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#072_ STORY INSPIRE: Former CIA Operatives: Why You Should Leave America Before 2030 · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: When this story hits the airwaves, it's going to transform
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: people's opinion about the CIA and the depths to which
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: CIA will dive to collect intelligence that protects Americans. So
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: one of its own officers became a spy, reporting our
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: secrets to a foreign adversary. My wife and I were
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: included in an operation to bait the mole, to make
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: a mistake so that the mole could be found and disclosed.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: Your wife is here today, and you've never told this
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: story before, have you?
• 0:24
  Speaker 3: No.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: And your curiosity right now is a major issue with
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: CIA because they don't want the world to know who
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: those people are. It's a dangerous game.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: Well, obviously, my research team tried to figure out who
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: it was. So was this the mob?
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: Married CIA spies Andrew and Gigi Bustamante were tasked with
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: unraveling one of the greatest intelligence operations in modern history.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: Their untold story shows you how to build trust, manipulate,
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: and thrive under pressure. A foreign ally contacted CIA and said,
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: you have somebody inside your organization sharing information on operations, officers,
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: assets to an enemy country. They deployed us to the
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: country and crafted new identities, new aliases, so that we
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: could build new sources of intelligence and try.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: To find the mole.
• 1:14
  Speaker 3: And we were really successful in doing that.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: Nobody felt like they were in imminent danger, but then
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: that changed. My presence in the enemy country became known.
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: I called GK.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: And said, I'm coming home early.
• 1:24
  Speaker 3: And from that, I knew that something was wrong. Because
• 1:27
  Speaker 3: it is very real that you can be disappeared by
• 1:30
  Speaker 3: a foreign adversary.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Or worse, being captured. And the president can plausibly deny
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: that you're CIA. So I had to try to escape
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: the country. But everything went wrong.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: And what happens next? A horrible story.
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: So.
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: This is the first time I'm setting you at home
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: a challenge when you listen to this episode. Can you
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: figure out which country Andrew and Jihee were undercover in
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: as spies from what they say? But also, our team
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: here figured out that the mole in the CIA was
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: one of these three people. Can you figure out from
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: what they say which person was the mole? It might
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: make sense for you at this moment to screenshot these
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: three faces and the details below so you can remember
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: their profiles. And by the end of the conversation, I
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: want you to comment below which country you thought Andrew
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: was undercovering as a spy and which one of these
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: people was the mole within the CIA. Let's do this. Listen,
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: to my regular listeners, I know you don't like it
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: when I ask you to subscribe at the start of
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: these conversations. I don't like saying, I don't like it
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: being in there. None of us like it. It's frustrating.
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: Do you know what's also frustrating? It's also frustrating when
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: I go into the back end of the YouTube channel
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: and I see that 56% of you that listen frequently
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: to this podcast haven't yet subscribed. And so many of
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: you don't even know that you haven't subscribed because I
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: see in the comment section, you say to me, you go,
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: I didn't even realize I didn't subscribe. And that actually
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: fuels the show. It's basically like you're making a donation
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: to the show. So that's why I ask all the
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: time because it enables us to build and build and
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: build and build. And we're going for the long term here.
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: So all I'd ask you is if you've seen this
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: show before and you like it, help me, help my
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: team here, hit the subscribe button, and we'll continue to
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: build this show for you. That's my promise. Thank you
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: to all of you guys that do subscribe, means the
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: world to me. Let's get on with the show. Andrew,
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: you've never told this story before, have you?
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: No, I have never told the story of my own
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: operational background. It's been something that CIAP has forbidden for
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: a long time.
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: And what's written in this book has taken you a
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: long time to get approved by the CIA.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: Correct. So all CIA officers sign a lifetime secrecy agreement
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: and that secrecy agreement gives CIA the right to, to
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: approve or disapprove any operational elements of our background and
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: that are still classified and that fit under this very
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: kind of narrow rubric of sources and methods, sources and
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: methods of active intelligence collection. Because of my time at CIA,
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: my work at CIA, and the sensitivity of that work,
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: I just kind of assumed I would never be able
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: to talk about it. And then all that changed with
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: the first Trump administration.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: What was the CIA's response when you said that you
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: wanted to talk about what you're going to talk about today?
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Well, that's what's interesting. They had two different responses. When
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: I first submitted the request in 2019, to CIA to
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: write about my operational background. We went through kind of
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: some normal bureaucratic back and forth and they ultimately said, yes,
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: you can write about it in detail. And then in 2021,
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: when we submitted the manuscript and it was complete, the
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: world started to change. In 2022, multiple major issues erupted
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: between major adversaries of the United States and CIA came
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: back and removed their previous permission. They basically said that
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: in light of current geopolitics, everything in the book was
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: now reclassified.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: How did you get the CIA to change their mind
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: so that you could release this book and talk about
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: what you're going to talk about today?
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: We engaged with an attorney, one of the top attorneys
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: in the space of classified information and publishing information. So
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: the attorney believed that because of the effort that my
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: wife and I had put into the book, CIA would
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: back off. And ultimately, that is what they did. When
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: we threatened them with a First Amendment lawsuit, they came
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: back and said, we don't want to go down that road.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: We think we can collaborate on this. We'll approve your
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: book and you can move forward.
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: Why do you think they didn't want you to publish
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: this book and this story to get out?
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: When this story hits the airwaves, it's going to transform
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: people's opinion about CIA in two big ways. First, they'll
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: understand that CIA is not what the movies portray it
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: to be. It's not superhuman spies who go out there
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: like James Bond or Jason Bourne. who are one man
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: against the world. That's not how espionage works. Espionage is
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: a team sport. You have wins, you have losses. The
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: second thing is they'll actually, they'll start to understand the
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: depths to which CIA will dive to collect intelligence that
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: protects Americans. Inside this book, we talk about a mole
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: that actually penetrated CIA that CIA has never acknowledged. Inside
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: this book, we talk about new tactics that CIA learned
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: from terrorism and then used against our own most strategic adversaries.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: I don't think people recognize that CIA is morally ambivalent
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: to how it executes espionage operations. The goal is to
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: keep Americans safe.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: When you say in this book, you disclose that there
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: was a mole within the CIA, what does that mean
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: for someone that doesn't know what a mole in the
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: CIA is?
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: One of the worst things that can happen to an
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: intelligence service is that one of its own officers becomes
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: a spy for a foreign adversary. That is what I'm
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: referring to when I talk about a mole.
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: And you were involved in that operation to find the
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: mole within the CIA.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: Correct. More specifically, my wife and I were included in
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: an operation to kind of ferret out the mole, to
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: bait and tempt the mole to make a mistake so
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: that the mole could be found and disclosed.
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: And your wife is here today. Correct. And we're going
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: to bring her in and talk to her as well.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: But for anyone that doesn't know your backstory, which would
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: be pretty remarkable seeing as you've been on this channel
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: now a few times, could you give me a whistle-stop
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: tour of your professional background up until the point that
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: you met Jihyo?
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm from a rural place in Pennsylvania.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: I was like the only brown kid in a white
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: high school. But I ended up going to a military academy.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: I went to the Air Force Academy. And from the
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: Air Force Academy, I go into the Air Force. The
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: Air Force teaches me how to fly. They teach me
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: a foreign language. And then they teach me about nuclear
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: weapons and nuclear missiles. And I serve as a nuclear
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: missile officer in the Air Force. So CIA picked me up.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: And in my first day on the job in CIA,
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: the day that I met my wife, She was sitting
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: in the back of the classroom. I, of course, worked
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: my way to the front of the classroom. And from there,
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: our training just kind of overlapped and we became close.
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: Well, Jihee is here, so I'd like to hear her
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: version of events. Was there any inconsistency in the story
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: he told? What was your perspective? There's always another perspective.
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: And are you allowed to date in the CIA?
• 8:09
  Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. It's encouraged because it's really hard when you're
• 8:15
  Speaker 3: keeping so many secrets to date somebody outside of the
• 8:19
  Speaker 3: CIA and not be able to tell it. Because we
• 8:20
  Speaker 3: had friends who did that, who did that. You have
• 8:22
  Speaker 3: to keep your whole life secret. So you're lying to
• 8:24
  Speaker 3: them about where you're going and what you do.
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: Day to day.
• 8:26
  Speaker 3: Day to day, every single day. So you're building a
• 8:29
  Speaker 3: relationship and lying all the time. And it's really difficult.
• 8:33
  Speaker 3: So if you date within the CIA, if you're in
• 8:38
  Speaker 3: different divisions or whatever, maybe you can't talk about everything
• 8:41
  Speaker 3: in detail, but you at least know what's going on.
• 8:44
  Speaker 3: You know why somebody is going TDY or where they're
• 8:46
  Speaker 3: going for a training session.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: We can explain to each other like, hey, I'm going
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: to go work with the Spanish. I'm going to go
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: work with the Canadians. But when you're dating somebody on
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: the outside, you can't say those things. So it becomes,
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: I'm going on a business meeting. I'm going on a trip.
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: Crazy.
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: And we've had many friends who have had relationships explode
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: or melt down because the partner starts to ask very
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: logical questions. We had one good friend of ours who
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: was an outsider who was dating one of our good
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: friends who was an insider. And she pulled me aside
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: one day and she was like, you know, he goes
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: on all these business trips, but he never takes any suits.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: She's like, I think he's cheating on me. And I
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: was like, no, he's actually going to a tactical training
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: course where you don't need to wear anything except BDUs,
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: but I can see your concerns. So you have to
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: walk your, like, there's a lot of walking people off
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: a cliff because they start to come to the wrong conclusions.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: about what their actual partner is doing.
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: Chihi, what's your journey into the CIA?
• 9:44
  Speaker 3: Mine was kind of an unexpected journey because I went
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: into social work, working with survivors of torture from other countries,
• 9:52
  Speaker 3: with refugees, with asylees. But before I got that job,
• 9:55
  Speaker 3: I'd actually, I'd spent my entire last year of grad
• 9:58
  Speaker 3: school going to job fairs. And I wanted, what I
• 10:01
  Speaker 3: really wanted was to work for the federal government for
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: like the larger mission for the United States, for like
• 10:05
  Speaker 3: the people of the United States. But then nobody was
• 10:08
  Speaker 3: calling me back. And I was like, okay, I was like,
• 10:10
  Speaker 3: I'll just submit an application, like an online application to CIA,
• 10:13
  Speaker 3: which I thought was funny. And then a few months later,
• 10:15
  Speaker 3: I got a call back. She was like, come to
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: the information session. So I went in like a random
• 10:20
  Speaker 3: hotel with these like nondescript signs outside and you walk
• 10:23
  Speaker 3: in and you're like, I don't know if I'm in
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: the right place. And then they close the door and
• 10:26
  Speaker 3: they're like, welcome to the CIA recruiting session. And you're like,
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: this is so bizarre.
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: Did they tell you what your role is? Because I
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: know there's several different roles in the CIA.
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: Targeters began during the war on terror. And because what
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: they initially did was target individuals for capture or kill
• 10:47
  Speaker 3: for the military, right? Okay.
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: So what does that mean? They targeted people for capture
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: or kill for the military. So you would find the
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: person to capture or kill in a foreign country.
• 10:59
  Speaker 3: Yes. And so because everybody else is doing their job
• 11:04
  Speaker 3: of logistics or weapons or fighting or strategy. So the
• 11:09
  Speaker 3: targeted position was really important because it takes time to
• 11:14
  Speaker 3: go through all this data to piece together this puzzle
• 11:17
  Speaker 3: of who is important, who is important to capture, who's
• 11:22
  Speaker 3: important to kill, and how do you get to them?
• 11:24
  Speaker 3: The how do you get to them is the piece
• 11:26
  Speaker 3: that like everybody else wants to know, but they don't
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: really have time to do that and their other jobs.
• 11:32
  Speaker 3: So they carved out this targeter role so one person
• 11:35
  Speaker 3: can do all this research and identify. And the, you know,
• 11:38
  Speaker 3: terrorists were really fascinating because they had how their organizations
• 11:43
  Speaker 3: were structured. And so you really needed somebody who could look,
• 11:46
  Speaker 3: I mean, it's like a, Like targeting the mafia, right?
• 11:50
  Speaker 3: Like everybody has a role. Like there's a big organization.
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: Everybody has a role. It is in your favor if
• 11:57
  Speaker 3: you're going after them to find out who's who. Who's who?
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: Who's connected to who? How can you get to different people?
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: Because you're never going to be able to just get
• 12:06
  Speaker 3: the top person right away. So how do you get there, right?
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: And you became a targeter.
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: So your job was to figure out who to capture
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: and kill.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: Or capture or kill.
• 12:16
  Speaker 3: Or kill.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: And what was your role in the CIA? How is
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: your role different? Can you explain it for a layman?
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So where Jihi was trying to find the individuals
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: that were of interest, my job was to learn what
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: to do after a target or identify those individuals. How
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: do you actually meet the person? How do you befriend
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: the person? How do you win their trust? How do
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: you collect their secrets? What's known as a field officer
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: and operations officer, a case officer. Those are the different
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: terminologies that we use internally, but you essentially have every case.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: is kind of handed over from person to person. So
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: raw information, sometimes open source information is handed to a
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: targeter who creates a profile, a dossier, a targeting package,
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: who hands it to an operations officer who goes out
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: and actually makes that first contact. And then when first
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: contact is made, we pass all the information back and
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: it goes back to all the same people to build
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: the next package for the next target.
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: So Jihee would identify the individual and then your job
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: was to fly overseas, go undercover, and make first contact
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: with that individual to extract intelligence from them?
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: And not at first. By the time that CIA started
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: utilizing us as a tandem couple, a tandem couple is
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: a term that means a married, truly married, CIA trained couple.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: When we started becoming a tandem couple, that's how we
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: were a one-two punch for operations. Prior to that, we
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: were in separate offices and separate divisions doing separate work.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: So we got along and we were complimentary because I
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: understood the challenges of her job and she understood the
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: challenges of my job, which made both of us better
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: working with our counterparts in our different offices.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: So where does the story begin, Andy? You wrote this
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: book to tell a story. So I'm asking you the question.
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: Usually I'd hazard a guess where to start, but where
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: does this story begin?
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: From my perspective, the story really starts on, I think
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: it was a winter day when we were both called
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: in to a counterintelligence office that was a massive oak table.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: It was a senior executive leadership type of room, but
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: there were only three people there. It was she, it
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: was me, and it was the leader of what's known
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: as Falcon House, which is this group of specialists inside
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: of CIA focused on one particular adversary, an adversary that
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: we've had to code name Falcon to maintain confidentiality with CIA.
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: And so Falcon is a country, basically. Falcon is a.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: Country, correct. And that leader revealed to us that they
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: believed there was a penetration, a mole that was inside
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: of Falcon House, inside of CIA. and that they needed
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: us to agree to do an operation so that the
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: mole will make a mistake here. Because if the mole
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: makes a mistake here, we'll find him. But we can't
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: have you be here because if you're here, the mole
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: will find you. And then we don't know what happens
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: if the mole finds you. So we're going to send
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: you across the world to go work in this other country,
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: Falcon being the country, while we here as the experts
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: in Washington, D.C., try to find the mole. And that
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: was privileged information. that neither of us as junior officers
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: ever thought we would hear. And I think that I
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: know for me, I was kind of giddy with excitement
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: and gee, he was a little bit more apprehensive with
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: this can't be real, but that was for me, that's
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: where the story starts is when these two people, her
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: and with her anxiety disorder and me with my kind
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: of lackluster CIA career, when we got pulled into this office,
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: that was clearly outside of our league and invited to
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: do this operation, um, Without that first meeting, Shadow Cell
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: would have never happened.
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: So from that moment onwards, how long was it before
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: you flew to the foreign country in question? And what
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: was your objective when you got to that foreign country?
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: So I guess it's like a sub-objective to find the mole.
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: And there was another main objective, which was going to
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: help find the mole?
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: I mean, you're using great terminology. There were primary objectives
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: and secondary objectives. And the primary objective was to build
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: a new set of reporting assets, a new source of intelligence,
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: several new sources of intelligence in Falcon, the actual country.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: And to help you frame what Falcon is, there's only
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: a handful of countries that are true stark adversaries to
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: the United States. Every one of those countries has limited
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: to no diplomatic relationship with the United States. That's how
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: hostile they are. Any one of those countries could be falcon.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: The reason that we have to code name the country
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: is because CIA in today's geopolitical world has demanded we
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: don't disclose the name of the country. So we call
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: it falcon.
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: What are the United States adversaries where we don't have
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: any relationship with them? There's also like North Korea, there's Russia,
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: there's Iran we know of. Are there any others?
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: Cuba.
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: Cuba.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And there's a mix there of countries that we
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: do have a relationship with, but it's not a warm
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: relationship versus countries we have no relationship with. So we
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: have no relationship with North Korea. We have a cold
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: relationship with Russia, right? We have a cold relationship with China.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: We have no relationship with Iran. So they're all considered
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: hard targets. but of various levels.
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: So this, the objective is the primary objective is to
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: build a new team in this country. But the sub
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: objective is in building the team, you're going to find
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: out hopefully who the mole is because the mole is
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: going to make a mistake.
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: The mole is going to try to find us because
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: the mole's job is to prevent CIA from collecting secrets
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: about Falcon because the mole is working for Falcon intelligence.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: The mole is working for that country. Right. The mole
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: is part of the CIA, but working for the adversarial country.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: Bingo, which is the worst combination you can have. So
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: some of the most famous moles in history are Aldrich Ames.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: Aldrich Ames was a CIA penetration that worked for the Russians.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: Robert Hansen. Robert Hansen was an FBI penetration that worked
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: for the Russians. So these are famous moles in history.
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: We were essentially being told that these earth shattering 1990s
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: era moles were were still relevant, but now in 2010-ish,
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: there was a new one that had made its way
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: into CIA. And that's a big deal. So it was
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: a very exciting reveal for me because it meant that
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: we were not just doing something that was relevant and
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: interesting inside of CIA. We're doing something that is quite
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: possibly the most important work that can be done inside
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: CIA at this moment in time.
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: How did the CIA know there was a mole?
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of complexity there. That is part of
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: why they didn't want us to write this book. But
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: what they have allowed us to disclose is that a
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: foreign ally contacted CIA and said, we have collected intelligence
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: that suggests you have a mole. You have somebody inside
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: your organization who's a turncoat, a spy for somebody else.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: So a foreign ally warned CIA, otherwise CIA would.
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: Have had no idea.
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: And foreign allies are people like the United Kingdom.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: Canada, Australia. So you can imagine the disruption that that
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: would make. Not only did CIA proper not know they
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: had a mole, it took an ally to tell us.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: And then when the ally told us, we have to
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: assume that the ally is sharing as much biographical detail
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: as possible. So they're telling you the name. Hey, Bob
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: is a spy in your organization. But now that CIA
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: officer is an American citizen protected by American rights and privileges.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: And CIA obviously has no information to show that that
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: person's a spy, except for the word of some foreign ally,
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: which is still in the eyes of the US government,
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: a foreigner is a foreigner, ally or not. So even
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: if it is the UK or Canadians telling us so-and-so
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: is a spy, until we have our own body of evidence,
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: we can't prosecute. That person can't be fired. That person
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: can't be discharged. That person can't be sued. That person
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: can't be arrested. So now CIA has this mess where
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: they are actively losing information, actively losing intel because of
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: this mole because of a mole but they can't take
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: any action because they have to now build a legal
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: case against the mole to prove that that person's actually
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: breaking the law.
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: So the ally that calls the cia and says you've
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: got a mole in your ranks they named the person.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: Most likely most likely they would have never made the
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: notification without also sharing the name which is a courtesy
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: we do to others as well. If we come across
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: information that we know an MI6 officer has been compromised
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: or a Canadian CSIS officer has been compromised or an
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: ASIS officer in Australia, we will share as many biographical
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: details as possible.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: And did you share the name? When you were called
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: into the room that day, did they share the name
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: with you?
• 21:13
  Speaker 3: No.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: It's hard for people to wrap their minds around the
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: culture at CIA. And I get it because how do
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: you wrap your mind around an organization you don't know?
