#334 - CIA Spy on Executed Mossad Spies, Dad's Murder & Infiltrating #1 Enemy | Andrew Bustamante

Summary

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Julian Dorey Podcast #334

Guest: Andrew Bustamante (ex-CIA)
Title: CIA Spy on Executed Mossad Spies, Dad's Murder & Infiltrating #1 Enemy
Release Date: September 9, 2025

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Overview

In this gripping and revealing episode, Julian Dorey sits down with former CIA officer Andrew Bustamante to dive deep into modern espionage, his newly greenlit (and hard-fought) memoir Shadow Cell, and a lifetime of wild personal experiences. From covert games of spy-vs-spy in hostile territories, to wrestling with personal demons and the fallout of institutional betrayal, Bustamante takes listeners inside the real world of intelligence—far removed from Hollywood’s high-octane CIA fantasies. The conversation deftly blends thrillers of international intrigue, personal traumas like the murder of Bustamante’s father, the challenges of CIA life and bureaucracy, and honest reflections on family and identity.

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Main Themes and Purpose

• Demystifying Espionage: Bustamante lays out the subtle, invisible, and often boring reality of spycraft, sharply contrasting it with cinematic depictions.
• Building ‘The Shadow Cell’: The process, risks, and innovations behind a unique CIA operation that changed the Agency’s approach to handling internal moles and enemy infiltration.
• Personal Vulnerability: Unflinching honesty about trauma, family dysfunction, and the challenges of seeking validation both in and out of the Agency.
• Ethics, Loyalty, and Betrayal: What it means to operate in a culture of suspicion, and how institutional paranoia shapes both operations and personal lives.
• The Real Price of Service: Navigating life after the CIA, the drive for transparency, and the cost—both emotional and practical—of serving in the shadows.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Espionage: The Game Behind the Glamour

(00:00–08:00)

• Bustamante immediately rejects the Hollywood myths:
  “Espionage is a game because it’s real world chess... Professional intelligence is subtle, it’s nuanced, it’s invisible.” (00:00, Bustamante)
• Training Reality:
  Stories of surveillance detection, the monotony of operational planning, and the immense preparation required to do even the smallest task undetected.
• Failed Hollywood-Style Antics:
  “When you see James Bond on a beautiful antique wooden boat, screaming down a channel, shooting out of both sides, that's not professional intelligence… It's boring.” (14:39, Bustamante)
• Anecdotes about surveillance detection in hostile countries and the contrast between field reality and pop culture.

2. Fighting to Publish the Truth

(01:20–02:26, 14:39–16:03)

• Backstory of Shadow Cell:
  • Originally classified in entirety by the CIA; only after a threatened First Amendment lawsuit was it cleared for publication.
• Frustration with continued classification, particularly being unable to name the countries involved, though “anyone reading 30 pages of this book will know exactly which country it is.” (17:22, Dorey)
• “There’s so much more that truly, truly couldn’t be shared…” (02:36, Bustamante)

3. The Realities of Interrogation, Resistance, and Tradecraft

(09:54–11:24, 91:45–94:28)

• Simulations vs. Real Interrogations:
  Most are non-chalant, not adrenaline-fueled. Training always overshoots the intensity one will ever experience in the field.
• Notable Quote:
  “If you have anything less than what you’re trained for, you’re good to go.” (11:15, Bustamante)

4. The Book’s Genesis and CIA Internal Politics

(16:08–19:44, 24:25–28:28)

• Started during Trump-era transparency push; manuscript later censored following agency shake-ups.
• Details of writing around classification and internal CIA compartmentalization—“nobody knows what anybody else is doing inside the building.”
• Personal motivation: desire for public validation, not just online or institutional criticism:
  “My kids will one day be adults, right? And this is a source of truth that they can pull from…” (26:58, Bustamante)

5. Raw Personal History: Family Trauma, Validation, and Identity

(35:39–53:48)

• Bustamante’s birth father was murdered in a bar before Bustamante could even remember him; only much later in life did he piece together his roots.
  “It was just a story to me. It’s not a dude I ever met.” (38:23, Bustamante)
• Complex relationship with his mother—a combination of admiration and distance, as well as feeling like the perpetual outsider in his own home.
  “She told me: ‘I love your dad more than I love you.’… You never, ever forget it.” (46:01, Bustamante)
• Later reflections on the importance of forging a radically different kind of family—one prioritized above career or country.

