chinese person an image comes to your mind not all chinese people look like that right it's the same thing overseas if you're sitting in japan and you say american person an image is going to come to mind like hollywood football players celebrities interesting yeah that's going to come to their mind that's not what i look like wow so you would so your wife would basically figure out the people who have this information that the the government wants and you would somehow find a way to meet this person in public somewhere yeah in public or it could be in virtual world or it could be it could be in private if you had like the right kind of connections where you could connect through what's known as like access agents sometimes you hear them called useful idiots like useful ideas people in between who can connect you to the person you want to talk to and then you can have a cup of coffee in private that's your first meeting but a lot of times it's really just i know this person is going to be at this hotel i know this person's going to be at this conference i know this person is going to be at this baseball game right yeah i got to find a way so as part of your training to develop these social skills and these like psychological tricks that you could play to sort of get these people to like you and trust you yeah that's exactly right so one of um just to kind of reference back to your previous podcast on mkultra yeah right mk ultra was a goal to try and get people to understand mind control i would say that we never mastered mind control in the way that mk ultra set out for us to do but we have very much learned the process of mastering persuasion mastering influence which is all a form of mind control right and we do it without drugs we do it without you know without anything except for mastering social deliberate social skills right understanding how the human mind works understanding the cognitive processes being able to put deliberate elements in place that steer a person's thinking and get them to land on a specific outcome that is what we wanted to that we want them to deliver so you're doing it right now i don't know if you've if you've thought of that every interview that you have you are using some of those skills right so just as a real quick exercise right okay um what's your name my name is danny danny danny where were you born was born in clearwater clearwater florida yes that's an awesome town yeah did you like learn to love the beach growing up in that town or do you not love the beach because you grew up in that town no i've always just loved i love the beach in the water you love the beach are you a water person do you do stuff on the water absolutely all the time like what fish surf swim dive everything every so who's in control of this conversation you are i am why because you're steering it you're guiding me with the questions what do you do every time you have a podcast interview sort of yeah the same thing the exact same thing man that's a form of like cognitive control interest but we don't often think that most people think that if you're talking most you're in control of a conversation right it's why it's why when you want to impress your date you talk right you want to impress your date shut the hell up right exactly some questions listen yeah exactly right because then you'll be in control of the conversation like cognitively when you when you start receiving questions you start to feel like you are the center of attention even though you're only the center of my attention right anybody else who's in the room doesn't really know that you're there but you start you feel good there's all these emotional receptors that start to trigger you feel like the center of attention you feel like you're interesting you feel like all these things about you that are mundane to you you're like oh this guy really likes me like yeah i feel really good about myself right yeah and then you start to associate that with the person asking the questions and you start to be like i feel really good around this guy in fact you just feel good because you're getting questions right right but if i ask you the right questions and every time i'm around you i ask you questions and every time i'm around you i stroke your ego or i pump you up or i help you connect in ways that you want to connect with like business networks or whatever else like you're going to start to associate positive feelings with me as a person right right and now all of a sudden it's not hard to take that one step further and and be like you're not just positive towards me but you're actually loyal towards me and that's that's the human cycle man from stranger to friend from friend to loyalist so is this the kind are these the kind of principles that you teach with your everyday spy podcast yeah exactly right okay yeah these are the principles that we teach and then we also teach people how to apply them to everyday life right because it's one thing to understand something conceptually it's something completely different when you know how to apply it you can apply it to your to finding a date you can apply it to getting a raise you can apply it to securing a job when i left the agency i had to get a job right but guess what i couldn't tell anybody that you worked for the cia so it's like you really couldn't tell them no i couldn't tell you i went through a two-year cleanse where my cover had to be scrubbed so i wasn't allowed to talk about who i really was or what i really did i was only able to lean on this fabricated resume that cia gave me with with phone calls that would like like sources and stuff and everything resources fake yeah wow so after like six months of trying to find a job and not finding a job i was like to hell with this i'm just gonna use the skills that the agency taught me and i'm going to fraud like fraudulent myself into a job and that's essentially what i ended up doing so i got myself into an i.t position with like a fortune 10 company lying the whole way there and then i spent like a year with no skills at all learning on the job trying to like balance it was just an op right it was just another op but when the agency finally rolled back my cover i was able to go to my boss and be like hey man it's been nice working for you just i want to make sure that you know this in case there's any kind of legal ramifications but my resume was fake my application was fake i really don't have any of the skills that you hired me for what do they say well my boss was like thanks for telling me keep doing a good job and i'm going to talk to my boss too right so then like my boss and the boss above him like knew the truth and i don't know if it ever went any further than that but essentially like i was doing a good job i learned what i needed to learn right right you're very competent that's one of the most important things yeah