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: And the only insight is from movies. So culturally CIA
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: is a group of people who value secrets. And that
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: need to know is very important inside those walls. It's
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: just something we toss around like movie jargon outside. But
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: inside CIA, need to know is very, very real. And
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: you are only briefed to the minimum that you need
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: to know. So inside of this tiny group of spy hunters,
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: which is known as the counter espionage group, CEG inside
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: this very small group, they have the need to know
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: basically everything. And then as you go out in rings
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: from that group, they reduce the information they share. So
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: they might know the name, but then when they share
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: it to the next ring, they just say, Hey, there's
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: an officer who's in this office. And then it goes
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: to the next ring. There's an officer in this division
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: and it goes to the next ring. So the people
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: talking to us as senior leaders, the people talking to
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: us knew the minimum we needed to know was that
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: we were going to build new operations and But we
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: were also going to be most likely targeted by a
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: known threat inside CIA. That was why it mattered to us. Interestingly,
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: that decision is why we had a First Amendment case
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: with this book at all. Because CIA was knowingly putting
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: our lives in danger of a foreign adversary by intentionally
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: creating operations that would tempt that mole to disclose our identities.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: That was one of the things I was thinking when
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: I was reading the book is you knew that you
• 22:48
  Speaker 2: were being sent to an adversarial country. And you also
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: had the knowledge that working amongst you was a mole
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: who was revealing secrets about the CIA and potentially yourselves
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: to that foreign country.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: Correct.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: So that foreign country could have killed you. Absolutely.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: And that's the second kind of cultural element that people
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: don't understand about CIA. You don't really turn down an operation.
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: If you're invited to take part in an operation... You
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: have the right to say no, but if you say no,
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: you're committing career suicide. Jihee, and anybody who reads the
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: book will find this out. Jihee was a stellar officer
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: on a phenomenal trajectory, doing incredible things, kind of really
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: charting the course for what targeters have become today. For me,
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: I proved to be a not very good case officer.
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: And if there was anything I was really hoping for,
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: it was a second chance. So when We were pulled
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: into this meeting and they said, hey, here's this exciting opportunity.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: Here's an operation that we're literally inviting you into this
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: executive suite to invite you to this operation. And we're
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: going to put you together and we need you to
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: do this. That's not a situation that I was going
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: to say no to. I think you considered saying no.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: But for me, they knew me well enough to know
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: I was not going to turn that down.
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think when you have anxiety, you
• 24:16
  Speaker 3: consider saying no to everything. It's like you're always thinking
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: about the risk.
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: But I think that— What was the risk that you
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: were thinking about?
• 24:22
  Speaker 3: It is very real that you can be disappeared by
• 24:25
  Speaker 3: a foreign adversary, that you can be killed by them
• 24:29
  Speaker 3: with no explanation, that you can be just put in
• 24:32
  Speaker 3: jail and then you never get out because the government's
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: not necessarily going to come to your aid. And if
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: they do, it still might be 20 years before you're
• 24:40
  Speaker 3: out of their prison.
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: Every sworn officer has plausible deniability, meaning the president can
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: plausibly deny that you don't belong to whatever organization you
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: are claiming to belong to. So a CIA officer arrested
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: in a Russian prison can avoid all questioning and say,
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: hold on, guys. I'm actually CIA. You caught me. Good job. Now,
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: please send me home. Don't have a diplomatic incident. The
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: president has the right to say that person is not CIA.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: That person has never worked for me. I don't know
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: who that person is. that their American passport might be verified,
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: but they are legally in your possession of legal requirements.
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: So we don't really know who they are.
• 25:26
  Speaker 2: So just to clarify then, you were being told you
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: were going to be flown, both of you, to a
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: foreign country, an adversarial foreign country, and you were told
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: that there was a mole amongst your ranks that was
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: feeding information to the foreign country that you were being
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: flown to.
• 25:41
  Speaker 3: So they actually stationed us in a neighboring country that
• 25:47
  Speaker 3: was friendly. But we knew that Andy and anybody we
• 25:52
  Speaker 3: worked with would have to go into Falcon.
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: Falcon being the adversarial country.
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: The adversarial country. So we actually lived in a third
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: country called Wolf. But we were operating in both Wolf
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: and in Falcon. So the danger was still there.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: And then that's when Jihee's targeter mind set in. And
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: that's when she started thinking through. Well, how could our
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: operation be reverse engineered by Falcon and actually find us?
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: And if we can think like the enemy, we can
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: stay one step ahead of the enemy. So the whole
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: idea of going to Wolf and building our team from
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: the very beginning, G.E. started to architect how we could
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: do that in a way that would foil our aggressors
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: from being able to even discover our existence.
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: And what was the objective when you, so you've got
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: this sub objective, which I understand, which is to find
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: the mole. But the main objective is just to spy
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: as usual and collect information on this adversarial country.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: Yes and no. The main objective was to collect information,
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: but the spying as usual is the part that was
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: a no. CIA specifically told us they didn't want us
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: to do the standard spy MO. Spying has really been
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: the same since the days of Egypt, the ancient Egypt, right?
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: You find somebody who gives you information about something that
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: they have access to and that's it. And that's spying.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: Then you turn it into a report and you pass
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: it up to somebody who reads it and they make
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: a decision. They wanted a new kind of mousetrap. They
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: wanted a new way of doing espionage. And when they
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: deployed us to the friendly country, that was their only
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: request was whatever you do there, coordinate it with the
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: local leadership and then don't tell us because we have
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: to make sure that the mole doesn't learn what you're doing.
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: That's going to be how we tempt the mole to
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: start probing around and asking questions that are outside of
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: the norm. That's how we're going to reverse engineer this
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: and find the mole. So we need you to go
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: do something new and we need it not to be standard.
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: And don't tell us.
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: And don't tell us, but tell your leadership in the
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: friendly country.
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: Your CIA leadership in the friendly country. Correct.
• 27:55
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: Okay. And he's going to tell or she's going to
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: tell them.
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: No. So it's completely compartmentalized.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: Need to know.
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: Right. Because if we kept all of our operations centered
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: in Wolf, then in our friendly country, then the mole
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: would never know what we were doing. So we would
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: be gathering intelligence, which would then be further compartmentalized to
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: maybe a specific office where like one or two people
• 28:22
  Speaker 3: at headquarters might know about one particular operation. And then
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: one or two people might know about another operation, but it's,
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: Because not all of Falcon House would know, the mole
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: would not have access to any of these new intelligence sources.
• 28:39
  Speaker 3: And that's what was really important. That's why they wanted
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: us to rebuild because he currently had access to all
• 28:43
  Speaker 3: of the legacy intelligence sources. And so if he wanted
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: to pass any information to Falcon from all of our
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: legacy sources, he could. But if he doesn't have access
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: to our new sources, he can't pass any of that
• 28:56
  Speaker 3: new information on. And now here we are, we're able
• 28:59
  Speaker 3: to gather more intelligence. And then hopefully, if we're lucky,
• 29:02
  Speaker 3: we strike gold on finding out who he is or
• 29:05
  Speaker 3: who he's working with or other things. But yeah, compartmentalization
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: is the key. So we were really very kind of
• 29:13
  Speaker 3: siloed in Wolf.
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: I'm trying to understand how you doing what you were
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: doing was going to help the CIA discover who the
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: mole was.
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: One of the things in.
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: Double agent operations, which is what you're talking about when
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: you talk about a mole or penetration, a double agent,
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: meaning I'm a sworn officer of CIA, but then I've
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: also agreed to work with the Russians, the Chinese, the
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: North Koreans, the Cubans, whatever. That's a double, a double agent.
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: Double agent operations are very difficult to maintain long-term because
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: if my information isn't relevant to my foreign adversary anymore,
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: if I'm collecting secrets on Cuba, but I'm being paid
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: by the Russians, The Russians may not care that I
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: keep collecting secrets on Cuba, so they might cut me off.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: And then all of a sudden, I'm a double agent
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: culpable of crime, but without protection from another country. So
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: when you think of your Edward Snowdens, when you think
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: of some of your famous turncoats from the United States,
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: they flee to the country that they were working for, ultimately.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: So if you don't have that escape path, then it
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: becomes very, very stressful and scary for a double agent.
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: So what CIA was counting on is The mole who
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: was reporting our secrets to Falcon, if we could create
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: new operations and that mole didn't have access to those
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: new operations, then the mole would start to stretch. They
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: would start to make mistakes, ask questions they shouldn't ask,
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: steal information, try to hack onto systems they shouldn't get onto.
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: And that's all stuff that CIA can use to build
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: a legal case to arrest that person. But without knowing,
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: without having something that that person has to stretch to collect,
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: they're not going to make a mistake. So our job
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: was to create something new so that the mole would
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: make a mistake that CIA could track, and that would
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: build a legal case that would allow CIA to arrest
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: an American citizen for espionage.
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: Did the CIA have access to... the information the mole
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: was sending back to the enemy country?
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: No, that's one of the most dangerous parts about double
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: agent operations. We often, we have a lot of nicknames,
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: a lot of inside terminology, but we usually call it
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: the keys to the kingdom. When you have a foreign penetration,
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: you have the keys to everything in that foreign countries,
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: all of their secrets, because you have access to an
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: intelligence officer who can pull anything. So our double agent,
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: our mole, had access to essentially everything related to Falcon
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: that CIA had. So CIA didn't know what he was sharing,
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: what he wasn't sharing, how much he had been sharing,
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: or even how long he had been sharing it.
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: But they suspected he was sharing something.
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: Because there was something that our ally picked up on,
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: something that allowed them to identify the person and communicate
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: it back.
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: So you land in this friendly country next to the
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: enemy country. And do you have to adopt new aliases,
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: new names, new stories? Do you have to pretend that
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: you're normal people living a normal life? You do.
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: There's different ways that you can craft it. So Jihy's
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: job as the targeter was to find our targets in Falcon.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: A big part of what we had to do when
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: we got to Wolf, our friendly country, was do whatever
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: the leadership there told us to do. So CIA crafted
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: everything for us to land in the friendly country. Once
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: we were in the friendly country, Then we had to
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: start crafting new identities, new aliases, so that we could
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: travel out of the friendly country and into Falcon.
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: Into the enemy country.
• 32:50
  Speaker 3: But while living in Falcon, we were, you know, Chihi
• 32:53
  Speaker 3: and Andrew Bustamante, newlywed couple. Where we worked was covered.
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: Where did you work?
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: It's undercover. We still can't disclose it.
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: Like, as far as this enemy, did you, like, run a,
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: when you were in the enemy country working, were you, like, running, like,
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: a coffee shop? Or is it?
• 33:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah, when going into Falcon, you had to have a
• 33:14
  Speaker 3: different cover and a different cutout.
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: And we would use what you're referring to as called
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: commercial cover or commercial activity, meaning we would act as
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: if we were part of commercial business going into and
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: out of the country.
• 33:26
  Speaker 2: But you'd use your normal names?
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: No, no. This is one of the other things that's
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: really fascinating about the book. And one of the reasons
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: that CIA pushed back is we get to disclose whole
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: new levels of tradecraft that have never been talked about
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: in previous books. So the tradecraft that we use here
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: is something that the Brits actually call dry cleaning. And
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: what that means is we would clear our path before
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: we would go into Falcon. So we're in a friendly country,
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: and we need to go into a hostile country. In
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: order to go from the friendly country to the hostile country,
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: you can't go directly. Because if you go directly, the
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: hostile country can track you back to your friendly country,
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: and then they can send a team to to hurt
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: you if they need to in the friendly country. So
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: instead what you do is you create a cleansing route.
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: So you travel from the friendly country to a neutral country.
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: And in that neutral country, you'll change identities and then
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: travel into your target country. So now if the hostile
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: country tracks you, they track you back to a neutral
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: country and they have no idea that you originated from
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: a friendly country.
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: But if you go from a friendly country to a
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: neutral country, when you get to the neutral country, Do
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: you need like a new passport and stuff? Because that
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: neutral country, presumably they don't know that you're spies.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: Correct.
• 34:42
  Speaker 2: So do you have to have a new passport to
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: then get on a plane to fly into the... Yes.
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: And it's what we would call a passport swap. And
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: there's different ways of doing a swap. You can carry
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: your own swap. You can have somebody meet you to
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: do a swap. You can have a cache where you
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: hide a swap. But that's the benefit of always using
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: a consistent cleansing route because you can always go back
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: to the same neutral country. And from the hostile country's
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: point of view... Every time they track you, you always
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: go back to the same place. So they start to
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: build a pattern of life, what we call a pattern
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: of life, where they believe you're originating from this country,
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: when in fact you're not.
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: So you land in this friendly country, you're making your
• 35:21
  Speaker 2: way into the hostile country. What was your objective? What
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: were you trying to do in that hostile country?
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: The first thing we were trying to do was find targets.
• 35:29
  Speaker 2: And then.
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: We knew that as we found targets and built targets,
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: we would also need to support the operations against those targets.
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: And there's a logistical element to espionage where you need
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: to have encrypted phones. You need to have satellite phones
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: or SIM cards. You need to have money. You need
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: to have specialized gifts. There's a logistical supply chain that
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: needs to be built.
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: Specialized gifts.
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: So things that are appealing to a target that they
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: may not be able to get themselves. Gold bullion, high-end liquors,
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: child pornography, foreign currency. Whatever they need, your job is
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: to make sure they have a way of getting it.
• 36:10
  Speaker 2: Child pornography?
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: Some targets, especially in the world of drugs and terrorism
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: and weapons, they feed off of the strangest things.
• 36:23
  Speaker 2: So the CIA would supply that pornography?
• 36:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: In a way, we would more like facilitate the transfer.
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: Some other friendly country might actually be who acquires it.
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: So for example, Germany might actually have a raid where
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: they carry out a raid against a pornographer and they
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: have terabytes of porn, right? And then the UK might
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: have a case where they need porn to pay an Iranian.
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: So now they can trade with BND so that BND
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: can use this cache of porn and they can give
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: it to the Brits who give it to the Iranians,
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: and that can be a currency of types. Again, morally ambivalent,
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: the goal is to protect your people at the end
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: of the day, right? So when it comes down to it,
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: that's the same way CIA works. If we're giving gold,
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: if we're giving minted American gold coins to an evil
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: person in North Korea, do we really care if it's
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: keeping Americans safe? There are some people who would say yes,
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: and there are other people who would say, whatever the
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: price is, let's keep Americans safe.
• 37:30
  Speaker 2: So tell me about what you did then. So what
• 37:33
  Speaker 2: did you accomplish while you were there? And you talk
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: in the book about using terrorist tactics to build your
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: operation there. Can you run me through what it is
• 37:43
  Speaker 2: you accomplished there and the role that both of you played?
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: So I'll start it and I'll let you take it over.
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: But the... The book's title, Shadow Cell, is really about
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: the cell model and the terrorist cell model that we
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: recreated in our friendly country so that we could execute
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: operations against our hostile country that mirrored tactics and techniques
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: that terrorists had used to foil Americans for the last
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: 20 years in the global war on terror. So what
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: Jiki and I learned is that CIA was not very
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: good at beating terrorists. America was not very good at
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: beating terrorists. That's why... After 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan,
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: we left and we gave it back to the same
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: terrorist group that we went in there to fight. We
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: had learned a lot from fighting that adversary. But we
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: were the only country in the world fighting the global
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: war on terror. The Russians, the Iranians, the Chinese, the Cubans,
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: the North Koreans, none of them engaged in the war
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: on terror. So everything we had learned from al-Qaeda, we
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: were the only ones that learned it. So we found
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: that to be kind of a competitive advantage. So we
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: started building our operations, modeling our operations off of the
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: way the terrorists structured their cells. And we called our
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: cell in Wolf, the shadow cell. And we had to
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: find the people, recruit the people and train the people
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: inside our cell, our actual CIA peers. We had to
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: get them to learn how to run the same model.
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: That's really what the book explains is how we built
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: that and what those people did. because espionage is not
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: about one superhero overseas. It's about a team of people
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: doing incredible things.
• 39:21
  Speaker 2: And were those people on the ground in the friendly
• 39:24
  Speaker 2: country next to the hostile country? Yes. And so did you,
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: when you recruited these people to build this team, did
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: you recruit them from America or were you recruiting them
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: with inside that friendly country?
• 39:35
  Speaker 3: Inside of Wolf. Everybody who was in the cell was
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: already working in Wolf.
• 39:39
  Speaker 2: And the word cell basically means team.
• 39:41
  Speaker 3: Right, team.
• 39:42
  Speaker 2: So you built this team in the friendly country next
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: door to the enemy country. And this team consisted of
• 39:48
  Speaker 2: how many people?
• 39:49
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: So James was our senior most case officer. Tasha, Luke,
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: and Beverly were our second tour case officers. So they
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: were more junior. That's why they were hungry, but still
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: kind of flexible. Whereas James was in, James was at
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: a place in his career where if this didn't work,
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: his career would be tanked. And then Jihee and I
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: were not case officers. We were kind of the, I
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: was the mission planner, if you will, and Jihee was
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: the targeter. And then Diana was our linguist. Will was
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: our tech support. And we had, that was our, that
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: was our cell. That was our little group of people
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: that would sit in the bullpen. Now it's important to
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: note that none of them, and this was their primary mission.
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: It was our primary mission for all of them. Helping
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: us was just something they were doing because they believed
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: that if we were successful, it would be good for them.
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: They had primary missions to do all sorts of other things.
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: Oh, okay. And were these people locals?
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: They're all Americans and they're all Americans assigned to Wolf.
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: So they're all American CIA officers, all sworn officers that
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: are assigned to our friendly country in various different covers
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: to do various different primary missions.
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 41:02
  Speaker 2: And how did you guys like communicate? Did you like
• 41:04
  Speaker 2: meet up for like dinner? Like how does it work?
• 41:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, all of our communication and hangouts were
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: in the office because we couldn't really be seen outside together.
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: We had a, we had what's known as a skiff,
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: a specialized compartmented, uh, information facility so it was a
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: it was a hardened soundproof office that we could have meetings.
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: In couldn't the adversarial country like watch you walking in
• 41:28
  Speaker 2: there in the morning.
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: The adversarial country arguably didn't even know we were in
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: wolf because every time they tracked anybody's travel it would
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: take them to a different country.
• 41:37
  Speaker 2: Oh so you were just people going to an office
• 41:39
  Speaker 2: yes so you could be doing anything in.
• 41:40
  Speaker 3: There correct and it's an office and a large office
• 41:43
  Speaker 3: building so we could really be going anywhere.
• 41:46
  Speaker 2: Okay fine it's hard to track So what was your,
• 41:49
  Speaker 2: what was your first mission together as a, as a team?
• 41:52
  Speaker 2: Like what were you, what were you doing in the
• 41:53
  Speaker 2: enemy country? What was your objective to you were finding
• 41:56
  Speaker 2: you were working as a target to, to find interesting individuals.
• 42:00
  Speaker 2: And then Andrew, you were predominantly trying to make contact
• 42:03
  Speaker 2: with those individuals.
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: Sort of my, because I couldn't, as the node of the,
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: of the cell, the node is a term that we're
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: using to say I was the piece that was exposed
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: to CIA. So the mole, if the mole went hunting,
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: The mole would find me. I was the one that
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: was exposed.
• 42:21
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: So for me, it was important that I actually didn't
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: meet with any of the targets that we had in Falcon.
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: My job was to go to Falcon to start sourcing
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: the information that she would use to identify those individuals.
• 42:32
  Speaker 2: What does that mean?
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: So whether it's something stupid like a phone book or
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: a thumb drive, whether you're picking up a dead drop
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: from somebody else. So consider in Falcon, we would have
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: already had other case officers carrying out operations.
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: So we may have a case officer who was able
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: to extract information from a military database. And that military
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: database has all the weapons engineers for Falcon's air force.
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: That case officer can spy that spy. That spy can
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: collect the thumb drive and then they can put that
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: thumb drive in what's known as a dead drop. A
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: dead drop would be something that you hide anywhere in the,
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: in the country, in a city, wherever else, like in
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: a bush.
• 43:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: Like in a bush. I would then go into Falcon and,
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: And I would go to that dead drop site.
• 43:15
  Speaker 2: The bush. So you'd go into the enemy country.