6. Trust, Paranoia, and Organizational Culture at CIA

(31:25–34:34, 122:03–124:39)

• The Agency breeds institutional suspicion:
  “You don’t trust anyone. You don’t trust anyone to back your career up. You don’t trust anyone not to be a double agent.” (122:03, Bustamante)
• Discussion of betrayal by colleagues—parallels to the external threat of moles.

7. “Shadow Cell” – Innovating CIA Operations

(130:53–146:46)

• The assignment from “Falcon House” (code-name for a hostile, high-GDP Asian nation): create a new operational structure to counter an internal mole.
• Breakthrough: Modeling their compartmentalized, clandestine operations after terrorist-style “cells,” reducing damage if compromised.
  • “We’re the only ones that know—terrorist cells work because nobody knows more than one person. So what if we did that?” (138:11, Bustamante, paraphrased)
• Recruitment of a highly diverse cell team; each member is compartmentalized and only the team leaders have global knowledge.
  Notable characters: James, Beverly, Luke, Tasha ("the hippie"), each with distinct skills and backgrounds.
• Notable Quote:
  “We had proof of concept with James... Leadership at Wolf was like, you guys can have 60 days. And James.” (145:22, Bustamante)
• Memorable Story: Targeting “Converse,” a junior intelligence officer whose carefully curated social media accounts seemed normal—until subtle patterns revealed the truth.

8. The Risks, The Mole, and Operational Close Calls

(170:53–213:46)

• Detailed, nail-biting description of running an extended “surveillance detection route” in-country after realizing surveillance was anomalously absent—always a bad sign.
• Multiple methods of surveillance and how detection, “lulling” watchers, and choosing cover activities (e.g., killing time in an arcade) work in practice.
  • “I squinted down the barrel of the plastic rifle... at that moment a figure appeared around the cabinet... we locked eyes. My heart stopped. I had been made.” (190:22, Bustamante reading)
• The agony and psychological toll of believing (or not knowing if) capture is imminent; gambling on standard border exit rather than panicked evasion.
• Interrogation at the Airport:
  “I sat down, and it was just within a few minutes the interrogation started. That’s a no-no.” (209:06, Bustamante)
• Ultimately, the mission exposed the mole (Kevin Mallory, in public reporting)—but not before serious risk and an unshakable sense of impending doom.
  “...They found the mole, and they were able to operate on the mole in large part because we got the right person to make the right mistake at the right time.” (213:46, Bustamante)

9. Legacy, Reforms, and Bittersweet Success

(218:25–226:45)

• The “cell” innovation was eventually scaled Agency-wide; John Brennan’s subsequent reorganization drew directly from their model, even if much of the Agency resented the shift for careerist reasons ("now anyone can be a leader, not just case officers").
• “All the angst and all the ire of CIA case officers... they’re now going to know we were part of what contributed to that reorganization...” (221:52, Bustamante)

10. Reflections on Service and Identity

(226:45–end)

• Bustamante remains humble (despite his achievements), focusing gratitude on his teammates and his family.
  “I have no problem being the target of your jokes, because these people aren’t.” (225:38, Bustamante)
• “If it didn’t go the way it went, I wouldn’t be where I am now. I can’t argue with that.” (226:49, Bustamante)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Espionage as Chess, Not Hollywood:
  “Professional intelligence is, it’s subtle, it’s nuanced, it’s invisible, it’s boring.” (14:39, Bustamante)

• On Institutional Paranoia:
  “Inside CIA... everything’s compartmentalized. Nobody knows what anybody else is doing.” (20:01, Bustamante)

• Family Brutal Honesty:
  “She told me: ‘I love your dad more than I love you’… You never, ever forget it.” (46:01, Bustamante)

• On Real Interrogation:
  “When people are panicked and fearing their life, all sorts of sh*t comes out of their mouth… it’s a comedy of errors sometimes in a very, very serious moment.” (09:54, Bustamante)

• Stress Under Surveillance:
  “You become acutely aware... you have to act in such a way that's so calculated that they don't realize it's calculated. That's so predictable without seeming predictable.” (185:11, Bustamante)