and that's what but that's that's an everyday skill right i can drop you in almost any job in any industry anywhere and you're going to learn how to do it right the hard part is getting through the gatekeeper right how do you get past the hr person how do you nail the interview how do you fake it right until you can prove it and that's kind of that's a that's an intel skill wow that's fascinating man so what what was it like after how many years total were you in the cia uh seven years total with the agency seven years what point was it that you and your wife like what drove you guys to ultimately make the decision to leave so i would say about the five-year mark we started realizing like it may not be the best fit for us you're always it's it's the government it's the cia yeah but it's still the government you don't really have a lot of control over where you are whether your boss is a dirt bag or a superstar you know it's not it's not a meritocracy doing a good job doesn't make more money it doesn't get you choice assignments right it's all about who you know still it's a good old boys network right so we were both kind of realizing that maybe it wasn't going to be the best long-term fit for us at about five years and then we got a sweet assignment that we were both like there's no way we're going to turn this thing down like let's ride this wave and see what happens and we had such a good time on that assignment that we ended up getting pregnant how long did the assignments typically last um they last between two and four years depending on where you're going i mean some short-term assignments can be much shorter than that but your typical assignment is somewhere between two and four so we went out and like we had a blast and then we ended up getting pregnant and once we got pregnant if anybody out there has kids uh knows what it's like to be in a relationship where where the wife or the girlfriend gets pregnant everything changes right like there becomes this like an extra lens is like lifted and you're like oh these are my real priorities and these are the things that are just nice to have yeah all this it's crystal clear as soon as you know there's a baby in a belly you're like holy smokes it changes yeah it's crazy so that happened to us and we were like okay we're gonna have a baby this this baloney's gotta end right i mean before that my wife my wife would get shipped somewhere for like two months i couldn't talk to her she couldn't tell me where she was going really i didn't know she wouldn't even talk for two months yeah i mean we would talk through secret systems that the agency provided us because we were co-workers right so we'd be able to plan for one app but she's still on her other app but essentially that's just glorified email so it's like your wife is doing one thing and then you're here and then she'll come back for a week and then i find out i'm gone for two months and then like maybe we're both gone or nobody knows when we're going to talk to each other next if we're going to talk to each other next and it's sexy and it's fun and it's exciting yeah when you're 28 years old absolutely and you know oh it's like a dream job there's a bachelor first single person yeah exactly and even when we got married we were like oh this is sweet like you know who gets to live this life they make movies about this kind of thing right but then all of a sudden there was a baby and now we're like okay if you leave for two months what do i tell them right six years from now if you don't come home right right and then the agency starts to play a role in what you can and can't tell family and who you can and can't tell about whatever right and it becomes this really messy like pit of justice right lies lies and compromise and that's why the agency has one of the highest divorce rates in america right agency employees marriages just don't last divorce is rife uh adultery is you know rampant like stuff bad stuff happens when you start compromising on these core values you like the agency doesn't care because you're still loyal to the united states you're still doing your job yeah they don't really care about whether or not you stay married or not right right as long as you don't start selling secrets to the russians i can imagine already husband's out in russia on some covert mission and he had to sleep with this russian lady because it was part of the mission sorry i mean i had to do it yeah and then how are you going to how are you going to talk about that when you come back exactly right like uh it was you know the things i do for my country like triple x style right right right it's like or is it like yeah nothing really happened babe it was a really boring trip right jeez i only talked to you know sasha but sasha was a boy and he was fat you wouldn't have liked it god let's make spaghetti and meatballs yeah that's that's the worst that's the worst possible career i could imagine you could you could have for raising children yeah and that's what happens and that's what's so the reason one of the reasons i am so positive still to this day about the agency is because the men and women working right now are making that sacrifice like they are going to work every day lying to teenagers every day missing birthday parties missing baseball games right they're going on these missions that they may not come back from because they believe so strongly in the mission and they are voluntarily putting everything about themselves and their family second i i that's not the way i'm wired right but if that's the way they're wired god bless them because they're doing a job i won't do and they're doing it to keep my family safe yeah i can't talk trash about that no i mean i'm not going to write some trashy memoir that that tries to [ __ ] slap the agency when there are people out there making that genuine sacrifice and yeah some of them you know they make that sacrifice it doesn't go well they lose spouses they have children that are that never want to talk to them again right i mean it's just they they retire at 60 with a divorce and half their net worth is taken away and they've got to keep working at like doing whatever they do right it's just it's a it's a huge compromise it's a huge challenge and it's one that i will always honor and respect the people doing it yeah definitely different kind of different kind of human to do that yeah to do that work absolutely so when you were on a lot of these covert ops that you were on was your how often would you say your life was actually in danger when you were on these jobs like were you if say for example someone figured out that you weren't who you were saying you were would your life be in immediate danger so it's interesting when you think about what a life really is right so we call espionage the gentleman's game it's more like chess than anything else right when