• 43:17
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 43:18
  Speaker 2: You'd go to the bush.
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: And take the thumb drive and bring it back by
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: our cleansing route to Wolf, where I could give it
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: to Jihee. Jihee could then extract the information from the
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: thumb drive. And now she has a list of all
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: the engineers who are part of the enemy country's air force.
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: And then from there, she has a starting point for
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: her information to start finding targets. Now, as she finds targets,
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: that's when we tap on our case officers. James, Tasha, Luke, Beverly.
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: And we say, here's somebody that we think would be
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: susceptible to you because you're a middle-aged woman. You're an
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: older man. You're a younger man. You're a younger woman, right?
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: We think that these people might be susceptible to your interests,
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: your backgrounds, your voice, who knows what, and we need
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: you to target them. And then we would send those,
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: those spies into Falcon to meet the targets that she,
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: he found.
• 44:11
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 44:12
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 44:12
  Speaker 2: Got you.
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: The game of espionage is not an easy game. It's
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: a fun game, but it's a chess game, not a
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: checkers game. So there's a lot of moving pieces and
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: a lot of moving parts. And for me, it was
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: always very exciting, but I also understand that it can
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: be very difficult to express it well.
• 44:30
  Speaker 2: Was there ever a time when you felt most at
• 44:32
  Speaker 2: risk when you were in that hostile country?
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: At some point, my presence in Falcon, in the enemy country,
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: became known. to the local government in the enemy country.
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: And they dispatched a surveillance team to track me. It
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: was a major turning point in our operation. We kind
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: of went from a place where we felt like we
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: were winning to a place where we wondered if we
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: were losing. We went from a place where I felt
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: very safe to a place where I felt like I
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: could immediately be apprehended. And then all the worst thoughts
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: start to creep in, not necessarily about being shot. Oftentimes
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: a CIA officer being shot in a foreign country is
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: a welcome experience. Because being shot at least means everything ends.
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: The worst is being captured and being interrogated and being
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: used for diplomatic leverage and being used for policy leverage
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: and being forced to do brainwashing and propaganda videos. That's
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: a much worse experience than a clean death.
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: You said earlier that it would have been the mole
• 45:33
  Speaker 2: that was exposed to your presence and that knew that
• 45:36
  Speaker 2: you were in this enemy country. So was it the
• 45:38
  Speaker 2: mole that told the enemy country?
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: That's what we believe. We don't have the evidence to
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: prove it. But what CIA's conclusion, as well as the
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: conclusion inside of our own shadow cell, is that our
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: operations had reached the place where they were significant enough
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: that the mole took a risk to find out that
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: I was the exposed member of the cell. And then
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: the mole reported my name to the hostile country's police force.
• 46:07
  Speaker 2: So you're now inside that hostile country, the enemy country,
• 46:10
  Speaker 2: and they know that you're a US spy. Was there
• 46:15
  Speaker 2: a day when you realized that they knew that you
• 46:17
  Speaker 2: were a spy?
• 46:18
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: Well, there wasn't a day that I realized that they
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: knew I was CIA. There was a day that I
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: realized they were surveilling me As if I was a threat.
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: When you travel, when any business person travels to a
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: hostile country, they're almost always surveilled. Their hotel rooms can
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: be rifled through. There's people called bumbling surveillance or watchers
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: who will usually follow you. I'm not sure what your
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: travel looks like, but I can almost assure you that
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: if you've traveled to Russia, if you've traveled to China,
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: if you've traveled to Cuba, you had a watcher. You
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: had a surveillance team.
• 46:51
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: That was watching you.
• 46:52
  Speaker 3: Me? Yeah. Why?
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: Because you're wealthy. You're successful. You're an influencer. You're of significance.
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: At the very least, they want to make sure that
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: some petty criminal doesn't hurt you in their country because
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: that could be a big deal.
• 47:03
  Speaker 2: Thank you. Please continue to surveil me.
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: But at worst, they could also be scraping your cell
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: phone to pull all of your contacts off the cell
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: phone so that they could then reach out to any
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: of the contacts that you have on your cell phone.
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: They could scan and duplicate your hard drive as you
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: go through secondary or go through immigration in a foreign country.
• 47:20
  Speaker 2: They can scan my hard drive as I go through immigration? Absolutely.
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: We can do that here in the United States too.
• 47:26
  Speaker 3: What?
• 47:26
  Speaker 2: So if I land in the United States, they... How
• 47:28
  Speaker 2: would they do that?
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: So there's different authorities that exist for different agencies. So
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: here inside the United States, one of the authorities that
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: we give to our border patrol is the authority to
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: essentially scrape data off of all of your electronic devices.
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: So if you're deemed a target of interest, and if
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: you're moved into what's known as a secondary screening, they
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: will separate you from your bags. They'll actually open your bags.
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: They might even tell you to unlock your cell phone
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: or unlock your laptop. And then from there, With technology
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: that's proprietary and technology that's also commercially available, they can
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: scrape and scan your hard drive.
• 48:04
  Speaker 2: Because I've been through security before in various countries. And
• 48:09
  Speaker 2: sometimes when I get to the other end, there's a
• 48:11
  Speaker 2: letter in my suitcase. And the letter in my suitcase says, hey,
• 48:13
  Speaker 2: we had to go through your bags for some reason.
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: If you had a technical device in your bag along
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: with that letter, there's a good chance that it was cloned.
• 48:24
  Speaker 2: But I didn't give them my password.
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: Sometimes they don't need your password.
• 48:29
  Speaker 3: Really? Oh yeah.
• 48:31
  Speaker 2: How are they going to get into my laptop without
• 48:34
  Speaker 2: my password?
• 48:35
  Speaker 3: There's ways.
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: So yeah, there's password generators. There's password cracking codes. Your
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: password is the, I mean, I have somebody I could
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: call right now. And within about 30 minutes, we would
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: probably have all of your passwords that you use for
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: all of your devices in your personal home.
• 48:53
  Speaker 2: That's the end of the podcast.
• 48:54
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 49:03
  Speaker 2: And this is a bit of a tangent but it's
• 49:04
  Speaker 2: an important one so what devices do you guys use
• 49:06
  Speaker 2: if you have that knowledge that it's really easy to
• 49:07
  Speaker 2: break into devices do you use the same devices that i.
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: Use yeah i mean for me i assume that once
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: you if you become a target of interest there's nothing
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: you can do to protect yourself so i use devices
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: that are actually easy to crack and clone because I
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: don't want my device to get broken so that when
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: the Chinese or the Russians choose to go through some
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: backdoor on my Android system, my Android doesn't shut down.
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: Whereas there are more complex systems like a glacier phone,
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: Where if somebody penetrates your Glacier phone, the whole phone
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: will shut down and you'll be without a phone.
• 49:39
  Speaker 2: Is there any phone or device that's safe?
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: I would argue the answer is no.
• 49:44
  Speaker 3: No. I would say no also.
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: Because anything that you create that claims to be safe
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: becomes priority number one for all the adversaries out there.
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: Because they know if they can be the first ones
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: to crack that phone or crack that hard drive or
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: crack that operating system, then they have the competitive advantage
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: over everybody else.
• 50:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's possible for something to be safe for a
• 50:03
  Speaker 3: short period of time, but eventually it's going to get cracked.
• 50:07
  Speaker 3: They'll find the back door, they'll figure out how to
• 50:08
  Speaker 3: open it.
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: And it's not just foreign intelligence that wants to do that.
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: It's also all of your criminal syndicates. It's all of
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: your dark web syndicates. Everybody wants to do it. So
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: whenever I see anybody come out and promise that they've
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: got the new hardest device, I just.
• 50:21
  Speaker 2: I don't believe it.
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: It might be hard, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.
• 50:25
  Speaker 3: Yeah, there are levels of security, but nothing is 100% secure,
• 50:28
  Speaker 3: at least when it comes to technology. And so we
• 50:31
  Speaker 3: just assume- that it's not secure. And so you just
• 50:35
  Speaker 3: treat your device in that way, you know, with whatever
• 50:37
  Speaker 3: liberal security is convenient and makes you feel secure. But
• 50:41
  Speaker 3: knowing that at any point, somebody could just hack in from,
• 50:44
  Speaker 3: you know, they could hack in remotely. They could, you know,
• 50:47
  Speaker 3: scrape your drive when you're going through immigration, or if
• 50:50
  Speaker 3: you're in a hotel room, somebody comes in. I mean,
• 50:51
  Speaker 3: it's always possible.
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: They can steal your encryption key from somebody else that
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: you are having an encrypted chat with.
• 50:57
  Speaker 2: They don't even have to target you. Do you use
• 50:58
  Speaker 2: cold storage, i.e. do you use a hard drive that's
• 51:01
  Speaker 2: not connected to the internet or something?
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: We will air gap. Air gapping is cold storage, like
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: what you're talking about, where you take something off the
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: actual cloud, take something off the internet, and it just
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: lives in a standalone server. We have drives that we
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: save our information to that are air gapped. They're not
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: connected to the internet, not connected to a cloud. They're
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: only connected whenever we choose to transfer information. So we'll
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: do things like that to keep our information safe. But
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: I think the most important thing is that if you show,
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: if you make yourself easy to be hacked, then you'll
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: actually get hacked less because you're not a risk. They
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: can see what you have. They understand that you're not
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: important and they move on to the next target that's
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: more clandestine or trying to hide.
• 51:46
  Speaker 2: Okay, so you figure out, going back to the story,
• 51:49
  Speaker 2: you figure out that you're being surveilled. How?
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: Just like the whole idea of a cleansing route through
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: a third country, That's a piece of tradecraft that has
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: never been exposed before. I actually get to teach a
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: number of people. I get to teach in the story
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: how we do what's known as a surveillance detection route.
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: So the core of surveillance detection is understanding something that
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: we call multiple sites, multiple sightings over a period of time.
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: So I need to see the same person, the same vehicle,
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: the same face, the same profile. Profile meaning tall, Caucasian male, mid-50s.
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: I need to see the same profile several times over
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: a period of time where I'm changing locations. So what
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: happens inside shadow cell is I identify one car that
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: follows me through multiple turns and then falls off only
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: to come back on later on. That's kind of my
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: first indicator that there might be something going on. So
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: then I go through this route, a predetermined, pre-planned route
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: through a city. And the only reason I'm doing that
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: route is so that I can drag people along with
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: me to see if they're going to behave like surveillance.
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: And from that route, I find that it's not just
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: one car, it's actually two other cars. And when I
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: get out of my own vehicle to walk on foot,
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: there are very specific people who then follow me on foot.
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: And then in the third part of the surveillance detection route,
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: I find that the same people who are following me
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: on foot are also the people driving the cars that
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: are following me inside vehicles. So most surveillance detection routes
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: are executed in this very prescribed, very specific process so
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: that you can see who is actually following you.
• 53:32
  Speaker 2: And you did that. You discover that there's multiple people
• 53:35
  Speaker 2: following you in multiple vehicles.
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: And when you discover that, it's terrifying.
• 53:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I was going to say.
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: It's absolutely terrifying, but it's comforting because you know they're
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: following you. but they don't know that you know that yet.
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: So they still think that they're discreet. They still think
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: that you're operationally active, meaning they're following you because they
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: expect you to commit espionage. They're following you because they
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: expect you to meet with a source, do a dead drop,
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: acquire some kind of equipment that you shouldn't have, right?
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: They're waiting for that. If they don't see that, then...
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: they don't get the evidence that they need. They don't win.
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: So you go straight to a strip club or something.
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: Exactly right. You go to a strip club, you go
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: to a library. I went to an arcade in this
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: book and you go somewhere to just waste their time.
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: Because as long as I'm collecting their information, when I
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: come back to my friendly country and I meet with
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: my shadow cell teammates, I can now tell them this
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: license plate is a surveillance vehicle. This profile is a
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: surveillance vehicle. If you see a woman or a man
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: wearing these types of clothing, this is a surveillance vehicle.
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: And now we can build a database back in Wolf
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: that shares the surveillance team members in Falcon.
• 54:44
  Speaker 2: Were you scared when you figured out that you were
• 54:46
  Speaker 2: being followed?
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: I was terrified. I was terrified because I had so
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: many thoughts going through my head from how did I
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: fuck up to what if I don't go home? I'm
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: trying to think about what they're going to do as
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: their next step. How long are they going to follow
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: me before they just say fuck it and just wrap
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: me up? Are they even going to wrap me up,
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: meaning apprehend me, capture me? Do they already have evidence
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: that shows that I'm committing espionage, right? I haven't committed
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: espionage on this trip yet, but have they seen me
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: on a previous trip doing a dead drop, retrieving a
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: dead drop, dropping a cell phone, taking a battery? Like
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: what do they know? I don't know what they know.
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: And then you've got all this panic. And at the
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: same time, you have to recall three and a half
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: hours of very specific activity across a city to run
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: an SDR.
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: An SDR.
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: A surveillance detection route. You have to recall, I turn
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: left on Front Street. I go two blocks. I turn
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: right on 22nd North. And then I turn left on
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: an alley. You have to recall this thing that you memorize,
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: that you work through. And at the same time that
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: you're having this spike of adrenaline and panic.
• 55:50
  Speaker 2: And you were on your own?
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: I was on my own for that operation.
• 55:53
  Speaker 2: So you go through this route through the city that
• 55:56
  Speaker 2: is predetermined for you to go down. And presumably this
• 55:58
  Speaker 2: particular route is designed in such a way where it
• 56:02
  Speaker 2: gives you opportunities to expose them. You realize that you
• 56:07
  Speaker 2: are being followed. What do you do in that exact moment?
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: The first moment that I realized it was true, I
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: had this realization, this moment of fear and vulnerability where
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: I just, it was a very, it was a moment
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: of self-loathing where you just, you realize that you're not
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: as good as you think you are. And you realize
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: that however this happened, you're the only one to blame.
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: for what comes next. In that kind of moment of humility,
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: I actually called Jihee. In our alias identities that we
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: had built for these operations, we had what's known as
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: a throwaway phone or a disposable telecommunications. And I called
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: her and I gave her a coded message to let
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: her know that something was wrong because I wanted her
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: to know that something was wrong so that she could
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: take it back to the cell so that they could
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: start their systems on their end to protect me if
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: I did get arrested, if I did get wrapped up,
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: if I did get shot.
• 57:09
  Speaker 2: You gave her a coded message?
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: Via cell phone.
• 57:12
  Speaker 2: What is that coded message?
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: I think I just called you and said I'm coming
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: home early.
• 57:18
  Speaker 2: You called her and said I'm coming home early?
• 57:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah, which is a bad sign because you would never
• 57:23
  Speaker 3: come home early from an operation ever. So as soon
• 57:26
  Speaker 3: as I heard he was coming home early, I knew
• 57:28
  Speaker 3: that something was wrong.
• 57:30
  Speaker 2: Take me into your world at that time. The phone rings.
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: I get the call on my burner phone, which was
• 57:36
  Speaker 3: unusual anyways. I mean, I always had it because that
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: was part of our communication plan was for us to
• 57:41
  Speaker 3: do that when we were apart.
• 57:43
  Speaker 2: So a burner phone is a secondary phone that you
• 57:45
  Speaker 2: just use for these kind of things?
• 57:46
  Speaker 3: Just for this. It's never used for anything else. It's
• 57:49
  Speaker 3: not connected to a name. And that's what keeps it
• 57:52
  Speaker 3: anonymous for us. And so he calls and he says,
• 57:56
  Speaker 3: you know, hey, I'm coming home early. And I'm like, okay,
• 58:01
  Speaker 3: because you can't. Like if the line's being tapped, you
• 58:04
  Speaker 3: can't be like, oh my God, what's going on? Like,
• 58:06
  Speaker 3: are you okay? Because somebody is listening to it. It
• 58:08
  Speaker 3: has to sound like we knew that his alias had
• 58:11
  Speaker 3: a fiance. I was the fiance. So, you know, it
• 58:14
  Speaker 3: was totally natural for anybody listening in to hear him say, hey,
• 58:17
  Speaker 3: I'm coming home early. So then I had to be like, oh,
• 58:19
  Speaker 3: that's really exciting. That's great. You know, I can't wait
• 58:22
  Speaker 3: to see you. And he's like, okay, I love you.
• 58:24
  Speaker 3: And then that's the end of the conversation. And that's
• 58:26
  Speaker 3: all I get. And so after that's all I get
• 58:30
  Speaker 3: from Andy- I go back to the office. I'm starting
• 58:32
  Speaker 3: to look, like scour all of our cables, like go
• 58:35
  Speaker 3: talk to James. Like, have you heard anything? Like, is
• 58:38
  Speaker 3: anything happening?
• 58:40
  Speaker 2: You started to scour all of your cables?
• 58:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah. So, you know, we have our, all of our databases,
• 58:45
  Speaker 3: you know, all the CIA databases. So, you know, there's
• 58:48
  Speaker 3: reporting that comes in all the time that you're, you know,
• 58:51
  Speaker 3: especially regional reporting that you're privy to. And so, you know,
• 58:55
  Speaker 3: I talked to James because he was, he had more
• 58:57
  Speaker 3: access than I did to things, all things Falcon. And
• 59:00
  Speaker 3: so I was like, have you heard anything? Is there
• 59:02
  Speaker 3: anything weird going on? And he said, no. And so
• 59:04
  Speaker 3: I started just kind of looking through all of my
• 59:06
  Speaker 3: stuff to see, you know, was there any reporting that
• 59:09
  Speaker 3: was of some kind? being captured or somebody, you know,
• 59:12
  Speaker 3: something going wrong? And there was nothing. And so Andy
• 59:16
  Speaker 3: and I have, we created on our own just a,
• 59:19
  Speaker 3: it's called a combo plan, a communication plan. Where if
• 59:23
  Speaker 3: anything ever happens, whether natural disaster or espionage faux pas,
• 59:29
  Speaker 3: we had a system of communication where I wait eight
• 59:33
  Speaker 3: hours and check this fake email that we share that's
• 59:38
  Speaker 3: not attributable. And then he gives me a sign of life.
• 59:41
  Speaker 3: And then we have these timings, eight hours, 12 hours,
• 59:43
  Speaker 3: 24 hours, 48 hours, where all I need from him
• 59:47
  Speaker 3: is a sign of life to know that he's okay.
• 59:50
  Speaker 3: And then that also gives us the opportunity if it
• 59:52
  Speaker 3: were a natural disaster, for example, to put, you know,
• 59:55
  Speaker 3: I meet me at this location.
• 59:57
  Speaker 2: So that's an email address that Andy emails.
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah. So it's an email address that we both have
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 3: a login to and you create a draft email inside
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 3: of it.
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 2: Oh, okay.
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 3: Also learns from terrorism.
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: Also learned from terrorism.
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 2: Oh, is that what terrorists do?
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 2: So they create a draft email. They just leave it there. Yeah.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 2: Someone else logs in and looks at it.
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah. So there's, it's never sent. So it never goes
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 3: over the internet really. Yeah, so we had this communication
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 3: plan in place. So even though I was concerned and
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 3: I couldn't find anything to discover what was happening, I
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 3: knew we had this communication plan in place. So I
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 3: knew that at some point he was going to give
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 3: me a sign of life and I couldn't do anything
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 3: until that point.
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 2: So you've discovered that you've been discovered by this adversarial country.
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 2: You call Jihee, you let her know that you're coming
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 2: home early. Then what do you do?
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: Then I have to plan my escape. So another thing
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: that people, that movies don't show you is that when
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: the first effort to escape is always self-rescue. It's always
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: on the part of the field officer alone to try
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: to escape. There's no Navy SEAL team. There's no evacuation helicopter.
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: There's no high-speed boat or classy yacht just waiting for you.
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: You have to get yourself across the country's border yourself
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: before you can hope for any kind of evac from
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: there or what we call an exfil. So I knew
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: that it was on me to come up with some
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: evacuation plan. And I had to come up with an
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: evacuation plan that wasn't going to let the surveillance team
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: know that I knew I was under surveillance.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 2: So you're still in the car at this point?
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: I'm in between the car and on foot, depending on
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: where I am in the surveillance detection route, right? It
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: was surveillance detection routes generally break into three phases, right?