• On CIA Career Success and Bitterness:
  “It has nothing to do with the operation. And this is one of the few things I will say is really, really sad about CIA. It is a careerist organization.” (222:43, Bustamante)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | Topic | |------------|----------------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:00–08:00| Opening, Realities of Espionage | Bustamante’s intro to real-world spycraft | | 16:08–19:44| Writing Shadow Cell | Legal battles with the CIA over publication | | 35:39–47:06| Childhood & Family Trauma | Father's murder, step-family, love and validation | | 91:45–94:28| CIA Training: The Farm & Operational Failure | The Farm experience, failure, career pivots | |130:53–146:46| Building The Cell | The Falcon mission, modeling after terrorist cells, team dynamics | |170:53–213:46| The Surveillance Detection Route | Almost getting caught, arcade scene, escape from “Falcon” | |218:25–226:45| Aftermath and Agency-Wide Reforms | Cell model’s legacy, careerist backlash, reflection on service |

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Language & Tone

The conversation is honest, raw, and unsparingly direct—alternating between tense tradecraft, dark humor, and vulnerable confession. Both Dorey and Bustamante engage in moments of levity and self-reflection, unafraid to address institutional flaws or personal failings with candor.

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For Listeners New to the Topic

This episode provides a rare, ground-level look at the complexities of modern espionage, the battles over transparency in the intelligence community, and the cost of living a double (or triple) life. Bustamante’s stories bridge the gap between front-page geopolitics and deeply personal struggle, offering both wild insight and introspective wisdom.

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Recommended Action

• Shadow Cell is out now—see the link in the show notes for more.
• For further context, listen to previous episodes with Bustamante (notably #97, #150, and #254 with John Kiriakou), as this conversation continually references and builds upon those earlier interviews.

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“Espionage is a game because it’s real world chess … Professional intelligence is subtle, it’s nuanced, it’s invisible. It’s boring.”
—Andrew Bustamante, 00:00 & 14:39

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Transcript

[Andrew Bustamante]

Espionage is a game because it's real world chess. When you see James Bond on a beautiful antique wooden boat, screaming down a channel, shooting out of both sides, that's not professional intelligence. Professional intelligence. It's subtle, it's nuanced, it's invisible. So my 100% job was just to determine my surveillance status, where I knew that the next person who should follow me is the younger male on their team. I don't know why. Things were different that day. It was winter, it was cold, it was nasty outside. Where is he going to fit in the arcade? You control every element of your time. I could play three, four, five games, give the whole team a 15 or 20 minute break so they don't think that there's anything suspicious about me. And that's how espionage worked. The thing that's so nasty about it is how fast it all went wrong. There's actually so much about that story that is truly classified that really, truly couldn't be shared.

[Julian Dory]

Not even with your friend Julian.

[Andrew Bustamante]

You think I'm gonna tell you?

[Julian Dory]

I think you're gonna tell us today.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Let's see if you can stump me.

[Julian Dory]

Let it happen, Andy.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Oh, man.

[Julian Dory]

This is payback.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Oh my God.

[Julian Dory]

Let it happen, Andy.

[Andrew Bustamante]

One year.

[Julian Dory]

Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. I can't believe they wrote, they let you write this book.

[Andrew Bustamante]

I don't know how to take that yet, but. But I'm, I'm excited to explore it.

[Julian Dory]

No, it's, it's amazing what you guys pulled off, but like, I feel like this is like a manual as to how to stop it now in some ways.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So it's been a challenge. It's been a challenge in so many ways, man. Three years ago, that entire book was deemed a classified document by CIA. So it's taken three years of fighting, debating, and wrangling before they finally let us release it. And the only reason they let us release that is because we threatened them with a First amendment lawsuit because of the. What happened inside the book. Technically, if they didn't let us release what we wrote here, it would have been a violation of the First Amendment.

[Julian Dory]

Did that lawsuit get settled?

[Andrew Bustamante]

I assume we never actually went into the suit. Yeah, we, we. Long story short, we took it to an attorney. The attorney understood the claims and the situation that the book details and, and the attorney had a back. A backdoor channel conversation with cnn.

[Julian Dory]

Back door channel.

[Andrew Bustamante]

A back channel, back channel. Is way better than Backdoor, right? Back channel conversation with CIA where CIA said, you know what? We're just going to release the book then.

[Julian Dory]

Well, there's one really disappointing part about the book. You couldn't write the name of the country. I've been waiting for this for years. So they told you you couldn't do that.