you capture a piece the piece has more value to you alive than it does dead right so it's not like a soldier where you know here's a company of here's a platoon of army people trying to you know storm a machine gun nest the machine gun nest's only mission is to kill every single person at platoon and make sure it stays safe yeah right we're in a completely different kind of game so if we're overseas if we're on mission if we're doing something in a war zone we are worth way more if somebody can capture us and hold us than if they just neutralize us and it's the same way with us we would rather follow a russian spy for years and let them keep operating then pick them up and scoop them into a you know sell somewhere and arrest them because you learn so much more right watching them operate you learn from interrogations you learn from monitoring communication systems right so the value it's a gentleman's game because there's so much more at stake when you're being observed than once you've been captured right so i would say that was my life in danger and i wasn't really at risk of losing my life very often that you know there's always ieds that go off on the sides of roads there's always you know bullets and missions and rockets that fly overhead if you're in a war zone yeah or a civil war zone right yeah and that kind of stuff is kind of always a threat but when it comes to whether or not someone's going to individually target me and like snipe me from like the 12th floor of some building it's not really like that it's the bigger risk is that somebody has identified me through my cover that ruins the mission and that ruins the mission and i don't know it and now everything i do every day right they're tapped into my phone lines tapped into my cell phone they're following my emails they're following me they're following my wife right and they're they're just sucking up every piece of information they find my assets they find my targets they find my mission they find the objective they let me do everything while they build a big case a big international case right and then you know right before i get on a plane the last thing they want to do is let you know that they've figured you out exactly right exactly right and that's something that you don't see like in the movies it's like oh they're following james bond and as soon as they think they have a good shot they try to kill him like no james bond i would just watch that guy all day long and be like this guy is such a douche really he's just there's his asset there's a lady sleeping with there's where he keeps his money right like there's the car he drives right we can put a gps tracker on the car and always know where he's at you know he wears the same three suits yeah right he uses the same gun it's just you know it's way easier to watch the guy and learn about mi6 than it is to just neutralize the guy and stick him in a cell right um i know one of the things i wanted to talk about was uh the havana syndrome where i mean when i first found out about it a couple months ago and i read about it i saw like an interview from one of the guys on youtube that was absolutely [ __ ] terrifying yeah all of a sudden your whole family is is waking up with migraines and bleeding out of your nose and i guess from what i understand is the russians were blasting microwave energy very focused microwave energy at these buildings with uh like either u.s embassies or buildings like that where they knew americans were working either for the cia for whatever blasting microwave energy at them for some reason or not basically to jam signals or communication do you know anything about that yeah so the what you're getting at when we talk about the havana syndrome so i mean first and foremost we have to recognize that nobody knows what it is nobody knows nobody can confirm if it's even real right we've just had enough instances of it where we're like you know predominance of evidence suggests something is going on we don't know who it is but we know that it started in havana and we know that in havana it's like the russian embassy was across the street from the american embassy right right so like that's the foundation that's where it all started outside of that a lot of what's happening is speculation which makes it dangerous but here's here's kind of what i would add to the conversation we know that there is an inherent risk in direct weapons kinetic weapons right if if person a shoots person b like we live in a world where the whole world knows it now right right it's hard you can't hide the ballistic evidence like there's going to be a bullet that has a unique you know caliber that's going to come from a gun that has unique caliber so you can't hide that kind of stuff so now we're getting into this world of like energy weapons and we've seen them in crowd control too like how do you break up a crowd without killing people like what happened in kent state back in you know the 60s or whatever so you've got to find a way to break up crowds you got to find a way to basically target individuals in a way that can't be tracked so that's where these these energy weapons come from are indirect energy weapons right so basically um whether it's a fire hose that just you nobody wants to get with a fire hose so they all run away right or whether it's a sound wave that makes you vomit or makes you disoriented like we've seen these things in other parts of the world we see him here in the united states what we have here is an instance where something and theoretically like it wouldn't be hard to take an energy weapon and mount it and direct it at a certain floor of a building um there's an infrastructure requirement anytime you have an intelligence operation going on so in with an infrastructure requirement like it's it's hard to just move your your command center from place to place so once people know where your command center is they could use a pulse energy weapon and just aim it at the windows and do their do their thing right disorient you make you stick to your stomach you know cause nose bleeds you know push for brain aneurysms things that can't be tracked so what's fascinating about the havana syndrome is that it happened in cuba and in china and in russia and in other countries around the world and it's oftentimes most often associated with you know diplomats and people who are in the intelligence service who are you know at some point in a diplomatic facility so there you see like the infrastructure is there permanent infrastructure things are like individuals who are being targeted it's not like you hear you know you don't get articles about janitors who are complaining about this stuff right right who are on the first floor it's always us diplomats isn't it yeah that we hear about the most yeah exactly and the kind of technology that would be used to make this kind of effect is