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: It's in the first phase that you suspect that you're
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: under surveillance. It's in the second phase that you confirm it.
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: So it's in this second phase when I confirm I
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: am absolutely under surveillance. That's when I contact Jihi, and
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: that's when I start coming up with my own self-rescue plan.
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 2: And the third phase?
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: The third phase is a collection phase. You know that
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: you're under surveillance. You know that you've communicated to somebody
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: that you're under surveillance. And now the mission becomes collect
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: as much information as you can about the surveillance team
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: before they realize that they're being collected against.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 2: So you see this car behind you, multiple cars behind you,
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 2: and the same people following you on foot. Are you
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 2: writing this down or are you just trying to memorize it?
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: At first, it's all memory. And we have a methodology
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: for trying to memorize this stuff. We actually talk about
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: this in the book as well. You start to come
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: up with short codes to describe the people. Um, and
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: the codes that you come up with mean something to you,
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: but they wouldn't mean anything if they were, if they
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: came out in an interrogation, if they came out in writing.
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: So like for you, I might call you black t-shirt.
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: A black t-shirt means something to me. So if I
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: see black t-shirt behind me three times in the next
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: 45 minutes in three different parts of the city, I
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: know that I have an image for what black t-shirt means.
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: But when I write down black t-shirt, nobody else knows
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: what that means. When I see a woman, it was cold. Uh, the,
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: the season that I was carrying out these operations. I
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: saw a woman in earmuffs, so I would call her earmuffs.
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: I saw a guy in a bomber jacket, so I
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: called him bomber jacket. And you just recall these people,
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: you blue sedan, yellow SUV, right? White taxi cab. You
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: start to come up with these nicknames that mean something
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: to you, but don't mean anything to anybody else. And
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: then when you get back to a place where you
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: can document your notes in detail, you have a reference
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: point to document in detail. So I start by memorizing,
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: When I got towards the end of my third phase
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: of surveillance detection, I actually wrote down my notes. In
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: the book, it explains I went into a clothing store,
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: and then I started making notes in the clothing store. Presumably,
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: if somebody came in and arrested me at that moment,
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: what they would see is a bunch of notes about clothing,
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: earmuffs and black t-shirts inside of a clothing store. That's
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: not espionage. But then when I was able to actually
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: get back to to Wolf with my cell, then I
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: was able to deconstruct what black t-shirt meant. Black t-shirt
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: meant black male with a goatee, approximately 165 pounds, five foot,
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: 11 inches, 38 years old.
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 2: So how'd you get from phase two of your process
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 2: of figuring out if you're being followed to the arcade?
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 2: Like what was the, why did you get to the arcade?
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: So I went to the In a surveillance detection route,
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: one of the things that you're actually trying to do
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: is called bore or lull your surveillance. You never want to,
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: in movies, it makes it look like you're trying to
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: ditch your surveillance team. You're trying to lose your tail.
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: That's not what professionals do. What professionals do is we
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: drag the tail. We keep the tail with us for
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: as long as possible. And one of the things you
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: do is you make yourself very predictable. You move very slowly.
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: You hang out in public places, which makes it very
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: easy for them to observe you. I was actually going
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: to the arcade to try to collect more information about
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: my surveillance team, but I was trying to give them
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: time and space so they could observe me in a
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: public setting. It backfired because what actually ended up happening
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: is that when I went into the arcade, they lost me.
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: They lost sight of me, which put them into a
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: position where they started panicking to try to find me,
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: even though I was just sitting inside the arcade.
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 2: I mean, it doesn't sound like it backfired if they
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 2: lost you.
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: It's a terrible thing when they lose you because when
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: they lose you, they start to panic and they start
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: to assume either they made a mistake or you're a
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: trained officer. If you're a trained officer, if that's the
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: conclusion that they make, they can come in and arrest you.
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: If they lose you, then they start to make mistakes.
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: And when a surveillance team starts to make mistakes, it
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: means that they might stumble across you. They might have
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: two different surveillance people find you at the same time.
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: And for them, that's a scary thing because for them,
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: they're trying not to be identified. They're trying to be discreet.
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: They're trying to not be seen. So when they, in
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: this case, in the story that we share in Shadow Cell,
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: when the surveillance team broke into a starburst, a starburst
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: means they went, they broke ranks to try to find
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: me in the arcade. When they broke ranks to try
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: to find me, they presented themselves to me in the
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: arcade face-to-face. And it was in that moment that I
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: realized that They know that I see them and I
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: know that they see me and this is bad.
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 2: You locked eyes with them.
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: Which you're never supposed to do. You're never supposed to do.
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: You're never supposed to lock eyes with your surveillance. You're
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: never supposed to lock eyes with anybody who's a threat
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: ever because that's threatening behavior, right? That's one of the
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: reasons that people share strong eye contact with peers is
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: it's a show of trust. Well, whenever you're Locking eyes
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: with somebody who's a threat, it's a sign of aggression
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: or dominance. So whenever you're being surveilled, you never want
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: to make eye contact with your surveillance team because your
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: surveillance team will see that eye contact as a threat.
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 2: When you say you sort of bumped into them in
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 2: that arcade, what's the distance?
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: Three feet.
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 2: Three feet. And how long did you lock eyes with
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 2: each other?
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: It felt like an eternity. In reality, it was probably
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: two and a half seconds.
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 2: I mean, two and a half seconds is a long time.
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: Especially when you're trying not to be seen.
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 2: So recreate that moment for me. You're in the arcade
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 2: pretending you're playing with games. You turn a corner.
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: It's horrible, man. It's a horrible story. I'm in the arcade. Again,
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: I think I'm doing everything right. I'm like, oh, I'm
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: in the arcade. They watched me come in. They're probably
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: taking a smoke break outside. They've got nothing to worry about.
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: And I'm kind of going from game to game and
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: spending whatever credits that I bought in the arcade. And
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: I go to this... dinosaur hunting shooting game right almost
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: like big buck hunter or like jurassic park and i
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: pick up a rifle and i'm shooting at dinosaurs and
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: i'm just killing time and then the fucking surveillance comes
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: around the back of the machine looking for me he
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: comes around the back of the machine and he sees
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: me and i'm holding a fucking gun and i look
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: at him and he looks at me and that's That's
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: when our two and a half seconds happened. And I'm
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: sitting there and I'm like, what just happened? Why did
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: I just see Bomber Jacket come around my video game
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: console and stare at me in the face? And that's
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: when I kind of realized, oh my gosh, the team
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: is in panic. I can see multiple people on the team.
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: They lost me. They're trying to find me. Bomber Jacket
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: just found me.
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 2: What did Bomber Jacket do when he looked at you?
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: His jaw dropped. He went slack. Like he looked at
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: me and he knew that he had fucked up too.
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: And I looked at him, and in my mind's eye,
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: I was just hoping that I didn't look as stupid
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: as he looked.
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 2: In that moment, is it true to say that you
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 2: should have just looked back at the dinosaur game as
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 2: fast as you possibly could?
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: What I should have done is I should have seen
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: a person come around the corner and just kind of
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: stayed in the game. That's what anybody else would have done.
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: Anybody else would have just stayed in the game. They're
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: focused on the game. They don't even realize there are
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: people walking around, right? But the fact that I identified it,
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: I saw him and then looked at him, and the
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: fact that he saw me and looked at me as
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: two professionals... on opposite sides of the playing field, we
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: both made the same mistake. We both made the mistake
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: of showing our recognition to our intended target.
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 2: And before we continue, as far as your alias was
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 2: in that country, you were called Alex Hernandez, right? Correct.
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 2: And you were running a business called Acme commercial? Correct.
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 2: What was Acme commercial supposed to be doing as a company?
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: Acme commercial was a company that was built to source
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: new disposable goods from foreign countries for, uh, for, uh,
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: transport and distribution across Western countries.
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 2: And the intelligence services build a lot of fake businesses. Yes.
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: It's a, it's, The easier it is to build a business,
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: the easier it is to collect information. So what we've
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: discovered is that just as anybody with $ 127 in their
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: pocket can create an LLC, that's about how much money
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: it takes to start an intelligence operation.
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 2: It says that the CIA operates numerous fake companies.
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: The CIA also operates numerous real companies too.
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 3: Not just the CIA. I mean, every intel organization has
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 3: commercial fronts. every Intel organization.
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 2: The CIA operates real companies. What does that mean?
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: There are real companies out there owned and operated by CIA.
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: In-Q-Tel is one of those companies. It's an investment vehicle
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: where CIA invests money and invests in new technology. And
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: all the technology that goes through In-Q-Tel knows that it's
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: going through the CIA.
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 2: That's public though, right?
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: Correct.
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 2: But the ones that aren't public. So the CIA will
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 2: create a company- And then they will use that company
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 2: to pretend to be doing something in a foreign land, basically.
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: But the primary mission is intelligence. This is one of
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: the most fascinating things, not only about CIA, but about
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: all of your first world intelligence organizations. You've heard of
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: what's known as the black budget. The black budget is
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: the budget of discretionary money that can be spent on
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: military and intelligence operations that isn't tied to the taxpayer.
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: So it's a giant pot of money That isn't tied
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: to tax money. So where does that money come from?
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: Part of that money comes from any time law enforcement
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: or intelligence agencies seize assets. We seize cryptocurrency. We seize drugs.
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: We seize child pornography, right? When we seize that money
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: and we use it for other operations, that's part of
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: the black budget. The other part of the black budget
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: is when an intelligence organization creates a business and that
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: business turns a profit. When that business turns a profit,
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: where does the profit go? It can't go to the
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 1: case officer. That person's being paid on the U.S. payroll.
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: So all that profit goes into the black budget.
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 2: Do you think the CIA has some big profitable businesses
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 2: that are set up as fronts that just went really,
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 2: really well?
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: I know it does.
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 3: Really?
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: I know it does. The CIA has businesses that it's
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: set up that have gone wildly profitable. CIA also has
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: officers that built these businesses that then were like, why
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: the fuck am I at CIA? And then they leave
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: CIA and they go on to run businesses instead.
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 2: I mean, a couple of things popped into my head
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 2: as you said that. The first was there's obviously a
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 2: huge conversation at the moment around TikTok. because TikTok was
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 2: started in China, it's become this massive sort of global success.
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 2: And I can't think of a better company to have
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 2: started than a platform like TikTok, where everybody's putting their
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 2: information and data in and it's tracking your location. So
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 2: what is your perspective on something like TikTok? Do you
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 2: think TikTok was started as a tool to spy?
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: I don't believe TikTok individually was started as a tool
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 1: to spy. I believe that what happened is TikTok became
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: wildly popular and the government in China realized, hey, everything
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: in China belongs to the government anyways. We can step
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: in and take advantage of this. That is also a
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: way that CIA and MI6 do business as well. When
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: a company does very well and there's an intelligence benefit,
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: they will approach the company. In a democracy, they can't
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: force the company to cooperate, but in a country like China,
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: they can.
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 2: So do you think the social networks, a lot of
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 2: the big social networks, have been approached by the CIA
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 2: or the MI6 and asked to give... Information to them.
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: I would go a step further and say that they've
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 1: all been approached and that the vast majority of them cooperate.
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 2: Is that a concern for the average person?
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: For the average person, that's a benefit.
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 3: The average person is not being targeted. I promise you.
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 3: There's zero interest. And for the federal government and for
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 3: the intelligence community, there's absolutely zero interest whatsoever. And the
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 3: average person.
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: The person who's cheating on their spouse or avoiding $ 5, 000
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: in taxes or who isn't paying their parking bills. Nobody cares.
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: The federal government doesn't care about that.
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 2: Well, you were doing some of that targeting, right?
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 2: So did you ever work with any existing company to
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 2: give you information?
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 3: So all of my data, depending on what country I
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 3: was working on, had different sources. And some countries had
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 3: more sources than others, but they're all sources I can't disclose.
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 3: But there's tons and tons of data that would come
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 3: in to me. And then I worked on a number
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 3: of cases where I had to get FISA requests.
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 2: What's a FISA request?
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 3: A FISA request is when you want to collect information
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 3: or take information from somebody who is an American citizen.
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 3: And I just want to remind people. that American citizen,
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 3: most people complain about, oh, they're targeting American citizens, are
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 3: thinking about themselves. They're looking at themselves in the mirror
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 3: and thinking, oh, they're targeting American citizens. They're not thinking
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 3: about the Chinese person who just came over and naturalized.
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 3: They're not thinking about the, you know, Iranian who's been
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 3: here for a long time and naturalized, right? Like all
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 3: of those, they're not thinking about, you.
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: Know, the- The Al-Qaeda member who claimed to be a
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: refugee to get here to get some sort of green card.
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 3: Right. So American citizenship- a lot of people have that.
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 3: And some of those people are doing bad things. And
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 3: some of those people are our adversaries who have infiltrated
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 3: the United States and are here to gather intelligence to
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 3: get to our adversaries, you know, or are here to
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 3: do bad things within the country. And so we have
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 3: to get FISA requests to get the data on them.
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 2: And what does that mean in reality, a FISA request?
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 2: Does that mean that you can go into their phone?
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 3: It means that you have proven that a link from
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 3: that person to something bad, and you've given the court
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 3: enough evidence to say, hey, look, this person's doing something bad,
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 3: and we need to gather more data on them. So
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 3: it just opens the kind of data that you can
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 3: get on that person.
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: And what kind of data is that? You can get
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: on their phone. You can get into their computer. You
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: can get into their private Google accounts. You can get
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: into their private Apple accounts.
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 2: Any kind of.
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 3: Data you can get access to, you can now use
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 3: it to target them.
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 2: So you could get access to their private Google accounts,
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 2: their private Apple accounts without their passwords?
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: You would hack their passwords or steal their passwords or
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: Google retains their passwords.
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 2: And Google would give you the password?
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: For most cases, if it comes down to national security,
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: American companies will share details. And that's what a FISA
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: request does is it's a judicial claim. It's a judicial
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 1: warrant essentially to say, you will let the service onto
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: that person's account.
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 2: You guys must think that people like me live in
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 2: a certain state of naivety and ignorance as to what's
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 2: actually going on.
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: I wouldn't say it's ignorance or naivety. I would say
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: that it's conditioned into you. You're conditioned to believe that
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: you have privacy.
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 2: So the reality that we should realize is that we
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 2: don't have privacy. It's not real. Privacy is not real.
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 3: No.
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 2: I mean.
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 3: You know, there's a level.
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: When you get undressed in a dark room, like, that's yours?
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 2: Usually. No one's watching. There's a good.
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: Chance that you're not being watched by the federal government.
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: That's a good chance.
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 3: You know, if you're sending, you know, dirty emails to
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 3: your girlfriend, that's... Essentially, I mean, it's private on the surface,
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 3: but not really forever private. Somebody could access those. If
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 3: you write her dirty notes, that's way more private. Especially
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 3: if she throws them away and burns them. I think
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 3: people put too much confidence in technology and feel too
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 3: confident in the privacy of technology. Because technology, there's really
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 3: nothing private about it. To an extent, yes. But if
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 3: you think that nobody can ever look at your stuff,
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 3: that's wrong.
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 2: Do you think the CIA knew you were coming here today?
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: I think the CIA knew we were coming on Diary
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: of a CEO, and I think they knew that we
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: were going to talk to you about our book. How
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: do you think they knew that? Because we know that CIA,
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: as well as other intelligence services, as an example, the
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: United Arab Emirates, we know that they have a dedicated
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: person that sits in their office that watches us.
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 2: So how would they know you were coming here today?
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: Our emails. I mean, our emails, our publishers' emails, our
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: own text messages back and forth. listening in on phone calls,
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: any number of things could have happened. Like we've tried
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: to have a very collaborative relationship with CIA about this
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: book because we know how scared they are. We know
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: how nervous this book makes them. So we're trying to
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: be extra collaborative to let, to give them peace of mind. Like, Hey,
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: we're not about to go out there and tell the
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: world that you're a bunch of animals and terrible anything.
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: They've actually read the book multiple times and, and still they're,
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: they're afraid that we're going to somehow like, like, make
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: them look bad because so many of their officers have
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: come out to become authors who, who makes CIA look bad.
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 2: There was a couple of other things that we are
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 2: going to get back to the arcade and what happened next,
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 2: but there's a couple of other things that sprung to
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 2: mind when you talked about how people can make real businesses,
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 2: fake businesses. have various different covers. The next one was,
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 2: you mentioned Edward Snowden earlier. And in mentioning Edward Snowden,
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 2: you used him as an example of someone who returns
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 2: to the country that they were working for the whole time.
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: So with Snowden and the Snowden case in specific, right?
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 1: Whenever somebody flees their own home country, nobody gives them
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: protection for free. Even in the United States, we don't
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: give anybody protection for free. You have to earn it.
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: You have to share some sort of currency. And that
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: currency may not be cash dollars. That currency might be information.
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: So when Snowden leaked to The Guardian the operations at
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: NSA that were collecting against American citizens, the same American
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: citizens that Jihee was just talking about, right? Nobody cares
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 1: about Joe Bob, everybody cares about the person who's pretending
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 1: to be an American citizen, but is in fact a
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: terrorist threat. When Snowden made his escape, when he fleed
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: the United States, he was essentially trading classified information, not
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: just the details of the NSA case that he whistle blew,
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 1: but other confidential information that he collected specifically as currency
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: to help him basically pay his way through Hong Kong
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: and into China or into Russia.
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 2: And so he lives in Russia now.
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: He's a Russian citizen. I'm pretty sure he's also received
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: a Russian award for heroism.
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 2: And you think he gave secrets to Russia about the
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 2: United States to get that?
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: I can almost guarantee you, yeah. What he gave, I
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: don't know. But Russia wouldn't give him that status unless
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: he had given them something in return.
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 2: And the other one who sprung to mind as real
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 2: business becomes successful is the man on everyone's lips at
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 2: the moment, Jeffrey Epstein.
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 1: So Epstein's a fascinating case because Epstein fits all of
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: the primary pillars of a foreign intelligence asset, collecting information
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: on American citizens, not an American spy working for someone else.
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: It's funny because people keep thinking like CIA killed him
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 1: or people keep thinking that he somehow worked for CIA
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: or maybe even worked for, for Mossad. What I see
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: is the opposite that he, if anything, was working independently,
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: maybe even working for several companies or several countries, but
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: collecting information on US people.
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 2: Is that what you believe?
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: I think that he could have been that. I don't
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: know that I necessarily believe that it's true.
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 2: Because he was a very successful business person. He had
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 2: lots of successful friends. I was interviewing someone the other
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 2: day and they said that they met Jeffrey Epstein and
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 2: Jeffrey Epstein was really, really interested in their physics and
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 2: science discoveries and wasn't interested at all in the financier
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 2: stuff that he was pretending to, or he was purporting
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 2: to be involved in. And this person said to me,
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 2: it was just really bizarre because he was only interested
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 2: in the physics and science discoveries we had at Harvard.
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 2: He wasn't particularly interested in finance to me. And that
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 2: person was like really shocked by that.
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: What I've learned working with wealthy people and successful people
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 1: is that they're often very intelligent and they're often misunderstood.
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: And part of the reason that they have grown as
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: successful as they've grown is because they don't really fit
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: in anywhere else. If they would have fit in somewhere else,
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: they would have been distracted by the area where they
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: fit in. Instead, they had to carve their own interests,
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: their own passions, their own drive. In many ways, when
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: I look at Epstein, that's what I see. I've also
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: worked with many wealthy people who have gone to jail.
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 1: And when wealthy people go to jail, their whole identity crumbles.
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: And they start to doubt themselves and they start to
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: have these irrational thoughts that sound totally rational to them.
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: I had a client who was very wealthy, who was
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: going to jail after being found guilty of a crime that,
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: that arguably couldn't be proven, but the court system was
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: set up in such a way that he was found guilty.
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: And he literally thought that it would be better if he,
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: if he cut off all ties to his kids and
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: just went to jail. And then even when he got
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: out of jail, never talked to his kids again, because
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: that would be better than shaming his children for the
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: rest of their life with a father who went to jail.
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: So there's When I think about the Epstein case, I
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: think about a wealthy, powerful man who was having parties
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: with the world's elites, and then he goes to jail
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: and he kills himself. To me, that's not an unbelievable
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: series of events.