[Andrew Bustamante]

There's actually so much about that story that is truly classified, that really, truly couldn't be shared. So even as. As excited and impressed as you are with what was shared, there's so much more.

[Julian Dory]

Not even with your friend Julian. You're not going to tell me?

[Andrew Bustamante]

It's not. It's not you that I'm worried about, man. Now, when that thing.

[Julian Dory]

Tell me.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Not when that thing gets published.

[Julian Dory]

I think you're going to tell us today.

[Andrew Bustamante]

You think I'm going to tell you.

[Julian Dory]

I think you're going to tell us today.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Let's see. Let's see if you can stump me.

[Julian Dory]

Vinay. Rocco. Let it happen, Andy.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Oh, man.

[Julian Dory]

Let it happen.

[Andrew Bustamante]

We've been. They're giggling.

[Julian Dory]

Let it happen.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Tough guys are giggling. They're not.

[Julian Dory]

This is payback. This is payback. In this.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Oh, man.

[Julian Dory]

Okay.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Fetch a man.

[Julian Dory]

Play ball. This will be real easy.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Now I see.

[Julian Dory]

Stop resisting.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Now I see. Oh, n n. Nah. Not over the hair. Not over the hair.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, my gosh. Let it happen, Andy. Let it happen.

[Andrew Bustamante]

This is. They're working it. Oh. It's not as easy as it seems. Right, guys? You dropped your twisty tie. You dropped your twisty tie. I really should have shown you how to do this, Julian, before we. They're getting there. There we go. Yep. A little closer. That's it. There it is. Yeah. Nice. Oh, dear.

[Julian Dory]

They're gonna love that perm. Where?

[Andrew Bustamante]

You're going to tell. We're going to the bathroom.

[Julian Dory]

All right, let's go.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Oh, yeah. I guess I shouldn't. I shouldn't tell.

[Julian Dory]

All right, Joe, that's enough. Then he. She ain't coming.

[Andrew Bustamante]

What's the name of country? Philadelphia.

[Julian Dory]

It's not a country.

[Andrew Bustamante]

What's the name of the country? Philadelphia.

[Julian Dory]

Get him in the shower. What's the name of the country?

[Andrew Bustamante]

All I can think of is Philadelphia.

[Julian Dory]

You like that?

[Andrew Bustamante]

No.

[Julian Dory]

He's a tough cookie. All right.

[Andrew Bustamante]

All right.

[Julian Dory]

We're good, bro. We had them in there for like 20 minutes. Just like I was like. It's like Anne Frank's attic. Don't say anything.

[Andrew Bustamante]

That shit's hard.

[Julian Dory]

They did good, right?

[Andrew Bustamante]

You guys did respectably, decently. I just want to Be clear.

[Julian Dory]

I was not the zip tie guy. Just throwing that out there, dude.

[Andrew Bustamante]

I had them.

[Julian Dory]

So you know what happened? I had it flipped the wrong way, and I went to pull it, and it wasn't clicking. That was my mistake. The best part of that was, Andy, like, you missed it. So I know for next time I need to. I need to kidnap somebody. I know I got to make sure my zip ties are in the right.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Nobody thinks about, like, these are little physical stuff. So a lot of times, we'll actually line that in our pocket, and we'll line it with the right side facing out. We'll. We'll pre twist so that they're already bound. So all you have to do is slip them over the hands and then tie them together.

[Julian Dory]

See, that's why, you know, almost like you were on the payroll. But you didn't see that coming at all.

[Andrew Bustamante]

No, I didn't see it coming. You guys. Yeah, you guys did well. You were very good. And Franks, that was very good. Got it.

[Julian Dory]

That was like. That was like the last minute. Like, I'm teaching them how to zip tie people. About five. I'm like, he's going to be here in five.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Come on, let's go.

[Julian Dory]

I'm going this up snug. I'm not going to pull it snug.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So we can.

[Julian Dory]

Don't choke. Yeah, no, yeah, yeah. Trying to cut it for 30 minutes, but you grab this. Are we, like, yelling when we do this? But how do we bust out of the closet? Yeah, you come out. I'm be like. So the. The tell is going to be. Yeah, we used to. I'm gonna say. So you really aren't gonna tell us about the country in the movie? Okay. And he's gonna be like, yeah, CIA won't let me. I'll be like, we'll see about that, baby Rocco. And then you. All right, Bust out of here with the. He's got the. He's gonna be sitting down.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Okay.