not the kind of technology that's going to exist in nigeria or kenya right it's going to come from a first world tech savvy country but yeah and that's that's kind of what we're seeing so for me it certainly suggests that there's an intentional weapon of some sort that's being used to deter people from going to these command centers like if i was still in the agency and somebody told me i had to go to moscow and like sit on the fifth floor i'd be like oh come on guys like i don't really want to be throwing up every afternoon that sounds miserable would you really say would you really be concerned if they told you that oh yeah i guarantee you people are doing that right now i promise you and that's that's what makes these weapons so powerful like what's happening i don't know what's the risk i don't know is it going to happen to me i don't know but you have to make a decision to go or not go and you're like and one of the biggest issues with it is i guess initially a lot of people were getting uh like like paid benefits or paid basically like they were able to leave and get all their medical stuff taken care of by the government but i guess now from what i understand i could be wrong but in the most recent cases the government has basically like denied any of that stuff and these people aren't getting some of those benefits or those i don't know benefits yeah i would hope that i mean it because if you are a government employee you always have certain government benefits which goes like kind of points to the whole solar winds debacle and the recent breach the cyber breach with solar winds but yeah so since all government employees have government benefits then it doesn't matter if you're undercover or not undercover you should have the coverage you need right to get taken care of what is solar winds so there's a there was a massive breach i think it was december 12th or 13th so it's uh just a couple days ago yeah just a week ago really fascinating example of what i what what i teach as in industrial espionage so solar solarwinds is a database company they basically they're a contracting civilian company and their job is basically to monitor the performance and the health of different databases for companies and government entities and state organizations like they have something like 18 000 customers so they're a massive successful company right well a breach was just identified we they don't know who it's from they speculate that it's russia and essentially what happened is some sort of foreign hacking malicious code was inserted into their system specifically so that their server their servers would forward that malicious code onto these targeted clients and then once it was on these targeted client servers it would penetrate those servers and then start collecting data and sending it back holy [ __ ] massive man it's the biggest it's the biggest breach that we've ever had in american history it's all over the news in certain circles right yeah it's not something people are keeping secret but what i think america doesn't understand is like this is traditional espionage i am on the reason i'm excited about my business is because i think we are on the brink of possibly the greatest espionage revolution in history what do you mean by that because espionage has become so much easier now you've got you've got countries that have access to information that allows them to make their own decisions so the the days of the iron curtain in the soviet union the even the days in north korea where you see like you know people having information control and you can like brainwashing entire countries that day is over like north korea is literally counting the days until somehow somebody can like sneak in with google right right right but people can make their own decisions when people can make their own decisions they can make their own bad decisions and it's very very hard for even a state controlled organizat a police state to protect all of its information when individuals can choose what they do and what they don't do on top of that that same technology that makes it possible for an individual to make a bad decision is also the technology that makes it possible for cyber actors from anywhere in the world to target anywhere else in the world and espionage is all about finding the weak point and the most vulnerable point and entering through that vulnerable point you can get to like you know you can get to the strongest guy in the world right your your ufc fighters your like your powerhouses right whatever they are they all still have vulnerable points right they're still soft between their toes it still sucks when they have an earache right they still rush to the dentist when they have a cavity they have vulnerable points even though they're big strong people countries are the same way united states big strong country guess what we still have vulnerable points solar winds was one of those vulnerable points that was the weak spot between our toes somebody out there was like oh look at this little company that has no protection and weak passwords but is connected to all of these secret government organizations all through the dod right look at this it's connected everywhere and if we can just penetrate there we'll get into everything and that's what they did so how did we find out about it so interestingly enough this is such an ugly story man yeah there's a court there's an international cyber security group out there called fireeye and they're like top top quality cyber security group based uh they might be based out of new york okay um possibly singapore anyways these are [ __ ] hot cyber security guys guess who they did business with solarwinds solarwinds managed all their databases right all the performance all the health all the server requirements everything so then fireeye used their own cyber security tools on their own systems and they started seeing these anomalies and they were like this looks like we've been penetrated right so they isolate the penetration they start to reverse engineer it and they're like we we have found something that looks like it was exported to our server from solarwinds so fireeye tells all of their clients hey guys we know you counted on us for cyber security and we're connected to all of your systems right we think that we've been compromised it's like covid19 for the cyber world right here's our contact tracing hey guys i know we hung out last week i just tested positive for kovid right and then all these people start to freak out yeah and then the person who has a positive fire eye looks back at solar winds and is like hey we think you might have been penetrated solarwinds does a scan and they're like yeah we've been penetrated so then they have to go out and tell all of their clients we think we've been penetrated keep an eye out like look for these kinds of anomalies and