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 2: The whole thing with the island and the underage sex
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 2: and all this stuff, people just can't seem to shake
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 2: the idea that he wasn't extracting information. And then the
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 2: fact that they won't release the flight logs or a
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 2: list of the names of people that were frequenting his
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 2: Ireland or interacting with him also raises another question mark
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 2: about why wouldn't the US government release that? Why isn't
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 2: Trump very quick to release that information?
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: There are lots of secrets that are kept for lots
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: of reasons. And when we talk about like, if there's
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: anything that we've learned, need to know that the need
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: part is the driving part. What is the need to know?
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: There's plenty of secrets the government has that it tells
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: the American people it doesn't know. It's just lying. Of
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: course it knows, but it's working the common good to say,
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: if you knew what we knew, it could cause panic,
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: it could cause chaos, it could cause any number of things.
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: And in the United States, that is one of the
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: rights and privileges that the federal government has.
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 2: So what do you both think happened with the Jeffrey
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 2: Epstein situation? Because it smells fishy to everybody. The fact
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 2: that Trump and Kash Patel and various other White House
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 2: officials were saying, we're going to release it the minute
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 2: we get in there. And then they get in there
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 2: and they say, there's nothing to release. You must, because
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 2: you understand this much more than I would, you must
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 2: see like fingerprints of what you think is actually going
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 2: on there or the real reasons they wouldn't release it.
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: When I look at it through a lens of probabilities,
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 1: the most probable outcome is that somebody in the prison
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 1: was hired to hurt Jeffrey Epstein. That's the most probable outcome.
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: that somebody outside was watching the Epstein case and knew
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: that Epstein may or may not have compromising information on them.
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: And that wealthy, well-connected person paid to have a hit
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: inside the prison. To me, that's the most probable result
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: of things happening. That explains the missing evidence, that explains
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: the videotapes, that explains the stories inside of prison where
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: nobody can see what's going on. Also, that's the most
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: vulnerable place for Epstein to have been neutralized. That's how
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: we would have run an operation.
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 2: But why wouldn't the government release that? Why wouldn't they
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 2: say a prisoner killed him?
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: The government may not know that because if a prisoner
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: was paid to do it, they may have covered their
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: tracks well enough, or they may have paid a prisoner
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: and the guards to also cover the thing up. Jail's
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: a nasty place. People forget how nasty a place jail is.
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: And jails are commercial. They're not federal for the most part.
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: So It's a commercial business that has all sorts of
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 1: plausible deniability that a federal business or a federal organization,
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: federal building doesn't have. So that's, to me, that's the
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: most probable series of events. There's still a chance that
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: any number of the other conspiracies are true. But when
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: I think of what I've seen, what my clients have seen,
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: what I would do if I was in the shoes
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: of a foreign adversary or a foreign intelligence collection operation
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: dealing with a Jeffrey Epstein type of situation, That's how
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: we would clean it up.
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 2: There was a press conference the other day where the
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 2: reporters asked the Trump administration, does the Department of Justice
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 2: have any indication that Jeffrey Epstein was working with the
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 2: US or a foreign intelligence agency? Or was he a
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 2: spy of some kind? And Pam Bondi, who works in
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 2: the Trump administration said, to him being an agent, I
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 2: have no knowledge about that. We can get back to
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 2: you on that.
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: Two really important things here. If they did have information
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: on that in an active investigation, she would say, I
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: have no knowledge on that. She would lie to the
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: American public. That's what you have to do if you're
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: trying to build a current case. Because if they acknowledge,
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: we have some reason to believe that he might have
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: been an agent. Now, all of a sudden, everybody else
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: out there would start destroying evidence and start hiding evidence
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: and start making the case much more difficult. So if
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: they knew, they would say they don't know.
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 2: Do you think he was an agent?
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: I think he could have been. I think he fits
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: the model of a very good reporting asset. But I
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: don't have enough evidence to say that he was actually one.
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 2: Do you think he was?
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 3: I mean, I think even if he– well, I don't
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 3: know that it matters is what I think. Like even
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 3: if he was, that doesn't mean that it's connected because
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 3: he was a lot of things. So I think– I
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 3: think people are focused on it because it's interesting because
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 3: it would be interesting if he was, and it would
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 3: be interesting if there was this conspiracy. I think that's
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 3: why people are focused on it, but I don't know
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 3: that it really matters because in the grand scheme of things,
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 3: I mean, it could be a lot of things that led.
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: You know, why are we talking about a dead guy?
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 1: Who's not reporting?
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 2: I think it's just the allure of right. People want answers.
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 2: Once the curiosity gaps open, people need to fill it
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 2: with something.
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: Correct. When, when what the intelligence community believes is that
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: in any given moment, there are two penetrations of every
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 1: intelligence service. So why are we talking about the dead
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: guy that we don't know about when we're not talking
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: about the dozens of arrests and cases that are made
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: every year of active moles, active penetrations that are inside
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: of our intelligence community?
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 2: Every single one of you watching this right now has
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 2: something to offer, whether it's knowledge or skills or experience,
• 1:28:28
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• 1:28:31
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• 1:28:33
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• 1:28:40
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• 1:28:53
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• 1:28:55
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• 1:29:01
  Speaker 2: Stan is incredibly simple and incredibly easy, and you can
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• 1:29:06
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• 1:29:07
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  Speaker 2: a free 30-day trial. Visit stephenbartlett.stan.store and get yours set
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 2: up within minutes. So take me back to the arcade.
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 2: You lock eyes with this guy, the guy wearing the,
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 2: what was he wearing?
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: The bomber jacket.
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 2: The bomber jacket. What happens next?
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: Once I realized that we had both made the same mistake,
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: he darted off in one direction and I felt burned.
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: Burned is the term that we use whenever we are spotted,
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: identified as trained intelligence officers. But I didn't want to
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: act on being burned right away because our training says
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: that just because you believe something to be true, you
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: can't act on that truth. If you act on that truth,
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 1: then you're verifying to anybody observing that you already know
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 1: you screwed up. So I kind of ambled around the
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: arcade and played another couple of games, kind of half-handed, half-hearted,
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: just to kill some time before I left and finished
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: my SDR route and finished my collection and went back
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: to my hotel for the night. The whole process that
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: I go through during the surveillance detection route, the whole
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: process that I go through to evacuate the country safely
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: is all part of the details that we put inside
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 1: Shadow Cell. But the feeling that predominated that dominated my
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: thought process was just this feeling of failure, this feeling
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: like I was a bad spy. I'm bad at what
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 1: I do, bad at what I collect. When I think
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: I'm good, I'm not good. It was just this humiliating
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 1: and humbling experience. And it wasn't helped as I went
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: through the process of writing the book. Because when you
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: write a book, it's cathartic in a way because it
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: gets all this stuff out. But It's also this black
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: and white kind of stark reminder of all the things
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: that you've done wrong.
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 2: What did you do wrong?
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: Whatever I did that got caught was wrong. If they
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 1: caught me on my own behaviors, if the mole was
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 1: the one that identified me to them, then I lost
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: the ability to operate inside a Falcon on that day.
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: I could no longer support the rest of the shadow cell.
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: I could no longer support my team. I had a
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: role to play and I couldn't play that role anymore.
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: And I think that's especially powerful to me because, I mean,
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: I'm not a case officer. I was supposed to be
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 1: a case officer, but I'm not because when CIA assessed
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 1: me for that job, they determined that I wouldn't.
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 2: Be good enough.
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 2: So you already had an insecurity there.
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: And that was the first year at CIA. So even
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: though I built this career and I had a chance
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: to carry out this operation, I got to do these
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: amazing things. All that plays out in the back of
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 1: my head is I wasn't good enough then. I'm not
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: good enough now.
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 2: One of the things that the CIA does is they
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 2: teach you how to deal with head trash. What is
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 2: head trash?
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: It's funny, actually. So head trash is all the terrible
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: things that you say about yourself in your head. That's
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: the colloquial term that we use is head trash. I'm
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: not good enough. I'm ugly.
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 2: I'm fat.
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: I wish my smile was better. You know, I lost
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: my true love when I was 14. Whatever, right? My
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 1: parents didn't love me because I wasn't a good enough kid.
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: Whatever it was, all those things are head trash. They're
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: subjective thoughts that you have because of your experience that
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: don't have any basis in objective reality. CIA teaches us
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: how to deal with that to a point. They teach
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: us how to counter that when we are operationally active
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: so that we don't get distracted by the head trash
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: going on. This is what happened whenever I first knew
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: I was under surveillance. They teach you how to handle stress,
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: mitigate cortisol levels in your bloodstream, Lower your heart rate
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: so that you can get back to the task at hand.
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 2: How do they do that?
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: Techniques like box breathing.
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 2: What's that?
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: Box breathing is a process that's common in anxiety as well.
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 3: Yeah, breathe in four counts, hold four counts, breathe out
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 3: four counts. There are various breathing techniques where you breathe
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 3: in for a certain amount of time, you hold it
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 3: for a certain amount of time, you release it for
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 3: a certain amount of time.
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 1: And the goal there is to reduce your heart rate,
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: to reduce your blood flow, to reduce the speed at
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: which the cortisol that's being released from your brain gets
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: spread to the rest of your body. So you can
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: start to take back your physiological movements and actions in
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: a hope that it also brings back your cognitive functions
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: and capabilities. the visualization process, just like when you're meditating
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: and you visualize a victory. If you're a professional athlete,
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 1: if you visualize a beach, if you're stressing out at work,
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: like you can visualize your way through an operation and
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 1: operational sequence to get yourself back to a place where
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: you're in control. So they teach us how to deal
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 1: with that head trash. But what's really interesting is CIA
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: relies on loyalty in its people to keep them at
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 1: CIA because the worst thing for CIA is for a
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: CIA officer to realize how capable they actually are. Because
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: when that officer realizes how smart, how capable, how resilient,
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 1: how resourceful they really are, that person can leave CIA
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: and go do amazing things. So a big part of
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 1: what CIA does is they train you to be operationally useful,
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: but then they still condition you to be like loyal
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: and needy of outside validation specifically from them. So it's
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: a very strange flywheel that exists.
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 2: A lot of businesses are like that as well.
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: It's not a healthy relationship, but it's a very effective relationship.
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 2: So you get back to your hotel. Are you not
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 2: at that point when you're back at your hotel thinking,
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 2: I'm going to find how to get through the restaurant
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 2: kitchen door and out the back and I'll cycle back
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 2: to the front? Because I'd be up all night thinking
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 2: about going through that bloody restaurant kitchen.
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 1: A big part of that is what you do in
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: the second phase of your SDR. And I had those thoughts.
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 1: I thought about I could get on a motorcycle. I
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: could ride to a local airfield. I could pay in
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 1: cash for that airfield person, like a little private pilot
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 1: to just fly me on a puddle jumper somewhere where
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 1: I walk across on foot and then I can make
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: a phone call from another plate. I thought about all
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: that shit, right? The problem is if you actually act
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: on that and you're being watched, what sense does that make?
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 1: The only person who would do that kind of crazy
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: shit is somebody who's trying to escape the country.
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 2: So what did you do?
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: I went back to the hotel. My plan was to
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: literally just leave, was to walk across the border like
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: any other law-abiding citizen and just evacuate.
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 2: Walk across the border.
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 1: Fly. To leave like anybody else would leave and just
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: gamble that they're not going to take me down. Just
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: gamble that I'm going to be more boring than they
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: will be confident and that before they leave, arrest Alex
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: Hernandez and make some sort of public international incident, they're
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: going to think twice and they're going to let me
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 1: just leave.
• 1:35:58
  Speaker 2: What actually happened?
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: So what actually happened is I get back to the hotel.
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 1: I don't really sleep at all. I try to use
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 1: sleep techniques to get me to sleep because I am
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 1: certain that at any given time, someone's going to burst
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 1: through the door and just take me down because they
• 1:36:12
  Speaker 1: already know I'm changing my flight. They already know I'm,
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: I'm updating my itinerary. I've made all the phone calls.
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: I've worked it through my company, my cover company to
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: get me home early. So I'm just waiting for them
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 1: to break in. They never break in. I go to
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 1: the airport the next day and on the path to
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: the airport, I'm looking for surveillance and I'm surveillance free.
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 1: And I get to the airport first thing in the
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 1: morning and I'm waiting. And like every step I'm waiting
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: for someone to jump out of the dark shadows and
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: take me down and drag me off to prison. And
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: it just doesn't happen until I get to the first
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: entry point for the airport i show my passport i
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: show my ticket and then they move me into secondary
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: secondary meaning where you try to leave a country and
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: the border patrol says that you're not you can't leave
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 1: through the main gate you have to go through a
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 1: second round of interview so they pull me off into
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: a secondary room and i go through a light interrogation
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: with two local falcon officers at like seven o'clock in
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 1: the morning first first flight out and and they're testing
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 1: my story and they're interrogating me to understand what have
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: I been doing in the country? Why did I change
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 1: my flight? They're going through my cover story. They're going
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: through my meetings from the day before. They're going through
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 1: everything two and three times, which is an interrogation technique
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: to see if somebody's lying. And I'm sitting there going
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 1: through this whole process, watching what almost feels like two
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 1: untrained border patrol agents trying to crack me. And it
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: was a funny feeling because they were so bad at
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 1: their job that it made me feel confident in myself again.
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 2: Are you trained on how to deal with those situations
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 2: in terms of body language and how you speak?
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. CIA trains us on how to deal with interviews,
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 1: how to deal with interrogations, and even how to deal
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: with actual capture and strategic almost situations. like enhanced interrogation,
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: like what you would call, what we do call torture
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 1: here in the United States.
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 2: And so from your training, what were you implementing at
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 2: that moment in time?
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 1: Mirroring is a big piece of what you're supposed to
• 1:38:20
  Speaker 1: do in an interrogation. So you want to reflect back
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 1: to the interrogator what they expect to see in a
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: person of innocence. So you try to keep your yourself
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: from jittering. You calm your nerves. You try to match
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: their curiosity. So if they lean forward, you actually want
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: to lean forward too. And if they lean back, you
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 1: want to lean back. And if they're using their hands
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 1: to talk, you want to use your hands to talk
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: because you want to show them that you and them
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: are the same. that you're not better or worse or
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 1: guilty or anything else. So mirroring is one of the
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: techniques that we're using. We also, I also used minimum information.
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: There's a process called elicitation and you use different elicitation
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: techniques to get individuals to share more information than they're
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: supposed to share. One of those elicitation techniques is silence.
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 1: So oftentimes if you want someone to speak, all you
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: have to do is sit there and be quiet because
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: it will force them to talk. This is something that
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: many interviewers use, especially when they're border patrol agents or
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 1: when they're like law enforcement or local law enforcement. They'll
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 1: just let somebody kind of admit their guilt. So for me,
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 1: they ask a question, I answer their question, and then
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: we sit there in silence for as long as we
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 1: need to sit there until they ask their next question.
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 1: And then we sit there and I answer their question.
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 1: We sit there in silence again. And that's combating elicitation.
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: It's a technique that we call counter elicitation. And that's
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 1: just one of several elicitation techniques that interviewers can use.
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 2: And that's useful in everyday life, I guess, as well. Absolutely.
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 2: In what context?
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 1: When you're dealing with a negotiation, when you're dealing with
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: a hostile employee, when you're dealing with a hard conversation,
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 1: when you're trying to find information in another person who
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 1: you think is holding information back, elicitation techniques are incredibly valuable.
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 1: You can ask them a question. You can ask them
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 1: the same question twice. That'll help you identify whether or
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 1: not they're lying, if there's a gap in their two
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: answers or if they answer two different ways. And I mean,
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 1: I'm sure you've seen it as a, you, you, one
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 1: of the things that makes you such an effective host
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: in your own house here is that you use elicitation
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 1: techniques all the time. You ask feeling based questions. How
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 1: did you feel about this situation? Take me back to
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: that moment. How would, if you could, if you could
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: be king for a day, what would you do?
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 3: Right?
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 1: These are all very advanced elicitation techniques because it gets
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 1: people to express more than they thought they would share.
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 2: So you're in that room in that airport. These two
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 2: very poorly trained guards are trying to get something out
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 2: of you. They don't get it out of you.
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 1: Correct.
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 2: So at some point they just let you go.
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: Correct. So what ends up happening is they're arguing with
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: each other and I don't know why they're arguing. It
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 1: seems like from the pigeon words that I can pick up,
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: one of them's talking about being busy and not having
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: enough time and this doesn't make sense. And the other
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: person's talking about we have to do this, this is required,
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 1: et cetera, et cetera. I don't actually know what they're
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 1: saying to each other, but I see that their aggression
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 1: with each other just keeps going up, almost like two
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 1: colleagues who are fighting, right? But at the end of
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 1: the day, they couldn't hold me without either releasing me
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: back to my plane or moving me into a place
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 1: where they were going to retain me long-term. So when
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 1: faced with that kind of decision, they released me back
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 1: to my plane. And then the biggest stress that I
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 1: had was not running to my plane because as soon
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 1: as they let me out of the secondary interview, all
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: I wanted to do was like haul ass to my plane,
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: get on my plane and feel safe. But I had
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 1: to continue to show that I was not a trained officer.
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 2: And at this point, are you, how are you feeling
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 2: back in the friendly country?
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 3: So at this point, I still have no idea what's happening. Um, I,
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 3: By the time I hear from him, he is in
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 3: the cutout country on his way back. So I know
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 3: he's left me a voicemail and I know he's out
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 3: of Falcon, the enemy country, which is great, but I
• 1:42:10
  Speaker 3: know he's in that third country. So I'm like, okay,
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 3: he should be on his way home. But until then,
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 3: I mean, all of this that he was going through,
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 3: I didn't find out until he actually returned home. And
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 3: then I hear this story and I'm like, what the hell? Like,
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 3: this is absolutely like our worst nightmare. Like, what we
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 3: did not want to happen. And so immediately we are like,
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 3: you know, we go into action. Like first it's like,
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 3: I'm so happy you're home. And then the next thing
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 3: is how did this happen? And we just start taking
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 3: action into, you know, investigating, like, did we do something wrong? Like,
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 3: is there any, any mistake that we could have made?
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 3: And we have to research and go back through all
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 3: of our own stuff. And, you know, and then we
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 3: have to make the assessment of can Andy ever go
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 3: back in, you know, was this really what we think
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 3: it was or, you know, Is he safe? Like, is
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 3: his alias safe? You know, and then we have to
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 3: make those.
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 2: And what was your assessment? Did you think he could
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 2: go back in?
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 3: No. It was too risky.
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 1: We assessed that Alex Hernandez was burned.
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 3: Was burned, yeah.
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 1: And we assume.
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 2: Alex Hernandez being your undercover spy name. Correct. The alias.
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 1: The operating alias that we used. And we assume that
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 1: the cutout country, the third country that Alex was traveling through.
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: So anytime Falcon wanted to track Alex, they would track
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 1: him back. to that third country. Alex would even use
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 1: the Falcon airline to fly back and forth between the
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 1: third country and Falcon specifically so that if Falcon intelligence
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 1: ever suspected Alex, they would feel that much more comfortable
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 1: knowing that they had flight manifests on him going back
• 1:43:40
  Speaker 1: to a third country. So we just assumed from our
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 1: study that Alex was fully burned, that, that the mole
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 1: had come across either Alex's operational history or the mole
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 1: had come across my true name, operational history and tied
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 1: me to Alex. Whichever one it was, Alex was burned.
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 1: But we also assessed that everybody else who had been
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 1: traveling to Falcon through the cell was still safe.
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 2: So you assessed that your shadow cell, which was your
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 2: team in the friendly country, were all fine.
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 2: But Alex Hernandez, which was your alias, could no longer
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 2: be used.
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 1: Correct. And that was how the cell was built. The
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: cell was built where Alex Hernandez was the tripwire. where
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 1: the first person to be compromised would be Alex. And
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 1: that would be the forewarning to everybody else so they
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 1: could start to turn up their operational security.
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 2: So does that mean it's game over for you?
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 1: For me in Falcon, it's game over. I can never
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 1: go back. I can never go back in my true name.