[Julian Dory]

So Pat, you know, you're going to this side. Don't hit the camera. Like, camera, like, just be aiming. Pat, you're gonna put him a little bit further over here so I have more room. He's on this side. Yeah, he's gonna be right. Assume you don't have. Okay. So you're gonna come in second because you're on the near side. Pat, just aim your foot for there.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yep.

[Julian Dory]

Grab him. You'll be grabbing him at the same time. You hold him down here. You wait till he gets. Whatever. I'll be bullshitting over there. I'm gonna be like, let it happen, Andy. Just let it happen. Yeah, you can totally just like, speak. I don't know, speak Italian or something.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Okay.

[Julian Dory]

And don't laugh. Like, just think about, think about.

[Andrew Bustamante]

You can't laugh.

[Julian Dory]

I'm gonna be laughing. You can't laugh. I'm gonna be laughing. When I went back in there, though, and I turn around and they're wheeling you in. I almost lost. I did. You're like, oh, no.

[Andrew Bustamante]

I was trying to learn Italian and Spanish last minute, before you pulled up. Italian and Spanish.

[Julian Dory]

His name was Rocco and his name was Vinny. We were like in Google Translate, like, trying to come up with some lines to say. Yeah, yeah. They were just telling me they were laughing off camera when I was like, saying before, I was like, hey, if anything funny happens today, just go with it. I was dying, dying back there.

[Andrew Bustamante]

We get set up. It's an interesting. It's an interesting intro to the Julian Dory show.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. Kind of tough having a shoe on the other foot, huh?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yes. This was a bit of a flip flop on the other foot, but it's all right.

[Julian Dory]

You want one throwing at you? I'll put this one straight up your ass.

[Andrew Bustamante]

There you go. There you go. For anybody who's actually Latino, then we know that's. That's called Chancleta. What you just did is called Chancleta.

[Julian Dory]

What's that?

[Andrew Bustamante]

That's when a grandmother threatens to throw a slipper at you. I should have pulled out some Spanish.

[Julian Dory]

All right, so how. So was the waterboarding. Was that. Was that as difficult as you thought it was going to be?

[Andrew Bustamante]

It was refreshing. Thank you.

[Julian Dory]

Refreshing.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Thank you for that.

[Julian Dory]

Your hair dried off very quick.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So did my shirt. It was great.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. Wow.

[Andrew Bustamante]

How did it feel to have someone say a city name whenever. Whenever you asked for a country?

[Julian Dory]

I was trying not to laugh. I mean, that was. That was the amazing thing. So for people who hadn't seen it, my friend Tommy G. On his channel, we went and did something in June where you and Trevor Fortner had permission to kidnap us off the streets of Milwaukee and take us to an abandoned warehouse for seven hours and have your way with us. Pause. But anyway, so things got escalated, and I gotta say, man, I went through all the. Just the straight footage from that day because obviously Tommy's job is he's gotta, you know, take the highlights and put it into a 40 minute documentary with interviews and stuff. But going through the footage and watching you and Trevor, but you were doing all the talking in character. Was crazy. Like I've said, Pat, seen the footage, Josie, all these guys have seen that footage. Like, you'd win an Emmy if that was. If that was put up. Like, it was scary how into it you were. And Tommy and I would like, fuck with you and like, say some. I mean, we're muffled under a hood, so it's like. But we'd say some funny shit and you would not laugh. And that was. I don't know how it felt for you on the other end, like, how much you were just like in character or, you know, who you really are, whatever, you know. But for us, it was just like, it was like unnerving because it's like, damn, he's really not going to break at anything.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Well, I didn't know I wanted to give you guys as close to the real experience as you could get. And people say all sorts of wild people say that's not supposed to be funny, but makes you want to laugh during a real interrogation. So when you guys were saying funny, it's actually easier not to laugh at the funny than when people say some wackadoodle stuff about who knows what, right? When people are panicked and, and fearing their life, all sorts of. Comes out of their mouth in all sorts of languages, too. And then you have interpreters, man, there's so many funny moments where interpreters are interpreting real time and their job is to interpret everything that's said. So they will literally interpret the gibberish that comes out, and then they'll try to verbalize what they think the person's trying to say, which is just. It's like, it's a comedy of errors sometimes in a very, very serious moment.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, that was the thing we were talking about with you afterwards at night when we were all at dinner, you know, like what your experiences were like witnessing anything close to this or being a part of that at CIA. And the thing that struck me was you were saying like, dude, it's like a Tuesday when this happens. And it's not this, like, drawn out eight hours. You're screaming at someone like, the first scene is Zero Dark Thirty. You're like, Come on, man. And it's like 15 minutes. And then, you know, you come back 10 hours later and see if they want to talk.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