then once they told all of their clients everybody's like oh we see anomalies we see anomalies we see anomalies we see anomalies and it's just this it's not ugly it's not like sloppy it's not sloppy cyber tradecraft it's really refined effective tradecraft so refined that solarwinds never found it fire i barely found it right like that's how quality the penetration was so it's a big deal how and why how did we figure out it was russia no nobody knows nobody's special everyone's saying it though right the reason everybody says it is because so there's an mo to cyber operations there's two types of cyber out there there's slap your mama sniper where it's like hey i just like i took you i took you down i want the whole world to know about it i'm going to do everything except say i did it i'm just going to say hey guys like not my fault that you suck and then there's a cyber that like you don't even know happened super refined you know professional you don't even know we were there right it's the same kind of thing that you see with like professional athletes there's a professional athlete who comes out there and dominates on the field and then like wants to be the one on all the talk shows and wants to be like i'm the best i'm the bomb i'm the [ __ ] and then you've got the the like the quiet killer who's you don't ever see on talk shows who everybody wants to wear their jersey because they're like that guy's a killer yeah right two different types china is this one when they when they break in and steal something they leave footprints everywhere right they're like they're marching all over the grave they leave red flags just to give you a human victory yeah but then if you come back and say china did this they're like oh it wasn't us wasn't us but you know it happened to you exactly russia on the other hand is like what they don't even get caught 90 of the time wow belarus doesn't get caught iran doesn't get caught like these are really really refined cyber folks america we pride ourselves on being so good at what we do you don't even see that we've been there right that's how refined this was so when it's that refined israel they are so good at what they do i stepped away from the mic they're so good at what they do they don't even leave a footprint they don't ever get caught like this group barely got caught and that and the reason they got caught is probably because they were going up against the hardest cyber targets in the world right there's only a handful of players that play at that level we're one of them russia is the next one on the list so it makes it really easy for us to be like russia did this but yeah you can't see anybody confirming it right for every one person that says it was russia yeah two other people say we don't know super refined man that's that's espionage that's insane it's super for me i think it's super exciting it is exciting you know it's exciting and it's insane and it's scary it's everything yeah why do you think it is i mean i i hear a lot that russia their spying techniques and their technology when it comes to surveillance and stuff is way more advanced than us is that accurate yeah there's um i wouldn't say it's more advanced i would say that it's more aggressive more aggressive yeah so you've got you've got these handful of of uh national intelligence organizations that have very refined very sophisticated um talented people intelligent people they understand technology they know how to use it right some of the countries on the left uh israel is on that list america's on that list canada's on that list the united arab emirates saudi arabia in the middle east on that list china's on the list india is on that list brazil is on that list it's a huge list right there's lots korea japan these are super refined places that are really good at what they do the difference between them is how aggressive they are okay america doesn't want to get caught like we want to be the quiet gray person that never gets caught so we're we use our stuff less aggressively china wants the whole world to secretly fear them so they don't worry about aggression they want to appear aggressive and then they have this excellent narrative because they're not a democracy right a handful of people decide that they have their own um what's the word i'm looking for propaganda organization their job is just to come up with the narrative so whenever someone accuses china of being aggressive china just comes up with a narrative that's like hey we're trying to be a world leader yeah we're trying to help don't mistake our aggression or don't mistake our our good will for aggression while we figure this thing out right right so that's that's how it works um places like russia super aggressive because russia's in this funky spot where it's still a state-controlled nation but they're trying to play this role where they're like a peacekeeper in the world like they're trying to offset american supremacy with their own kind of russian supremacy so it gets really sticky man how do you how do you put surveillance on all your people but then tell people like tell other countries that you can trust us we're here to help right it's really hard to do that it's hard to do that when you've got a country like america that actually helps you with no strings attached right or canada that actually helps you with no strings attached because the real strings are hidden so nobody even knows that they're there right that's the difference between what's known as tradecraft how we do our tradecraft and how they do their tradecraft do you think this is one of the terms of espionage do you think obviously when they charge snowden his charge his main charge was espionage was that actually espionage um so a lot of people say a lot there's like one guy on twitter i forget his i forget his name that basically says that he compromised a lot of stuff by giving things to china and russia but basically i guess from what i understand is what he did is not technically espionage because espionage is giving is giving compromising information to other countries so here's what's interesting about snowden and going back to what we were talking about remember we were talking about vulnerabilities and the soft spot between your toes yeah right snowden wasn't an intelligence officer he was a contractor that's often mistaken a lot of times it's reported that he was an nsa employee he was not he was a contractor a contractor that's a third-party contractor just like solarwinds is a third-party contract okay right we have multiple cases in the united states where third-party contractors are targeted by foreign intelligence services because they have access to top-secret systems but they don't have any of the protections that like full-blown cia officers nsa officers dia officers have right so as an example when i was in cia i had to take a full scope