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 1: I can never go back in an alias name. All
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 1: of my biometrics, meaning my fingerprints, my eye prints, all
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 1: of that is most likely compromised. All of Alex Hernandez's Uh,
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 1: everything that I carried on me, all the digital platforms
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 1: that I carried on me, which were all air gapped
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 1: and isolated to just Alex, all of those things we
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 1: have to assume have been collected and, and, um, synthesized
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 1: and reverse engineered.
• 1:44:59
  Speaker 2: And you were running a real fake business, right?
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I was, I was a middle manager. I
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 1: was a middle manager in the.
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 2: Very fake business. Oh, you're a middle manager. And that
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 2: was a business set up by the CIA. Okay. So
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 2: is that in part why you both decided to leave
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 2: the CIA? Did the shadow cell operation end at that moment?
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 3: Shortly after Andy was compromised, we found out that we
• 1:45:24
  Speaker 3: were pregnant. And we were hoping to be able to
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 3: stay on at Wolf to continue because I could have
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 3: kept doing everything exactly the same.
• 1:45:33
  Speaker 2: Wolf being the friendly country. Exactly.
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 3: And being in the friendly country, I could have done
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 3: all my targeting from there, no problem. And then Andy
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 3: still could have helped. He just couldn't travel into the
• 1:45:43
  Speaker 3: enemy country anymore. But Headquarters decided that we had been
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 3: so successful and we were continuing to be successful by
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 3: spreading the cell model to the other locations that they
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 3: wanted us to come home to Washington, D.C. and train officers,
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 3: train newer officers back at headquarters on how the cell
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 3: model worked and the new techniques we had come up with.
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: The worst part is we had a conversation about what
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 1: meant more to us, CIA or family. And without saying it,
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 1: we were both landing on CIA. And we started thinking,
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: how do we not give up CIA to have a family?
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 1: So we approach the agency and we tell them that
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 1: we have this idea. If you'll put us on light duty,
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: just give us some cush job for like four years.
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 1: We'll pump out our second baby. We'll get our first
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 1: one old enough to go to school. We'll get our
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 1: second one old enough for a nanny. And then you
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 1: can throw us back into the fray. they do that
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 1: for other officers when they're not successful officers. But when
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 1: you're a successful officer, they have different plans and they
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: try to just push you and push you and push you.
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: So they rejected our offer and they said, no, it's
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: a soft duty. And they put us back and they
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 1: told us, you know, gee, he's going to go to
• 1:46:59
  Speaker 1: this office and do this very sensitive thing. And you're
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: going to go do this other very sensitive thing. And
• 1:47:03
  Speaker 1: we don't, your family's not our problem. And it was
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: at that moment, I think that we both realized that,
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: CIA is never going to let us focus on a family.
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 1: We're always going to be focused on the mission. That's
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 1: what their job is. That's their number one purpose, where
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: if our number one purpose is to be parents, we
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 1: need to make a change.
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 2: What did the shadow cell accomplish in terms of the
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 2: information or strategic objectives that it accomplished?
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 3: So the shadow cell really did do what we started
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 3: out what really did complete the mission that we started
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 3: out to do, and that was to find new intelligence sources.
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 3: And we were really successful in doing that.
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 1: And it accomplished its secondary goal. We didn't know the
• 1:47:50
  Speaker 1: effectiveness that the shadow cell had in ferreting out the
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 1: mole until after we had left CIA. We found out
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 1: that the mole that we had been plagued by was
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 1: actually arrested by FBI in, I think it was 2019?
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 1: It was later. But the case file that had identified
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 1: that mole started all the way back with our operations.
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 1: So it was successful in ferreting out the mole. It
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 1: was successful in building new intelligence sources inside of Falcon.
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: It was successful in maintaining the United States' intelligence advantage
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: against this adversary at a time when all of our
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 1: other operations were compromised by the mole. I think what
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 1: Jihee's talking about is a completely unexpected benefit in that
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: our model is seemed to have become the foundation for
• 1:48:39
  Speaker 1: a massive restructuring at CIA in 2014, just two years
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 1: after our cell model, when I escaped Falcon. Two years
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 1: after that, John Brennan, then director of CIA, rolled out
• 1:48:53
  Speaker 1: an entire reorganization of CIA that was based off of
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 1: the same cell model that we had built.
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 2: Was this the model?
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 3: We cannot confirm or deny anything about the mole.
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 1: I will say this, that if you research the time
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 1: that that man was arrested, you'll find two other people
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 1: who were also CIA moles at the same period of time.
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 2: So the work that you did overseas, you believe helped
• 1:49:22
  Speaker 2: lead to the capture of this mole?
• 1:49:25
  Speaker 1: The work that we did overseas, we believe helped capture
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 1: the mole that Falcon House was out to capture.
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 2: And do you believe that the mole leaked secrets to
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 2: the enemy country that ended up being the reason why
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 2: they knew that you were a spy?
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 1: That was the assessment that we reached inside our own cell,
• 1:49:45
  Speaker 1: as well as what the counterintelligence center, which is the
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 1: covert espionage group that Jihee was talking about earlier, their
• 1:49:52
  Speaker 1: conclusion of the facts was the same, that we did
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: not make any error in our operations. There was no
• 1:49:57
  Speaker 1: no compromise in my behavior, no compromise in my operations,
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 1: no compromise of our systems or our communication methods, that
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 1: the only way that Falcon could have found out about
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: me was through a leak from the mole.
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 2: How did the mole get caught in the end? What
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 2: did they do wrong?
• 1:50:11
  Speaker 1: It's a great question. So FBI created a sting operation
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: based off of the intelligence that we were able to
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 1: collect through our operations that brought the mole out. So
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 1: FBI created a series of sting operations where they baited
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 1: the mole into coming back onto American territory. And when
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 1: the mole stepped foot on American territory, they had enough
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 1: of a legal case that they could arrest him at
• 1:50:36
  Speaker 1: the airport and then prosecute him in a court of law.
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 2: And what was discovered about the mole and the work
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 2: that they were doing and how long they were doing
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 2: it for and what they were being paid or given
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 2: to do to snitch on the United States?
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: So the details that, that I know that I know
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 1: we can share, um, They were paid hundreds of thousands
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 1: of dollars. They were not paid into the millions, but
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 1: they were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide
• 1:51:03
  Speaker 1: information on operations, officers, assets, locations. They were witting, meaning
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: they knew that they were working with a foreign intelligence agency.
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 1: They didn't believe they were working with a company. They
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 1: didn't believe they were working for a research institute. They
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 1: knew they were working with a known foreign intelligence organization.
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 1: And that the original ally who gave us the information
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 1: about the mole, that original ally actually also retained incriminating
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: data on the behaviors of that person that were shared
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 1: with the Department of Justice.
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 2: And so was this, this was an individual who was
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 2: in the CIA, who was approached by this enemy country.
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 2: And the enemy country said to him, if you give
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 2: us secrets on what the CIA are doing against us,
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 2: then we'll give you hundreds of thousands of dollars.
• 1:51:54
  Speaker 1: We'll give you something. We'll give you cash at least
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 1: as part of it. We may also give you other things.
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 1: Here's the nasty thing about espionage is cash is usually
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 1: only one of several rewards. There's also operations where the
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 1: cash is there so that when you're arrested, your country
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: that arrests you believe that that's what your motivation was.
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: While all of your real money is kept in a
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 1: separate account, that's saved within the actual currency of the
• 1:52:20
  Speaker 1: country that you're serving.
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 2: So this person, they were in the CIA as a
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 2: mole leaking secrets about the CIA. They then left at
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 2: some point and then the FBI set up a trap
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 2: to get them to come back.
• 1:52:36
  Speaker 1: Correct.
• 1:52:36
  Speaker 2: When they left, did they go to the adversarial country?
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 1: We can't confirm those details because to confirm those details
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 1: starts to give more insight into who the mole was.
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 2: Okay. But they, they managed to, cause I was thinking,
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 2: I was just wondering if this, the other, the enemy
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 2: countries offer them like lifetime protection or something.
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: They do. So your enemy countries will offer you lifetime protection.
• 1:52:58
  Speaker 1: They'll offer you multiple generations worth of payment. So even
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 1: if you're arrested, don't worry, your kids will be taken
• 1:53:03
  Speaker 1: care of and their kids will be taken care of. Uh,
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 1: you've got citizenship, like the case of Edward Snowden, who's
• 1:53:08
  Speaker 1: received citizenship. Sometimes they offer, uh, rewards and comment and, uh,
• 1:53:13
  Speaker 1: accolades in their own home country. There's a number of
• 1:53:16
  Speaker 1: very strange and compelling offers that come about from foreign
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 1: intelligence services. When you think about a double agent, when
• 1:53:23
  Speaker 1: you think about a spy who turns on their own country,
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 1: it's less about thinking that they're paid to do it.
• 1:53:29
  Speaker 1: Spies aren't motivated usually by money. We weren't motivated by money.
• 1:53:35
  Speaker 1: We're motivated by that very unhealthy relationship where you have
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 1: to be validated by somebody else. And that same environment
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 1: that CIA creates, where all of its internal officers have
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: to be able to fight their own head trash, but
• 1:53:50
  Speaker 1: still seek validation from within their organization, that unhealthy relationship
• 1:53:56
  Speaker 1: is something that can be compromised. And a foreign intelligence
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 1: service can find an intelligence officer and fill that void
• 1:54:04
  Speaker 1: for them and validate for them and say, you're talented
• 1:54:08
  Speaker 1: and you've got promise and you've got potential and we
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 1: see it and your own home service doesn't understand how
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 1: important you are and your own home service doesn't understand
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 1: how valuable you are if you'll help us with this
• 1:54:19
  Speaker 1: we can reward you with money we can reward you
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: with citizenship we can reward your children with future residency
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 1: and with college and and we can make you a
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 1: very wealthy person all the things that you worked for
• 1:54:29
  Speaker 1: that your country would never give.
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 2: You did the mole admit that they had been a
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 2: mole I.
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 1: Do not believe so.
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 3: I don't believe so.
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 1: I also believe that most espionage cases, when they actually
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 1: go to court, they're not tried under the Espionage Act.
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 1: They're tried under some gentler term, some gentler, lesser offense
• 1:54:56
  Speaker 1: that is easier to prove, but also helps the government
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 1: protect its reputation against being penetrated.
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 2: So this individual, they left the CIA, flew to this
• 1:55:07
  Speaker 2: other country. They came back and they tried to rejoin
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 2: the CIA to get more information.
• 1:55:12
  Speaker 1: Well, they tried to rejoin a federal agency. And that
• 1:55:14
  Speaker 1: was how the FBI was able to lure them and
• 1:55:19
  Speaker 1: how they were also able to– For an interview.
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, for an interview.
• 1:55:23
  Speaker 1: And how they were able to get them on American soil.
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 2: Interesting.
• 1:55:29
  Speaker 1: So I do want to share that your curiosity right
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 1: now is a major issue with CIA. Because they already know.
• 1:55:39
  Speaker 1: They already know that very smart people out there are
• 1:55:42
  Speaker 1: going to know that there's a way, there must be
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 1: a way to reverse engineer the whole story. To find
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 1: out who is Falcon, or to find out where is Falcon,
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 1: to find out where is Wolf, to find out who
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 1: is the mole, right? And what's going to be, what's
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 1: fascinating is that we have put every effort that we
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 1: can into the story to make sure that it's not traceable.
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 1: Because CIA had several penetrations at the same time during
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 1: our tenure at CIA. And that's both depressing and encouraging
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 1: because it's encouraging in that it shows that what we
• 1:56:22
  Speaker 1: were doing was parallel to what many other officers were doing.
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 1: We wrote the book Shadow Cell, but that doesn't mean
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 1: we were the only two people that were tapped on
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: the shoulder to carry out experimental new operations. They could
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 1: have asked five, seven, 12 other people to go carry
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 1: out new operations, to try to ferret out this multi
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 1: penetration of CIA at the time. But it's also discouraging
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 1: because it's one of those areas that keeps these stories
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 1: from being shared because CIA doesn't want the world to
• 1:56:52
  Speaker 1: know that it was penetrated by multiple people. It doesn't
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 1: want the world to know who those people were. If
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 1: it did, it would have disclosed this long ago. Well,
• 1:56:59
  Speaker 1: obviously my research team tried to figure out who it was.
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 1: And the Diary of a CEO research team is not
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 1: a team to take lightly. So I'm a little bit
• 1:57:08
  Speaker 1: afraid to hear their conclusions.
• 1:57:10
  Speaker 2: Well, based on our own research, we thought that the
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 2: mole was likely Jerry Chung Sing Lee, who spied for
• 1:57:17
  Speaker 2: China around the time of the book. Jerry began spying
• 1:57:20
  Speaker 2: for China after leaving the CIA, then tried to rejoin
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 2: the agency, was allowed to leave the country by the FBI,
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 2: and was then arrested in 2018 at the airport when
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 2: he returned to the USA. Just like the mole in
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 2: the book. But it also says here, Andrew will not
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 2: comment on whether he is actually the mole or not.
• 1:57:40
  Speaker 2: So there's no point asking you if he is the mole.
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 2: Have you ever been to China?
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 1: We are under legal obligation to neither confirm nor deny
• 1:57:54
  Speaker 1: the results of your research team, but also the results
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 1: of anybody else's research if they reach out to us
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 1: and ask for confirmation on who the mole may or
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 1: may not be.
• 1:58:04
  Speaker 2: Has being in the CIA changed the way that you
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 2: view reality and human beings?
• 1:58:08
  Speaker 3: Oh, yeah.
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 2: In what ways?
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 3: Very much so. so.
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 1: I love this question and I really want you to
• 1:58:13
  Speaker 1: be honest. Can you please share with Steve how you
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 1: went from your college beliefs to your post-CIA beliefs?
• 1:58:23
  Speaker 3: So when I worked with refugees, that was my first
• 1:58:27
  Speaker 3: big turning point that humans can be really nasty. Like
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 3: I grew up Buddhist. And so it was always like
• 1:58:34
  Speaker 3: humans have the potential to be amazing. And I agree.
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 3: That's true. But when I worked with refugees, I realized
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 3: that humans can be horrible. And I worked with Bosnians
• 1:58:45
  Speaker 3: and I worked with refugees from Rwanda where their neighbors
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 3: literally turned on them. People who they had grown up
• 1:58:54
  Speaker 3: with literally the next day came over with a machete
• 1:58:57
  Speaker 3: or came over with a gun and and killed their
• 1:58:59
  Speaker 3: family members and chased them through forests or through whatever.
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 3: And that can happen anywhere. That was the first time
• 1:59:07
  Speaker 3: that I realized that anytime somebody says that can't happen here,
• 1:59:11
  Speaker 3: that's a lie. That can happen anywhere. None of those
• 1:59:15
  Speaker 3: people ever thought, oh yeah, that could happen here. None
• 1:59:19
  Speaker 3: of those people ever thought that. People always think that
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 3: can't happen here. My neighbor would never do that to me.
• 1:59:23
  Speaker 3: And that's not true. And then when I worked for CIA,
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 3: you know, that compounded the sense of like the world
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 3: behind the scenes is a dangerous place. And you can't fully,
• 1:59:36
  Speaker 3: I sound horrible saying these things. You can't fully trust anybody.
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 3: I mean, the reason I'm with Andy is because I
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 3: trust Andy 100%. But he might be the only person
• 1:59:48
  Speaker 3: that I trust everything that comes out.
• 1:59:49
  Speaker 2: Of his mouth.
• 1:59:49
  Speaker 1: You only trust me like 98%.
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 3: Well, you know, yeah, but I know I can get
• 1:59:53
  Speaker 3: that other 2% out of you. That's why. So- You know,
• 1:59:57
  Speaker 3: you really, like you always have to understand that people
• 2:00:02
  Speaker 3: are a combination of good and bad. And while I wish,
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 3: while I would like to think that people would always
• 2:00:09
  Speaker 3: try to err to the good, I always have to
• 2:00:11
  Speaker 3: keep in mind that people have a bad side to them.
• 2:00:15
  Speaker 3: And there's any set of circumstances that could trigger that.
• 2:00:21
  Speaker 2: Do you think we're in one such moment?
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 3: I think we're always in a moment. I think some
• 2:00:27
  Speaker 3: part of the world is always in that moment.
• 2:00:29
  Speaker 2: What about the United States? Because I know Andy said
• 2:00:31
  Speaker 2: when we had the conversation the other day that he
• 2:00:32
  Speaker 2: was going to try and leave the United States before 2026.
• 2:00:35
  Speaker 2: It's not just me alone leaving.
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, maybe you have different motivations. I don't know.
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 2: Are you staying, Jihee? Because he says he's leaving.
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 3: I've been the one who's been pushing to leave for years. Why?
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 2: How would you sort of summarize the situation that the
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 2: Western world and the United States are in right now
• 2:00:52
  Speaker 2: from your perspective with what you know? Are these good times?
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 1: Jihis was born in Venezuela. What was Venezuela like in
• 2:01:01
  Speaker 1: the 80s?
• 2:01:02
  Speaker 3: Oh, it was nice.
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 1: It was one of the world's best economies. It was
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 1: a thriving democracy. It was an excellent place.
• 2:01:08
  Speaker 3: With a large wealth gap.
• 2:01:10
  Speaker 1: Jihis' parents, her father, came from a wealthy family. A
• 2:01:15
  Speaker 1: wealthy Venezuelan family. That's how they moved to Japan. It's
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 1: not easy to pick up and move a family of
• 2:01:20
  Speaker 1: four to Japan or a family of three and then
• 2:01:22
  Speaker 1: have a child in Japan. All of that wealth... that
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 1: they had in 1980 when Jihee was born was gone
• 2:01:30
  Speaker 1: in 1989.
• 2:01:32
  Speaker 2: Just a few years later.
• 2:01:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think 85 maybe.
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 1: Five years. And Venezuela went from being one of the
• 2:01:39
  Speaker 1: most successful, thriving democracies with a strong economy. It went
• 2:01:45
  Speaker 1: from that to what it is now. There is no
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 1: shaking that reality from Jihee or from her family. So
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 1: if there's anybody... in the United States right now who
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 1: is acutely aware of how fast everything can go sour.
• 2:01:59
  Speaker 1: It's my wife. And that's why what I certainly find
• 2:02:02
  Speaker 1: is this uncompromising commitment to moving in large part, because
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 1: you can't wed yourself to any one system unless you
• 2:02:10
  Speaker 1: want to be available to the detriment of that system.
• 2:02:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 3: I believe in being mobile. We rent, we don't buy.
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 2: As you might have been able to tell, I'm absolutely
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 2: fascinated by the psychology behind high-performing sports teams. I think
• 2:02:29
  Speaker 2: it started with my love for Sir Alex Ferguson as
• 2:02:31
  Speaker 2: a Manchester United fan. So when I was told about
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 2: a new Netflix series that covers the rise of the
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 2: Dallas Cowboys, it immediately piqued my interest. And this isn't
• 2:02:40
  Speaker 2: because I'm mad about American football. I'm not. I don't
• 2:02:43
  Speaker 2: even watch it. But I do know about the Dallas Cowboys.
• 2:02:45
  Speaker 2: And for a lot of Texans, they're much more than
• 2:02:47
  Speaker 2: a sports team. I watched this series and it is
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 2: absolutely amazing. Brilliant. It centres on Jerry Jones, an oil
• 2:02:55
  Speaker 2: businessman with no football background, who bought the Cowboys in
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 2: the late 80s and transformed them into the most valuable
• 2:03:01
  Speaker 2: sports franchise in the world. It's all about how one
• 2:03:04
  Speaker 2: guy assembled a powerhouse team in the 1990s, made up
• 2:03:08
  Speaker 2: of legendary players and coaches, and through fearless decision-making, led
• 2:03:12
  Speaker 2: his team to three Super Bowl victories. And I really
• 2:03:15
  Speaker 2: enjoyed it. And I think you might too. Check out
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 2: America's Team... The Gambler and His Cowboys, which is streaming
• 2:03:22
  Speaker 2: right now only on Netflix. And they now sponsor this podcast.