So the way you described it was not only like, nonchalant, it was almost like, man, this is like the low light of my day. You know, it's not like this adrenaline situation.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Correct. It's a, it's a job. And there's a professional way to execute a job. You know, we're going to talk about my book today. And in that book, I go through an interrogation with a service that does not perform at the highest level of the game. And as soon as you see what an interrogation looks like when it's not intense, you start to realize that you have an advantage because you're trained to handle intense interrogation. If you have anything less than what you're trained for, you're good to go. That's part of the methodology behind not only CIA training, but elite military training. They try to train for the worst that you'll ever see in the field. So that when you actually see it in the field and it's far less than what you've trained for, it's easy.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, that part of your book, like you've told me that story out of context. Like I never got that story fully in context off camera. You know, we've discussed places you've been and stuff you've done that you couldn't discuss until this book. And some things you'll never just be able to discuss publicly. But my heart was racing reading that. Probably that was like 15, 20 pages, whatever that was, because the way you guys did this book is like you'd have like one page or two pages of Jihee, your wife, two pages of you, like back and forth. It was very good. But when I got to this part, you know, you're the one reporting what was happening on the ground there and the number of places where you could have been as you described. And I'd like you to explain this to people. You could have been the panicked person in front of the bear. That you didn't do that over like a full day is crazy to me. Did you know that one in eight Americans are currently prescribed anti anxiety medications? It is a quiet epidemic that is sweeping the wet right now. And people who start on these medications have a very hard time quitting. Recovering from benzodiazepine addiction or alcohol addiction is essentially like recovering from brain damage. But what if I told you that a legal mushroom that has been weirdly embedded into our culture is helping people to finally get off these gabaergic substances? I'm talking about Amanita muscaria, the little red top mushroom with the white dots that's depicted in Alice in Wonderland and Mario. This is a legal mushroom to buy, possess and sell in every state except Louisiana. And thousand of people are using it to get off benzodiazepines and alcohol. This mushroom isn't only for people looking to quit their anxiety medications. People are tapping into its power as a natural nootropic for focus during studies or work. A non addictive alcohol replacement at parties, a dream enhancing tool for vivid nights and even a gentle aid for pain recovery. Amanita can do a lot more than help you quit gabaergics. And it's been hiding in plain sight this whole time for years. There was a massive gap in the market where no one in the United States was reliably importing this mushroom. That's where Minnesota Nice comes in. Providing you with the highest quality raw Amanita and consumer ready made Amanita products at a price that you can afford. So use Minnesota Nice to help find your harmony today and go to www.mannice ethno.com/julian. That link is in my description below and use code JD22 for 22% off your first order. That's www.mnicefno.com/julian. Link in description below and use code JD22 for 22, your first order.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Well, I appreciate that, man. I think that's, that's a big part of what I wanted the book to highlight for people was the professionalism that goes into intelligence. What you see on tv in the movies and in TV shows is not professional intelligence. When you see James Bond in a, in a very conspicuous outfit on a beautiful antique wooden boat screaming down a channel, shooting out of both sides, that's not. Yeah, that's not professional intelligence. Professional intelligence is, it's subtle, it's nuanced, it's invisible, it's boring.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, you had a great line for that back in episode 97. I can't remember it right now, but that was the first time you and I ever talked where you were, you were explaining like it's 99, like office work or whatever. That's like, ah. And then there's like that 1% where.

[Andrew Bustamante]

You'Re like, thank God. Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

And that's like the action. But it just goes to show you when you're working someone for months, years sometimes, you know, you may just be watching this person talk to their parents on the phone and recording it from across the street and hear nothing. And then if you get lulled to sleep, you're gonna miss it. That one time at 7:30 at night where they call the other guy and say, you know, spaghetti's ready.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Exactly.

[Julian Dory]

You know, yeah, the.