polygraph i had to go through multiple interviews every year to make sure that i was not compromised to a foreign intelligence unit right okay when i worked i would often work side by side with a contractor a contractor from booz allen hamilton a contractor from northrop grumman a contractor from caci who didn't have any of that securities like bat barrage that they had to go through right they basically were like caci the government went to cici and was like we need a body we need a body to type and they're like here you go this person hasn't has a top secret clearance and they're yours that's a third party contractor that's the weak spot and they don't sign those those confidentiality lifetime confidentiality agreements they don't sign a lifetime confidentiality agreement their contracting company signs that agreement for them so that's how it's like snowden could be in a seat on monday and then the next day the contract goes to a different organization or or like snowden's contractor contracting firm decides you know this guy's not worth it let's put somebody else in right that's that's part of the problem that has been identified with solar winds we have this huge soft underbelly because we've relied on contractors and third-party contractors for so long so with snowden he was never an intelligence officer he never had direct access to intelligence policy therefore he doesn't really fall under the espionage act the espionage act specifically applies to intelligence personnel so if an intelligence personnel officer who's been entrusted and sworn their oath to the united states violates it they can be tried for treason and for espionage right if you don't sign that they have to find different charges which is why you see he has all sorts of charges for like compromising information and selling information and giving away secrets that shouldn't have been like he's got a whole rap sheet of things that he has done that are valid uh valid criminal charges that can be with it can be upheld but that that's why there's so much question about the espionage act got it yeah i thought for some reason i thought that just because that he revealed information that was specific to amer american government spying on americans i thought that it wasn't espionage because it wasn't it wasn't it didn't have anything to do with any sort of foreign entities yeah so when he left the united states he basically started selling his services his services meaning his information that's how he paid for his escape oh really yeah so he didn't know he gave information to uruguay gave information to cuba gave information to russia gave information to china that's how he kind of that was the the barter that he used to keep getting state level protection to escape them to evade american authorities so it's they all offered protection for a limited period of time until they got the information that applied to them and then they shipped him off to the next person wow yeah that's where that's where the treason charges come in that's where you know we can say that he has compromised information that was secret national security information um that he swore to protect but then he didn't protect it espionage act but that is a criminal charge do you think that's how he's in russia right now yeah absolutely the way that that guy has been able to evade capture isn't because big-hearted countries around the world want to support him right it's because they're like snowden is a giant black eye to the united states he's only getting help from countries that hate the united states right so he like that's how it works and if if something were to happen the other way around i promise you right now if some contractor who does business on behalf of russia's fsb if somebody were to come out and like basically out themselves in the press and say hey russia does this terrible thing um america we would be like come on over to america we've got a nice house for you in seattle yeah we're gonna give you lots of prime time television spots oh my god but do you think do you think that's the only reason they're protecting him is because it makes the u.s look bad and it's a black guy united states or is he actually giving them any kind of any kind of compromising information yeah i don't i don't think he has anything else to give no right he gave everything out publicly as soon as he left like i'm sure he didn't give everything up publicly because he's a smart guy a smart guy would know you give 80 of it away publicly you keep 20 in reserve for that day that russia comes and they're like okay we don't really need you anymore you're like did i tell you about this and then you you know you buy a little bit more time so i'm sure he had stuff in reserve but uh but yeah the reason that russia keeps him is not because he's doing anything that helps them now he's not giving them anything that's super sensitive he's not talented enough to be developing technology for them all of their resources are more talented than he is right maybe he can give them some context or some insight into you know how american cyber security works but he's outdated he's obsolete in a lot of ways now right but what he is still current on is he is still a big hot seat like he's a big hot ticket item in the united states if russia gives snowden back to the united states you can be sure it's because they're trading him for people that have been captured in the united states that they want back wow yeah it's called a it's called a prisoner exchange or an intel exchange but couldn't he just be pardoned by like the president or something it could be if they if a president wanted to do that but that's not they would most likely try to do a barter yeah most likely and i think that's what our government probably knows too is there like snowden's being held in russia so that the next time we bust seven illegals if you recall back in like 2010 or 11 we busted like seven russian illegals here in the united states and we put them all in jail and then there was a big prisoner exchange so that's what they're waiting for they're waiting for the next big exchange where like it's just public enough but not too public where they can be like hey we'll give you snowden and you can close this case and you can show that the united states is all powerful but in exchange for that we're gonna want these three guys that you wrapped up like that's that's what i think they're waiting for that's what most uh most intelligence professionals think that's snowden's value now is just as a chip for some future date yeah but you would think that you would think that just pardoning him would take that power away from russia you know it would take that they're holding him they have that that leverage of snowden if the president could just pardon him they would take that leverage away from them but it also validates what he