• 2:03:26
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• 2:03:30
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• 2:03:33
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• 2:03:36
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• 2:03:38
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• 2:03:41
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• 2:03:45
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• 2:03:47
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• 2:03:49
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• 2:03:51
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• 2:04:06
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• 2:04:09
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• 2:04:11
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• 2:04:27
  Speaker 2: slash Stephen. And I'm so honored that once again, a
• 2:04:30
  Speaker 2: company I own can sponsor my podcast. Are there any
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 2: particular skills that people who are trying to be successful
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 2: in their average life, because this is called the Diary
• 2:04:39
  Speaker 2: of a CEO, that you learned through your time at
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 2: the CIA that you think are most useful for people
• 2:04:45
  Speaker 2: to be successful, however you define that, in their day-to-day lives?
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 1: The first thing I want to say is that our book,
• 2:04:52
  Speaker 1: Shadow Cell, talks not necessarily about awesome spies. It talks
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 1: about how we went back to the basics. We went
• 2:05:02
  Speaker 1: back to foundational espionage, what we call at CIA sticks
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 1: and bricks. We gave up all the technology. We gave
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 1: up all the fancy satellites. We gave up all the drones.
• 2:05:12
  Speaker 1: And we went back to build off of strong foundations.
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 1: And we didn't do that because we're smart. We did
• 2:05:18
  Speaker 1: that because the terrorist groups that won the global war
• 2:05:22
  Speaker 1: on terror were using bricks and stones and sticks. And
• 2:05:29
  Speaker 1: they were winning over an American Department of Defense that
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 1: had a $ 900 billion budget every year. We spent $ 8
• 2:05:38
  Speaker 1: trillion in the global war on terror only to evacuate Afghanistan.
• 2:05:43
  Speaker 1: All of that happened because they were using foundational tools
• 2:05:46
  Speaker 1: that we couldn't crack. And in the shadow cell, that's
• 2:05:50
  Speaker 1: all we did. We used foundational tools that proved to
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 1: dominate time after time. And there's so much in everyday life.
• 2:05:58
  Speaker 1: And there's so much in business from marketing to sales,
• 2:06:01
  Speaker 1: to budgeting, to hiring practices, to to annual and semi-annual reviews.
• 2:06:06
  Speaker 1: There's so much that businesses can take from this basic
• 2:06:09
  Speaker 1: idea of never let go of the foundations, never let
• 2:06:12
  Speaker 1: go of your sticks and bricks.
• 2:06:13
  Speaker 2: What advice would you give to the average person? And generally,
• 2:06:17
  Speaker 2: just generally in their life, about how to live a
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 2: good life based on what you've seen, what you know
• 2:06:21
  Speaker 2: now and how you look at the world.
• 2:06:22
  Speaker 1: For me, a good life is a life spent doing
• 2:06:26
  Speaker 1: the things you want to do, the things that bring
• 2:06:28
  Speaker 1: you joy when you have the age and the energy
• 2:06:32
  Speaker 1: to do them. It makes me super sad whenever I
• 2:06:35
  Speaker 1: meet people who wait until their 60s and they retire
• 2:06:40
  Speaker 1: to be free, to try and travel. And that's when
• 2:06:42
  Speaker 1: they focus on learning the guitar. And that's when they
• 2:06:45
  Speaker 1: focus on art. And their body just can't keep up
• 2:06:47
  Speaker 1: with them. Their body can't travel like it used to travel.
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 1: They have a shake in their hand. They can't paint anymore.
• 2:06:51
  Speaker 1: But they believed for 30 years that it would be
• 2:06:54
  Speaker 1: better when they retire instead of acting on it right now.
• 2:06:58
  Speaker 1: And for me, it's all about Finding joy in the
• 2:07:04
  Speaker 1: moment today. My son is 12. He plays chess now.
• 2:07:08
  Speaker 1: He wants to play video games with me now. He
• 2:07:11
  Speaker 1: wants to go deep into details about his favorite manga
• 2:07:15
  Speaker 1: comics right now. All of that could be different in
• 2:07:17
  Speaker 1: five days. My daughter is seven, doing handstands and doing cartwheels.
• 2:07:22
  Speaker 1: And all she wants is for daddy to give her
• 2:07:24
  Speaker 1: a shoulder massage at night and tell embarrassing stories about
• 2:07:28
  Speaker 1: my childhood to her while she falls asleep. That's what
• 2:07:30
  Speaker 1: she wants now. All that could be gone. And never
• 2:07:33
  Speaker 1: come back in six months. I have to do it now.
• 2:07:37
  Speaker 1: If I don't do it now, it'll never happen. I
• 2:07:39
  Speaker 1: won't be able to wait until I'm wealthy. I won't
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 1: be able to wait until I sell a company. I
• 2:07:43
  Speaker 1: won't be able to wait until I retire and then
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 1: try to get these moments back now. So what can
• 2:07:48
  Speaker 1: I do? I ask myself every day, what can I
• 2:07:49
  Speaker 1: do right now to maximize the joy that I get
• 2:07:53
  Speaker 1: right now? Because it's not just my joy that's happening.
• 2:07:57
  Speaker 1: It's also the joy that I'm giving to the people
• 2:07:59
  Speaker 1: who want my time. and space, my wife, my kids,
• 2:08:02
  Speaker 1: my peers, my clients. What can I do to bring
• 2:08:07
  Speaker 1: joy to myself will bring joy to others.
• 2:08:09
  Speaker 2: Why does that matter so much? I can see it in,
• 2:08:11
  Speaker 2: I can see it in your face.
• 2:08:13
  Speaker 1: My life is filled with people who failed to figure
• 2:08:15
  Speaker 1: that out. My life is filled with a, With a
• 2:08:18
  Speaker 1: mother who kept waiting to do the things that she
• 2:08:21
  Speaker 1: wanted to do and now she still doesn't get to
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 1: do it. And grandparents who retired poor and family members
• 2:08:28
  Speaker 1: who retired poor and people who died early and people
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 1: who got hurt and can't walk.
• 2:08:33
  Speaker 2: You know, I called your mother. We spoke to your mother.
• 2:08:36
  Speaker 1: Did you call my mom?
• 2:08:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:08:38
  Speaker 2: And when I asked her this question, I said to
• 2:08:40
  Speaker 2: your mother, I said, what's your relationship like with Andy?
• 2:08:44
  Speaker 2: And she burst into tears.
• 2:08:45
  Speaker 1: Did she really?
• 2:08:46
  Speaker 2: She went on to say how proud she was of you,
• 2:08:48
  Speaker 2: but it was telling that she burst into tears when
• 2:08:51
  Speaker 2: she was asked that particular question.
• 2:08:54
  Speaker 1: That's awesome. I'm glad that you called her. I talk
• 2:08:59
  Speaker 1: to Jihee about this often because I never had a
• 2:09:02
  Speaker 1: relationship with my father. And my relationship with my stepfather
• 2:09:04
  Speaker 1: was very bad. I go into some of that in
• 2:09:06
  Speaker 1: the book as well. And I, as an adult, only
• 2:09:12
  Speaker 1: project negative assumptions on what they must have intended. because
• 2:09:17
  Speaker 1: that's what I was shaped to believe as a child.
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 1: I can't confidently project positive expectations on them because as
• 2:09:26
  Speaker 1: a child, I never believed they were doing anything positively.
• 2:09:30
  Speaker 1: I believed my mom was career focused and I believe
• 2:09:32
  Speaker 1: that my mom didn't really wanna be a mom. I
• 2:09:34
  Speaker 1: believe that my mom didn't really wanna be married to
• 2:09:35
  Speaker 1: the man she was married to. And that's what I
• 2:09:37
  Speaker 1: believed as a kid. So now as an adult, that's
• 2:09:40
  Speaker 1: my foundation. Jihee's foundation with her parents is completely different.
• 2:09:44
  Speaker 1: Like it's incredible now because Like the disparity between my
• 2:09:48
  Speaker 1: negative thoughts of my youth and Jihee's positive memories from
• 2:09:51
  Speaker 1: her youth are starkly contrasted. And that's why I want
• 2:09:54
  Speaker 1: to give my children something like what my wife had.
• 2:09:57
  Speaker 2: And what's your answer to that, Jihee, in terms of
• 2:10:01
  Speaker 2: what you want next?
• 2:10:03
  Speaker 3: So when I was younger, I was brought up with
• 2:10:07
  Speaker 3: this idea of a destination. So I did everything I
• 2:10:12
  Speaker 3: was supposed to do. Got good grades in school, went
• 2:10:13
  Speaker 3: to college, went to grad school, got a career with
• 2:10:16
  Speaker 3: the federal government. It was really good. And then we
• 2:10:18
  Speaker 3: left CIA. And I was like, but I had made it.
• 2:10:22
  Speaker 3: Like I rode that train. I did everything I was
• 2:10:24
  Speaker 3: supposed to do and I made it. So what are
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 3: we doing now? And it was a really hard transition
• 2:10:30
  Speaker 3: for me. But now that, you know, we have the
• 2:10:33
  Speaker 3: kids and we have our business, you know, and I've
• 2:10:36
  Speaker 3: gone through a lot of therapy, you know, I realized
• 2:10:40
  Speaker 3: that Andy has been right all along. It really is.
• 2:10:44
  Speaker 3: You never know what the next moment is going to bring.
• 2:10:46
  Speaker 3: And so you have to enjoy every moment that you
• 2:10:48
  Speaker 3: have right now. You know, don't put off that trip
• 2:10:51
  Speaker 3: until next year. Do it as soon as you can. Don't,
• 2:10:55
  Speaker 3: you know, like those dishes don't need to get washed
• 2:10:58
  Speaker 3: right now. If your kid wants to read a book
• 2:11:01
  Speaker 3: with you, like you can just put that off for
• 2:11:02
  Speaker 3: a little bit. So I've, it's taken me a long time,
• 2:11:06
  Speaker 3: but Andy and I are now aligned on the, like,
• 2:11:10
  Speaker 3: live every moment with as much joy as you can,
• 2:11:14
  Speaker 3: because to my other point, like you, you never know
• 2:11:19
  Speaker 3: when shit's going to hit the fan. So enjoy it
• 2:11:22
  Speaker 3: now because you never know when you might have to,
• 2:11:26
  Speaker 3: you know, flee your house because you're, you know, it
• 2:11:28
  Speaker 3: catches fire or flee the country because a war breaks out.
• 2:11:31
  Speaker 1: Or, you know, getting arrested in a foreign country.
• 2:11:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Getting arrested in a foreign country. And I'm a
• 2:11:35
  Speaker 3: big believer of seeing the writing on the wall. I
• 2:11:38
  Speaker 3: don't think that My advice to people is don't be complacent.
• 2:11:42
  Speaker 3: Just like Andy said, don't be complacent in your business,
• 2:11:45
  Speaker 3: but don't be complacent in your life either. Before World
• 2:11:50
  Speaker 3: War II kicked off, there was tons of writing on
• 2:11:54
  Speaker 3: the wall of what was coming. And people just kept
• 2:11:58
  Speaker 3: thinking to themselves, that can't happen here. It can't get
• 2:12:01
  Speaker 3: that bad, can it?
• 2:12:02
  Speaker 2: Are you trying to tell me something?
• 2:12:03
  Speaker 3: So the writing on the wall for Americans is that
• 2:12:06
  Speaker 3: we are transitioning into something new. We will never go
• 2:12:10
  Speaker 3: back to what we were. And so you either need
• 2:12:13
  Speaker 3: to be a part of creating the new America or
• 2:12:18
  Speaker 3: you need to start thinking about where else you're going
• 2:12:21
  Speaker 3: to go because the America we knew before no longer
• 2:12:25
  Speaker 3: exists and it will never come back. This is new
• 2:12:28
  Speaker 3: America now. So you either take part in it or
• 2:12:31
  Speaker 3: you leave. Okay.
• 2:12:32
  Speaker 2: So what is old America under your definition?
• 2:12:35
  Speaker 3: So old America, you know, and, I'm not that old. So,
• 2:12:41
  Speaker 3: you know, Old America in my lifetime has been a
• 2:12:44
  Speaker 3: series of, you know, the government appearing to work together,
• 2:12:49
  Speaker 3: you know, the appearing to do things, you know, to
• 2:12:53
  Speaker 3: improve the lives of people. But also, I think, becoming
• 2:12:58
  Speaker 3: complacent over time. Like the last several terms, we've had
• 2:13:02
  Speaker 3: a strong executive that has slowly become stronger, which I
• 2:13:07
  Speaker 3: don't think is the way that we should be going.
• 2:13:09
  Speaker 3: but that's what's happened. And a Congress who is constantly
• 2:13:14
  Speaker 3: in deadlock. So nothing is happening. And so we continue like,
• 2:13:18
  Speaker 3: I mean, the immigration problem, why is the immigration problem
• 2:13:21
  Speaker 3: a problem? This could have been fixed decades ago, honestly,
• 2:13:26
  Speaker 3: like decide what you want for immigration, decide what you
• 2:13:29
  Speaker 3: want your policy to be, right? And the policy clearly,
• 2:13:33
  Speaker 3: I think most people agree, isn't open doors. So if
• 2:13:36
  Speaker 3: it's not open doors, what do you want? And then
• 2:13:39
  Speaker 3: make that policy happen. So, you know, I think we've
• 2:13:43
  Speaker 3: had a history now of an executive getting stronger. For
• 2:13:46
  Speaker 3: some reason, the American people want a strong man.
• 2:13:49
  Speaker 2: So when you say the executive, you mean the president?
• 2:13:52
  Speaker 3: The president, yeah.
• 2:13:53
  Speaker 2: The president's getting more power to do things?
• 2:13:55
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 2:13:56
  Speaker 1: For a period of time, it was because Congress didn't
• 2:13:58
  Speaker 1: want to make their own decision. So they pushed the
• 2:14:00
  Speaker 1: power to the president. And then in probably the last
• 2:14:03
  Speaker 1: 16 years— we've seen the president take more power, execute
• 2:14:08
  Speaker 1: more executive orders. So whether you like it or not,
• 2:14:11
  Speaker 1: we're in a period now where there's a strong executive.
• 2:14:13
  Speaker 1: When anybody gets power, it's very unlikely they're going to
• 2:14:16
  Speaker 1: let it go.
• 2:14:17
  Speaker 2: So do you think Trump's not going to go anywhere?
• 2:14:20
  Speaker 1: I think the executive, Trump is the current executive. Whoever
• 2:14:23
  Speaker 1: the next executive and the executive after that, they will
• 2:14:25
  Speaker 1: continue to retain their executive powers. But this doesn't benefit
• 2:14:29
  Speaker 1: them to let go of the office of the executive's powers.
• 2:14:33
  Speaker 2: So- Juhi, if that's the old America, where it got
• 2:14:37
  Speaker 2: slightly more complacent, there was more power and increasingly more
• 2:14:40
  Speaker 2: power given to the president, you're saying we're in a
• 2:14:42
  Speaker 2: transitional moment now. What does that new America look like
• 2:14:46
  Speaker 2: on the end of that transition, in your view?
• 2:14:48
  Speaker 3: So I don't think we have a good idea of
• 2:14:51
  Speaker 3: what it's going to look like. I think the current
• 2:14:53
  Speaker 3: administration is taking a lot of risks that I find interesting.
• 2:14:58
  Speaker 2: Interesting is a very neutered word. What is the real word?
• 2:15:06
  Speaker 3: I mean, interesting is the real word because I think
• 2:15:08
  Speaker 3: that he's taking a lot of risks that really break
• 2:15:12
  Speaker 3: down how things have been for a long time. So,
• 2:15:18
  Speaker 3: you know, getting rid of, you know, pulling money from
• 2:15:20
  Speaker 3: Medicaid and Medicare, getting rid of USAID, you know, transitioning
• 2:15:24
  Speaker 3: from soft power to hard power.
• 2:15:26
  Speaker 2: Hard power being dropping bombs on Iran.
• 2:15:27
  Speaker 3: Yes. So we're giving more money to military and we're
• 2:15:30
  Speaker 3: taking money away from, you know, aid. basically. So we're
• 2:15:35
  Speaker 3: making that shift. We're making various economic shifts, immigration shifts.
• 2:15:40
  Speaker 3: And I think there's a lot of unnecessary panic about
• 2:15:45
  Speaker 3: all of it because whether I agree with his methods
• 2:15:49
  Speaker 3: or not, I think that we just have to wait
• 2:15:52
  Speaker 3: for things to settle out. And if something doesn't work,
• 2:15:56
  Speaker 3: I think he's the type of guy that's going to
• 2:15:58
  Speaker 3: take another risk and see if he can fix it.
• 2:16:01
  Speaker 3: Or that if it doesn't work by the time the
• 2:16:03
  Speaker 3: next administration comes in, they'll have to do something with it.
• 2:16:07
  Speaker 3: Nothing stops. Everything keeps going. So I don't know that
• 2:16:13
  Speaker 3: America is heading for a future that I want to
• 2:16:17
  Speaker 3: be a part of. I think that's, for me, I
• 2:16:20
  Speaker 3: think that's a true statement. But I think there's a
• 2:16:24
  Speaker 3: lot of Americans out there who this is the path
• 2:16:26
  Speaker 3: that they want to take.
• 2:16:28
  Speaker 2: What is your perspective on everything Chihi just said?
• 2:16:31
  Speaker 1: The transition that's happening right now is a transition where
• 2:16:35
  Speaker 1: the American people have to decide how much they want
• 2:16:38
  Speaker 1: to get involved and how much they want to let
• 2:16:39
  Speaker 1: other people just do it for them. And Donald Trump
• 2:16:43
  Speaker 1: is a I'll do it for you kind of guy.
• 2:16:45
  Speaker 1: And Joe Biden was also an I'll do it for
• 2:16:47
  Speaker 1: you kind of guy. And Obama was an I'll do
• 2:16:50
  Speaker 1: it for you kind of guy. And we are electing
• 2:16:52
  Speaker 1: people who will do it for us. Do what for us?
• 2:16:56
  Speaker 1: Whatever nasty thing we don't want to deal with. Budgeting. currencies,
• 2:17:02
  Speaker 1: hard work, foreign trade, foreign relations, wars. We want to
• 2:17:07
  Speaker 1: be able to just talk about it without having any
• 2:17:09
  Speaker 1: blood on our hands. So we push that responsibility to
• 2:17:13
  Speaker 1: our government when in fact, our founding fathers were the opposite.
• 2:17:17
  Speaker 1: Our founding fathers were, hey, the blood is on all
• 2:17:21
  Speaker 1: of your hands. You tell us what you want us
• 2:17:23
  Speaker 1: to do. Do you want a revolution? Then let's go
• 2:17:26
  Speaker 1: fight a revolution together. Do you want to build a
• 2:17:29
  Speaker 1: new government? Then we'll build a new government together. That's
• 2:17:32
  Speaker 1: how our country was supposed to be formed. So when
• 2:17:37
  Speaker 1: Jihyi says that we're in a transition and she doesn't
• 2:17:39
  Speaker 1: know where it's going, she is accurate. We don't know
• 2:17:40
  Speaker 1: what the future holds, except we know the future holds
• 2:17:44
  Speaker 1: more pain, for sure. Because we will either come out
• 2:17:48
  Speaker 1: of this through a pain transition that makes us better
• 2:17:52
  Speaker 1: or we will come out of this through a less
• 2:17:54
  Speaker 1: painful transition that leaves us in a position that none
• 2:17:57
  Speaker 1: of us want to be in and then we're going
• 2:17:59
  Speaker 1: to have to put in more pain to fix it
• 2:18:01
  Speaker 1: all again and how.
• 2:18:02
  Speaker 2: Do you think the transition levels out where do you
• 2:18:05
  Speaker 2: think we end up if you had to.
• 2:18:07
  Speaker 1: Guess I think that we have a solid 60-40 right now.