[Andrew Bustamante]

It's something that intelligence officers understand. It's something that your highest level of law enforcement understands. And, and hopefully it's something that more lay people will Understand, with the release of Shadow Cell.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. Now, what made you want to write this book in the first place?

[Andrew Bustamante]

It's a great question. So back in 2020. 2019. 2020, you had the end of the first Trump administration, and you had the push for more transparency and the push for the release of more classified information. So during that period of time, CIA was not in a good place with Donald Trump. But we wrote in and we said, hey, in the. In the best interest of transparency and. And sharing, we'd like to tell the story. And we know that the story has classified elements, but we also know that we're professional intelligence officers. We can write around the classified elements. Would you approve of letting us create a book proposal, a manuscript, et cetera? And CIA said yes. Now, in that original request, we specifically named the country. We specifically named the name of the various characters in the key characters that are inside the book. And as we kind of made each request for approval, CIA said yes. Every step of the way. We were in a great place until 2022. Everybody knows what happened in 2022. World. The whole world melted down. And. And then CIA came back. They had received our manuscript in January of that year, and they came back in March of that year and said, everything in this manuscript is classified.

[Julian Dory]

I remember because I met you in March, and then you were recording with me in April, went out a couple weeks later in May. But I remember you being like, what the. Yeah, because it was. It was like you'd been working on this, and now it was all stonewalled. And, you know, obviously you end up having to, I guess, like, if legal threats and whatever, just to get it out. But the crazy thing is that, in all seriousness, with our little charade right there, trying to get the country out of you, if you have listened to Andy on a podcast before, literally any podcast, and if you read 30 pages of this book and don't know what country you're talking about, I kind of can't help you. All right? And I'm gonna repeat the line. I've said this on the podcast before. You said this, I think, on the Patrick Beth David podcast, like, four years ago. You're like, I'm not allowed to tell you where I was stationed, but I am allowed to tell you it was somewhere in Asia. And I speak Thai and Chinese, so you do the math. So, you know, we'll leave that one there. But Falcon, as you call it, the country of origin in the book is obviously a. As you state, a U.S. adversary and all that. And we'll Talk all about that and get into kind of the strategy there and what you guys came up with, which, again, that's why I was saying I can't believe you were allowed to write this at all just because of. Yes, you. I. You did mention parts where you, like, we're holding back intelligence of how this would have happened or what would happen there. But the actual strategy you and your wife Jihee came up with, it's pretty unbelievable. Like, it's. And to see it play out and like, knowing you and putting it all together, it's like, wow. It's very impressive what you did, but I want to get to the beginning, which you guys. We've talked about it in generalities on the podcast before, and you've told some little stories without the full context, but now we can give more context. You've talked about many times. You were at the Air Force. We've gone through all that part of your life. And then you applied to the Peace Corps. You wanted to have 10 sex and whatever with. With hippies and help people still want.

[Andrew Bustamante]

To have 10 sex with hippies.

[Julian Dory]

Hey, listen, that's a good thing. Good thing to have. But anyway, so they intercept you and they give you a message that's like, you may qualify for other parts of government service. Wait for our call. Boom, boom, boom. Someone in McLean, Virginia, calls you. They get you on a plane, they bring you out to tell you it's CIA. I'm good so far.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah, good so far, man.

[Julian Dory]

Okay. So you get to the farm, which is where they train people to be case officers, and let's go through everything you did there and then how it ended, because it's. It. It ended up working out amazing for you, but it was a real challenge, like, in your life.

[Andrew Bustamante]