did yeah like if you pardon one person who's been deemed a traitor what keeps you from pardoning a future trader or a past trader right and there have been some massive massive compromises cia officers nsa officers dia officers contractors for all different intelligence community firms um yeah you know how do you choose who gets a pardon who doesn't get a pardon and even worse you're basically saying that snowden what snowden did was 100 percent right and everything that our system did was wrong so now we're going to pardon it and that's that's a hard thing to do right that's basically admitting that our system is broken right it's hard to admit that in a world stage even though we've had to come close recently yeah [Laughter] well they did they did recently come out and say that and admit that everything that they were doing was illegal and violated the constitution i think that was recently i saw that in a um i think it was a a washington post article i think maybe like two weeks ago yeah correct like the the courts the civilian courts ultimately ruled that the secret courts made the wrong call okay right and that's why i still say that snowden did the right thing the wrong way right our civilian courts have said we should not have collected this kind of information right he did the right thing calling attention to it but you don't call attention to something by pawning it off to our most hostile enemies yeah what are your thoughts what are your thoughts on on the whole election fraud scandal do you do you think about that at all have you talked about that at all yeah it's you know the whole with the dominion servers and russia and all this it's hard to it's hard to keep a handle on all of it so here's here's you know the if anybody's old enough to remember the matrix there's this the whole the whole first movie basically revolves around this red pill and blue pill yeah right why didn't i take the blue pill the blue pill being the pill that keeps you ignorant to all this stuff right one of the first things that espionage taught me is that just because you're aware of it doesn't mean it's not happening to you right so in every election around the world that has some nexus that impacts the united states i don't think it's surprising to think that the united states is probably involved how can we make sure that things in somalia go favorably for us how can we make sure that things in the middle east go favorably forest or in south america go favorably for us how can we how can we as an intelligence infrastructure influence that to make sure it works why do we think that that hasn't been happening the entire time the united states has been alive right japan was japan three what 300 250 years before the united states was the united states china was china 3000 years before the united states was united states do we really think that we've ever had a presidential election that hasn't had foreign influence what happened in 2016 yeah whatever trump got elected yeah that was just when foreign influence was caught do you see what i'm saying every election before that it's reasonable to assume it had foreign influence it had foreign interference when you say they were caught what do you mean specifically that means like facebook caught russia right right twitter caught russia people caught russia being involved right right whether or not there was any like where they were using facebook and social media to basically create these like these toxic echo chambers on youtube riling people up on correct so certain narratives or whatever why do we think that that didn't happen before 2014 just because there's no evidence just because no one's looked like what makes us think that didn't happen in 2008 what makes us think that didn't happen in 2004 what makes a thing that didn't happen in whatever 1982 yeah right yeah logically every single presidential cycle has foreign influence logically russia would be involved in every single one of them it just so happens that technology got to a place in 2014 where russia got too aggressive and they got caught just like solar winds right see what i mean we don't know if it was russia or not somebody got aggressive and technology made it so we could catch it they caught it in 2014. so what was everybody looking for in 2000 or 2016 they caught it everybody was looking for it in 2020 they caught it again right so so where where where do i land on the whole like election fraud and whatever else i think that now that we know that the narrative is muddy now that we know without a shadow of a doubt that foreign intelligence services are actively involved in our election cycle like what is being said matters less than realizing we can't trust everything that's being said how much of it is coming from somebody who has an opinion how much of it's being fabricated how much of it is alarmist rhetoric how much of it is genuine not just on the republican side either but on the biden side too let's not forget that like like we had intelligence reports that were saying china wanted biden russia wanted you know trump really whether or not those are true reports or not what makes us think that china isn't just as involved in the narratives happening right now as chi as russia is accused of being involved in narratives right now and we haven't even talked about iran being involved or about north korea being involved like it's not hard the whole cycle there's an anatomy for how you drive an influence operation and we know how that anatomy works it was silly for us if we ever thought that somehow the united states and our electoral process was independent of influence operations before 2016. right i just think it's it's it's weird like it's it's so much different now like before it was facebook now it's this weird company called dominion that owns these ballot machines or whatever and they somehow their servers somehow or got compromised and or at least that's from venezuela or whatever i can't keep track of it all it's so confusing and that's a big for me yeah that's a big sign of a conspiracy when it's that confusing yeah right when it's that confusing and it's that complicated and it's that hard to follow if it's that hard for you to follow and you're a pretty smart guy how much harder is it to architect right it's much much easier for like somebody to to think up some sort of paranoid idea and then someone like iran or someone like venezuela chimes in with a couple of fake accounts and magnifies that alarmist rhetoric right it could all be real it could all be fake the problem is nobody's realizing it could be both people are either believing it's real or believing it's fake nobody's sitting around saying hey like elements of this are probably real and elements of this are probably fake let's figure it out that's the definition of intelligence is is landing on a conclusion when you don't have all