• 2:18:10
  Speaker 1: I think there's a 60% chance that we don't like
• 2:18:14
  Speaker 1: where the transition ends. And then we spend 15 to
• 2:18:17
  Speaker 1: 25 years fixing it again, fixing our economy, fixing our
• 2:18:20
  Speaker 1: superpower status, fixing our foreign relations, fixing our trust of
• 2:18:25
  Speaker 1: our own government. I think there's a 40% chance that
• 2:18:29
  Speaker 1: the decisive action Donald Trump is taking right now is
• 2:18:33
  Speaker 1: adopted wide scale. We actually stimulate our economy, get people
• 2:18:37
  Speaker 1: back on the same page, and move forward in a
• 2:18:41
  Speaker 1: way that keeps us one step ahead of the threats
• 2:18:44
  Speaker 1: that we see from China, the disaster that we see
• 2:18:47
  Speaker 1: continuing to unfold in the Middle East, the precipice that
• 2:18:50
  Speaker 1: we have come up against in terms of geopolitics. There's
• 2:18:54
  Speaker 1: a chance that we come out of that, but I
• 2:18:55
  Speaker 1: think the dominant chance is that we don't. I would
• 2:18:59
  Speaker 1: say that that's not just my opinion. That's the opinion
• 2:19:03
  Speaker 1: of economists, of economists. That's the opinion of foreign relation experts.
• 2:19:08
  Speaker 1: There are multiple people out there who are all saying
• 2:19:11
  Speaker 1: that our budgetary decisions, our foreign policy decisions, our military
• 2:19:15
  Speaker 1: infrastructure decisions, our economic decisions are risky. Risky means there's
• 2:19:19
  Speaker 1: a chance they'll work, but it's a low probability chance,
• 2:19:22
  Speaker 1: not a high probability chance.
• 2:19:24
  Speaker 2: In such a scenario, then the economy would be hurt.
• 2:19:26
  Speaker 2: And then there'd be more wars, presumably, because if the
• 2:19:30
  Speaker 2: society becomes more individualistic and focused on themselves and nationalistic,
• 2:19:35
  Speaker 2: then they become more of an island. People get more paranoid.
• 2:19:37
  Speaker 2: They start building. I know Trump says he's building like the,
• 2:19:40
  Speaker 2: he's calling it the Golden Dome over the United States
• 2:19:42
  Speaker 2: so that he can fire any rockets out of the
• 2:19:45
  Speaker 2: air if anyone attacks. And then you kind of have
• 2:19:47
  Speaker 2: to unravel that and try and go the other way, potentially.
• 2:19:49
  Speaker 2: Is that kind of what you're saying?
• 2:19:50
  Speaker 1: I try to do as much reading as I can.
• 2:19:52
  Speaker 1: I'm sure you're the same way. And one of my
• 2:19:55
  Speaker 1: gifts to myself is when I read fiction. And I'm
• 2:19:57
  Speaker 1: reading a book called The Left Hand of Darkness by
• 2:20:01
  Speaker 1: a sci-fi legend named Ursula DeGinn. And it's a book
• 2:20:06
  Speaker 1: from the 70s. And I'm reading this book. And in it,
• 2:20:10
  Speaker 1: she has this quote where she talks about nationalism. inside
• 2:20:14
  Speaker 1: the world of the science fiction planet that she's on, right?
• 2:20:18
  Speaker 1: And the quote is something like, nationalism is not a
• 2:20:22
  Speaker 1: product of pride. It's a product of fear. People aren't
• 2:20:27
  Speaker 1: nationalistic because they're proud of what they have. They're nationalistic
• 2:20:31
  Speaker 1: because they're afraid that something might take away what they have.
• 2:20:37
  Speaker 1: And anytime you are driven by fear, you don't have
• 2:20:40
  Speaker 1: the chance for true happiness. And what I found in
• 2:20:43
  Speaker 1: that passage from the sci-fi book was really very insightful
• 2:20:49
  Speaker 1: to what I see happening across the United States. We're
• 2:20:52
  Speaker 1: all nationalistic, left and right, gay and straight, whether you
• 2:20:58
  Speaker 1: are old or young, we're all nationalistic. We all love
• 2:21:01
  Speaker 1: our country. But the things that's driving so much of
• 2:21:05
  Speaker 1: our nationalism is this fear of Of the other side,
• 2:21:09
  Speaker 1: not a fear of the collapse of our society, not
• 2:21:12
  Speaker 1: the fear of some rising power across the ocean. But
• 2:21:14
  Speaker 1: for some reason, we're more afraid of our neighbor than
• 2:21:17
  Speaker 1: we are afraid of the real threats that are out there.
• 2:21:20
  Speaker 1: Because at the end of the day, California and Mississippi
• 2:21:25
  Speaker 1: have much more in common than the United States and China.
• 2:21:30
  Speaker 1: But for whatever reason, we get so distracted and so
• 2:21:33
  Speaker 1: confused with our own infighting that we don't realize that
• 2:21:36
  Speaker 1: infighting is exactly what all of our adversaries from Russia
• 2:21:38
  Speaker 1: to North Korea to Cuba to even Bulgaria, which is
• 2:21:44
  Speaker 1: a NATO country that's pro-Russia. Our infighting just helps them.
• 2:21:48
  Speaker 2: And what's the potential worst case scenario of that infighting?
• 2:21:53
  Speaker 2: Because people think, okay, it just means people are going
• 2:21:54
  Speaker 2: to pop off at each other on X and Twitter
• 2:21:56
  Speaker 2: and social media, and they're going to scream at each other.
• 2:21:58
  Speaker 1: And then Gridlock is the biggest challenge. I don't believe
• 2:22:02
  Speaker 1: that we're going to be going into any kind of
• 2:22:04
  Speaker 1: civil war in the United States. We're not going to
• 2:22:05
  Speaker 1: shoot each other. We're not going to go machete our neighbors.
• 2:22:09
  Speaker 1: Not now, but gridlock is going to lead to economic collapse.
• 2:22:13
  Speaker 1: Economic collapse is going to lead to very real individuals
• 2:22:18
  Speaker 1: having very real problems, which is going to lead to
• 2:22:21
  Speaker 1: an increase in criminal activity. People will steal from each other.
• 2:22:24
  Speaker 1: People will steal from from stores, people will, you know,
• 2:22:27
  Speaker 1: lie and hurt each other to try to take care
• 2:22:30
  Speaker 1: of their own. And as that society starts to collapse
• 2:22:33
  Speaker 1: and we become more and more tribal again, all very predictable,
• 2:22:36
  Speaker 1: all case studies that we've seen all over the world,
• 2:22:39
  Speaker 1: as we become more and more tribal, then we will
• 2:22:41
  Speaker 1: become fed upon by our adversaries who don't have the
• 2:22:46
  Speaker 1: same problem.
• 2:22:47
  Speaker 2: When you said gridlock is the first sort of domino
• 2:22:50
  Speaker 2: that falls there, what is gridlock?
• 2:22:52
  Speaker 1: I see gridlock as policy gridlock. We don't know how
• 2:22:54
  Speaker 1: to move forward with Israel. We don't know how to
• 2:22:57
  Speaker 1: move forward with the budget. We don't know how to
• 2:22:58
  Speaker 1: move forward with whether or not we ratify these election results, right?
• 2:23:03
  Speaker 1: And in the time that we don't know how to
• 2:23:05
  Speaker 1: move forward, it creates an opportunity for somebody else to
• 2:23:08
  Speaker 1: bypass the democratic process and just dictate the outcome. And
• 2:23:13
  Speaker 1: that series of dictations makes it so that the outcome
• 2:23:16
  Speaker 1: is less collaborative, less well thought out, less well defined,
• 2:23:21
  Speaker 1: less palatable for more people. And then that distrust kind
• 2:23:24
  Speaker 1: of continues on. We do live in a moment now
• 2:23:28
  Speaker 1: where the distrust for government is higher than it's been
• 2:23:30
  Speaker 1: in a long time. We see the largest decline in
• 2:23:35
  Speaker 1: American currency that we've seen in decades and in century–
• 2:23:39
  Speaker 1: in the better part of a century– We see a
• 2:23:41
  Speaker 1: lack of public trust. We see consistent presidential approval ratings
• 2:23:46
  Speaker 1: below 50 for every president that comes through. We are
• 2:23:49
  Speaker 1: in a place where the people just don't trust their
• 2:23:51
  Speaker 1: own government. And I would say that that's not such
• 2:23:54
  Speaker 1: a big deal, except that we are the wealthiest country
• 2:23:58
  Speaker 1: in the world. We are the largest military in the world.
• 2:24:03
  Speaker 1: We are the largest producer of financial tools and the
• 2:24:07
  Speaker 1: largest producer of weapons. We are a big fucking deal.
• 2:24:10
  Speaker 1: to not have our shit together. Welcome to the United States.
• 2:24:17
  Speaker 2: Shadow Cell, an insider's account of America's new spy war
• 2:24:22
  Speaker 2: by Andrew Bustamante and Jihy Bustamante. It is a fascinating
• 2:24:26
  Speaker 2: book because usually the public doesn't get to read books
• 2:24:29
  Speaker 2: like this. And for the reasons you said, because they're
• 2:24:32
  Speaker 2: so highly scrutinized and then ultimately decided to be confidential
• 2:24:36
  Speaker 2: by the CIA, but this one managed to get through.
• 2:24:40
  Speaker 2: So I highly recommend everybody reads it. We've touched on
• 2:24:42
  Speaker 2: some of the surface level elements of this, but if
• 2:24:44
  Speaker 2: you want the details of what happened, then this is
• 2:24:47
  Speaker 2: a good book to read. But it also just gives
• 2:24:49
  Speaker 2: you a window into a world that most of us
• 2:24:51
  Speaker 2: live in ignorance to because we don't realize these things happen.
• 2:24:54
  Speaker 2: It's actually from doing this podcast that things that I
• 2:24:58
  Speaker 2: thought were conspiracy theories became not conspiracy theories. You know? Yeah.
• 2:25:04
  Speaker 2: Because before I started this podcast and started to speak
• 2:25:05
  Speaker 2: to people like you and other guests that I've had,
• 2:25:08
  Speaker 2: I thought that, well, I was watching podcasts and thinking, no,
• 2:25:10
  Speaker 2: that's bullshit. No, that's bullshit. That doesn't happen. These are
• 2:25:12
  Speaker 2: like spies that that's not going to happen. There's no
• 2:25:15
  Speaker 2: way that like one country spies on another. There's no
• 2:25:17
  Speaker 2: way that like, you know, people go undercover into countries
• 2:25:20
  Speaker 2: and get secrets and do all these crazy things. I
• 2:25:22
  Speaker 2: thought that was movies. But actually that happens and all
• 2:25:25
  Speaker 2: countries are doing it to each other. And I imagine
• 2:25:27
  Speaker 2: even the United States is doing it to some of
• 2:25:28
  Speaker 2: their allies. Like I imagine the United States probably has
• 2:25:31
  Speaker 2: spies in the UK, for example.
• 2:25:35
  Speaker 1: The United States doesn't claim to spy on the Five
• 2:25:37
  Speaker 1: Eyes countries, and the Five Eyes have all claimed not
• 2:25:40
  Speaker 1: to spy on each other, but that's just a claim.
• 2:25:45
  Speaker 2: We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the
• 2:25:47
  Speaker 2: last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not
• 2:25:48
  Speaker 2: knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left
• 2:25:51
  Speaker 2: for both of you to answer individually is, how did
• 2:25:54
  Speaker 2: a mistake you made shift the trajectory of your life
• 2:25:59
  Speaker 2: in a way you could not have predicted?
• 2:26:03
  Speaker 3: I would say that the mistake I made that truly
• 2:26:08
  Speaker 3: shifted the trajectory of my life was staying with my
• 2:26:12
  Speaker 3: ex-boyfriend for so long because we'd been together a year
• 2:26:19
  Speaker 3: and I knew then the relationship was already troubled and
• 2:26:25
  Speaker 3: I was applying to the Peace Corps right out of college.
• 2:26:29
  Speaker 3: But I also knew that if I joined the Peace
• 2:26:32
  Speaker 3: Corps and I went overseas, the relationship wouldn't survive. And
• 2:26:36
  Speaker 3: for some reason, I chose the relationship over Peace Corps.
• 2:26:39
  Speaker 3: And because I chose the relationship over the Peace Corps,
• 2:26:42
  Speaker 3: I ended up going to grad school so I could
• 2:26:44
  Speaker 3: stay with him. And then because I went to grad
• 2:26:48
  Speaker 3: school and the relationship drained me of all of my money,
• 2:26:51
  Speaker 3: I ended up applying to the CIA. And if I
• 2:26:55
  Speaker 3: hadn't been in that relationship, I never would have joined
• 2:26:59
  Speaker 3: the CIA ever. I never would have met Andy. I
• 2:27:02
  Speaker 3: wouldn't have the kids I have right now. I wouldn't
• 2:27:04
  Speaker 3: have the life I have right now. So arguably a
• 2:27:08
  Speaker 3: mistake to stay in a bad relationship for seven years,
• 2:27:11
  Speaker 3: but I wouldn't be where I am today without that.
• 2:27:17
  Speaker 1: It's hard for me to answer the question because I
• 2:27:20
  Speaker 1: keep finding myself coming to the same conclusion that Jihee
• 2:27:22
  Speaker 1: came to, that all of the mistakes that I think
• 2:27:25
  Speaker 1: about making all led to a sequence of events that
• 2:27:29
  Speaker 1: brings me to where I am now. So I'll actually
• 2:27:32
  Speaker 1: give a more recent example that is changing the course
• 2:27:35
  Speaker 1: of my life right now in 2020. In 2023, I
• 2:27:43
  Speaker 1: hired the first executive into my company, the first kind
• 2:27:47
  Speaker 1: of equal executive to me as a CEO. And I
• 2:27:50
  Speaker 1: hired that person because they came well-recommended and I hired
• 2:27:54
  Speaker 1: that person because they had a long track record of success.
• 2:27:56
  Speaker 1: I hired that person because they seemed to understand a
• 2:27:59
  Speaker 1: lot of things about business that I didn't understand. And
• 2:28:01
  Speaker 1: it was time for me to scale. And it was
• 2:28:04
  Speaker 1: an important thing for me as a CEO to lead
• 2:28:06
  Speaker 1: the charge by hiring the right people. And then in
• 2:28:10
  Speaker 1: the following 16 months, that person lost the company individually
• 2:28:17
  Speaker 1: and a half a million dollars, and then put us
• 2:28:20
  Speaker 1: into debt almost another $ 215, 000. So a giant $ 730, 000 mistake
• 2:28:29
  Speaker 1: in one 16-month period of time. And throughout that whole time,
• 2:28:34
  Speaker 1: I saw the mistakes. I saw the errors. And I
• 2:28:38
  Speaker 1: kept convincing myself not to take action. I kept thinking,
• 2:28:41
  Speaker 1: This is just what scaling must look like. This person
• 2:28:43
  Speaker 1: must know what they're doing. Like you have to spend
• 2:28:45
  Speaker 1: money to make money. We have to, we have to
• 2:28:48
  Speaker 1: prepare for the future. Like I kept rationalizing every step. Oh,
• 2:28:51
  Speaker 1: this was just a misunderstanding. Oh, this was just a,
• 2:28:53
  Speaker 1: this was something that will pay off six months from now.
• 2:28:57
  Speaker 1: And then, you know, that 16 months kind of ended
• 2:29:01
  Speaker 1: in March of this year. And I'm staring at a
• 2:29:05
  Speaker 1: healthy company that has $ 0 in its checking account. That's
• 2:29:08
  Speaker 1: carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. And I
• 2:29:12
  Speaker 1: realized I can't let somebody else try to do this
• 2:29:17
  Speaker 1: because nobody cares as much as I do. I'm the owner.
• 2:29:20
  Speaker 1: I'm the CEO. The company was built because of my
• 2:29:22
  Speaker 1: passion for the lessons and my passion for the people
• 2:29:25
  Speaker 1: that we serve. We are co-owners of the company together.
• 2:29:27
  Speaker 1: Jihee believes in me and she trusts me. And I
• 2:29:30
  Speaker 1: can't violate that trust by continuing to think that somebody
• 2:29:34
  Speaker 1: else can do it better. So I removed that person
• 2:29:38
  Speaker 1: from their position. I radically changed the company. And within
• 2:29:41
  Speaker 1: three months, we are back into a profitable statement. We
• 2:29:44
  Speaker 1: are months away from being able to pay off all
• 2:29:47
  Speaker 1: the debt that we had gathered. We'll never get back
• 2:29:50
  Speaker 1: the money that we lost and all the failed investments,
• 2:29:52
  Speaker 1: but we are on a trajectory to go in a
• 2:29:54
  Speaker 1: completely different direction. because I took hold of my company
• 2:29:59
  Speaker 1: and made it my company again, instead of thinking that
• 2:30:02
  Speaker 1: I wasn't qualified or wasn't capable or wasn't good enough
• 2:30:06
  Speaker 1: to be the CEO that built the company, why wouldn't
• 2:30:10
  Speaker 1: I be good enough to be the CEO that grows
• 2:30:12
  Speaker 1: the company?
• 2:30:13
  Speaker 2: I think a lot of young founders can relate to that.
• 2:30:16
  Speaker 2: I hear that story so often. I hear that story
• 2:30:18
  Speaker 2: all the time. I've had it for many, many years
• 2:30:21
  Speaker 2: of the founder that starts a business and then basically
• 2:30:24
  Speaker 2: gets like gaslighted by, oh, this person's an executive. They've
• 2:30:27
  Speaker 2: done it for 26 years. So they must know what
• 2:30:29
  Speaker 2: they're doing. I'll give them a massive salary. I'll give
• 2:30:31
  Speaker 2: them control. And then they make a set of decisions,
• 2:30:34
  Speaker 2: which because you, you know, you've not walked that path
• 2:30:36
  Speaker 2: before you're unable to have high conviction as to whether
• 2:30:39
  Speaker 2: those decisions are good, but because they are so expensive
• 2:30:42
  Speaker 2: and their decisions are so expensive, you kind of have
• 2:30:44
  Speaker 2: to go with it. And then eventually you realize at
• 2:30:47
  Speaker 2: some point that just because someone has worked in some
• 2:30:52
  Speaker 2: interesting places or had some previous interesting job titles doesn't
• 2:30:55
  Speaker 2: equip them for this challenge and especially when it's a
• 2:30:58
  Speaker 2: small but this is actually the paradox of it as
• 2:31:00
  Speaker 2: well like the mentality of success in like big scale
• 2:31:02
  Speaker 2: businesses is not the mentality of success in like a
• 2:31:05
  Speaker 2: high-grade startup you know where you're like penny pinching yeah
• 2:31:08
  Speaker 2: thank you so much i'm super enjoyable hearing the story
• 2:31:11
  Speaker 2: it was actually much more captivating reading your book than
• 2:31:15
  Speaker 2: i assumed it would be And I think that's because
• 2:31:18
  Speaker 2: of the level of detail you go into in the book,
• 2:31:20
  Speaker 2: which you just wouldn't have come across before. So I
• 2:31:22
  Speaker 2: really recommend everybody goes and read it. And thank you
• 2:31:24
  Speaker 2: again for coming back here. And it's wonderful to meet you, Jihee,
• 2:31:26
  Speaker 2: because I've heard about you before, but putting a face
• 2:31:28
  Speaker 2: to the name is always useful. So thank you so
• 2:31:30
  Speaker 2: much for being here and continue doing what you're doing
• 2:31:32
  Speaker 2: because you're opening our eyes to a world that we
• 2:31:33
  Speaker 2: would otherwise not be able to see. So thank you both.
• 2:31:36
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 2:31:38
  Speaker 2: This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53%
• 2:31:41
  Speaker 2: of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet
• 2:31:43
  Speaker 2: subscribed to the show. So could I ask you for
• 2:31:46
  Speaker 2: a favor? If you like the show and you like
• 2:31:47
  Speaker 2: what we do here and you want to support us,
• 2:31:49
  Speaker 2: the free simple way that you can do just that
• 2:31:51
  Speaker 2: is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to
• 2:31:53
  Speaker 2: you is if you do that, then I'll do everything
• 2:31:55
  Speaker 2: in my power, me and my team, to make sure
• 2:31:57
  Speaker 2: that this show is better for you every single week.
• 2:31:59
  Speaker 2: We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests that
• 2:32:02
  Speaker 2: you want me to speak to and we'll continue to
• 2:32:04
  Speaker 2: do what we do. Thank you so much.
• 2:32:13
  Speaker 3: Thank you.