the information right that's what makes intelligence intelligence if you had a conclusion it wouldn't be intelligence it would just be fact right if you had no basis at all for what you're saying it would be fabrication it also wouldn't be intelligence intelligence is what you do when you take missing pieces and complete pieces and you put it all together and you come to a conclusion right and then that conclusion can change but you land on some kind of conclusion my conclusion in this is elements of this are real elements of this are fake we need time to collect more information right yeah there's just it's crazy that it's it's almost like it's almost just like a battle of different countries around the world trying to determine who the next president of the united states is going to be i mean could you think if if you were in charge of china or russia would you bat an eye at putting tens of millions or even billions of dollars into influencing the outcome of the united affect you in a stan way absolutely exactly right like we do it every day we're going to buy the right kind of car insurance that benefits us we're going to go to the restaurant that benefits us we're going to watch the show on netflix that benefits us like we're dedicating our resources to making those decisions it makes perfect sense that some foreign country would be like well we've got to dedicate resources to getting the right person in that office um kind of a a weird segue but have you ever heard of a guy named barry seal it's only faint he was uh he was a commercial airline pilot who um was working for the started working for the medellin cartel and he was he was uh flying tons of cocaine from south america or central america to i think it was arkansas nice and uh and basically he got busted and he became a dea informant and he was when he was he one of your guests too no or was his story told his story was told on one of my podcasts yeah i think that maybe where i've seen it before yeah a guy a guy by the name of sean atwood a guy who who lives in the uk wrote a book about the war on a series of books about the war on drugs and uh basically there was a whole book about barry seal and george bush and the clintons when the clinton when uh bill clinton was still a uh a governor or whatever the hell he was in arkansas um and this guy barry seal who was now a dea informant flying drugs back and forth from south america to the united states basically there's like the the the theory is that he was doing that for the government for the cia uh to fuel the war on drugs and the government was directly doing business with the medellin cartel and um he was could have compromised george bush somehow for being involved and when he was murdered the claim is that the u.s government george bush gave the medellin cartel this guy's position basically gave him up so that they could execute him so that i would bury everything crazy crazy amazingly fascinating conspiracy about the cia's involvement with you know the war on drugs and uh and all that just diving down another another rabbit hole which i thought was interesting it's it's definitely interesting and i would say excuse me i would say that uh the i don't ever write off conspiracy theories i've seen too many conspiracy theories turned into conspiracies that turn out to be actual facts not theories right um i don't think that the theory is ever 100 right but it might be 20 right do you know what i mean right um and just like we know about some shady stuff that cia has done for mk ultra and against fidel castro and against you know uh leaders in the congo like anything's possible we've got to remember that the agency cia is a tool of the executive branch the executive branch is the president's branch right so that means the president can do whatever he wants with cia we don't fall under any like we're not on the judicial branch we're not in the legislative branch we're under the executive branch we work for the executive if the president comes up with some hair brain wacky idea like when it comes to us he has the authority to do what he wants to do and we are still a government organization cia still does what they're told to do right sometimes they run it through attorneys sometimes they run it through secret courts and secret courts might come back and agree or disagree or whatever else but uh you know is it beyond the realm of reality to think that that story is true not at all like cia's done wacky stuff um and if it comes to if the president wanted it to happen like we ultimately salute smile and execute right like that's the job of a government servant give everyone out there um an idea of where they can find more of the stuff you're doing with your podcast with your website with anything else how can people find you yeah absolutely if you uh if you are a podcast listener i've got a very popular podcast called everyday espionage you'll find me on all the major platforms out there everyday espionage you can search for that you can search for andrew bustamante you'll find it there all of my lessons everything that i teach is available through everydayspy.com everydayspy.com i've got a free spy game out there for folks to actually come on and test their own spy skills i've got tons of content a game yeah you can play online yeah remember how i was telling you about just-in-time learning yeah how we learn how we train basically just in time to use the skill yeah we've simulated that same kind of training into an online game that you can do right there on the website so and it's free it's i just want to give people a taste of how fun and powerful it is to learn these skills like quickly using that just-in-time learning process that's amazing yeah and then all of our content is available there and you know we offer all sorts of stuff through our newsletter that you can sign up for there and then we've got social media just like everybody else we're not as popular as you um but you can find us on youtube you can find us on twitter you can find us on facebook everything is at everyday spy so yeah if people want to find me reach out and let's talk and it's a blast doing what i do that's amazing man well thank you for being here and uh and sharing your knowledge and your experiences with us i really appreciate that no it's my pleasure brother cool man well let's definitely do this again super interesting i'm in goodbye world [Music] you

Channel: KONCRETE

Views: 199,623

Rating: 4.4662704 out of 5

Keywords: Koncrete, podcast, underground, exclusive, independent, interview, interviews, koncrete podcast, andrew bustamante, CIA, former cia, spy, covert spy, espionage, espionage stories, undercover cia, cia officer, super spy, cia agent, cia spies, cia spy, everyday espionage, edward snowden

Id: CkUDwq_-6AE

Length: 89min 15sec (5355 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 27 2020