You know, one of the things that I'm really excited about with the story, part of it is. Part of it is, like cathartic. It's like a form of therapy, writing your own memoir, because you have to face your own demons. You have to face your own hardships and live them again and then dedicate them to words on paper. It's not a fun process, but it is a healing process. So there's a part of it that's personally redeeming, but then there's also a part of it that's professionally validating because I've received so much criticism and so much hate and so much anger and so much doubt. Like, there's so much negative energy, vibes, whatever you want to call it, that comes from the Internet and from CIA Itself. I was just sitting with somebody two days ago who had a contact that's active duty CIA and they, they were like, hey, let me ask this contact of mine about Andrew Bustamante. And when they, when they mentioned my name to the person that's still inside CIA and who the knows who that person is, that person could be a two year officer, person could be a 12 year officer. But when they were like, hey, what are your thoughts on, on Bustamante? Apparently the person in CIA was like, oh, that guy, he hasn't done anything real. Why is he even out there on screen? Like, this is my validation. Because here's the truth of it. Inside CIA, everything's compartmentalized. Nobody knows what anybody else is doing. The people that you actually discover did something significant inside CIA only happens when they reach senior echelons and people start kind of passing what's known as rument, rumor, intelligence, rument down the chain about what that person did. Now that I have a book that's actually going out and the book, anybody at CIA will know that the vernacular and the terminology and the settings and even as much as we've had to obfuscate specifics, they will know that this is all real and they will know the cultural implications of it and they will know the, the inside jargon and they will know, and they'll be able to relate to the story. Because one of the most important elements of the story that you just hit on is the fact that at the Farm I technically failed, I never became a case officer. At CIA they're very, very particular about their vernacular. So if somebody becomes a case officer, it means that they are certified through what's known as the field tradecraft course. What the FTC is what's commonly known as the Farm by kind of general, alec, general movies and tv. So when you complete the Farm, you go up against a panel that has to vote for whether or not you demonstrated the core competencies to be certified as a case officer. So it's not about passing, it's about finishing and having a panel of senior officers say, yeah, we think he's good enough.

[Julian Dory]

Do you have any contact with those senior officers before it gets to that point?

[Andrew Bustamante]

You have contact with about 30% of them. It's supposed to be 30% of the people who work with you, so mentors, coaches, trainers, and 60% are other professionals who are, who have not worked with you, who are supposed to objectively assess your scores so they know you through your scores and the other 30 doesn't. When I went through The Farm. The Farm was broken into three groups. There's an A camp, a B camp, and a C camp. A camp instructors teach A camp students, B camp instructors teach b camp students, etc. Etc. And then the instructors for the different camps become the role players for the other camps. So you might be an instructor in C camp, but then be the role player for one of the students in a camp kind of.

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[Andrew Bustamante]

And that's, that's how they expose that 30 of instructors to the student cadre. But on the last day, that's supposed to be a moment when they look objectively at scores and they look subjectively at the instructor and role player interactions. It's a totally convoluted, completely broken system, especially done at scale, which is what was happening when I went through the farm following 2000, 2001, following the 911 tragedy. There was so much recruitment activity, so many new recruits getting pumped in, that this system that was supposed to work for 30 new people every six months became 300 people every four months that had to go through the system. So it just didn't, it didn't hold up well. So that's my long explanation of saying, I went through the Farm, I went through the exercises, I went through the assessments, I spent the time there that you're supposed to spend. I completed all the tasks. I had the objective scores to say that I passed, but I pissed off one too many people and I failed, according to the panel.

[Julian Dory]

So one thing I was really impressed at throughout this book and also in that part as well, was how vulnerable you were talking about this. And like, as someone who's known you for a long time, it actually surprised me a little bit because you are such a type, a go getter. You, I got this kind of guy. And that has a lot of good to it. But as you know, that can also have downside to it. And you seem to have like a lot of self reflection on where you could have been different to where, you know, your story would have ended up in some other type of situation. But, but you know, obviously it might have worked out, but you caused yourself problems along the way. Was that, was that something that it was a little easier to talk about when you were sitting there actually typing it out and thinking it to yourself, or was that something that was very much like the cathartic point of why you wanted to write this in the first place?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Now the, the point that the reason I wanted to write this happens more in kind of the last half of the book when we, when we talk about the team that we built, because the team that we built to execute the Shadow Cell operation were just an incredible group of people. That's who I wanted to bring honor to. If anything, the first half of the book was just my editor and my agent saying that these parts of the story are required to tell a memoir type of story. Yeah, I didn't really want to hide it or otherwise. What I didn't want to do and what I still never want to do is make anybody think that I'm the star of my own story. I'm the fucking two bit comic relief of this story. I'm not the star of this story. And again, it's, it's my vindication in many ways against all the people out there who think that I'm fake, who think that I'm phony, who think that I'm what you have written there on the, on the cup itself. Right? Like I've been saying this for years, that, that if you think I'm anything other than what I, what I claim to be, you're a dumbass. Well, now, hopefully with a published book that if we're, if there's any good, good fortune in our future, becomes a bestseller, verified by CIA, publicly documented, with a legal case behind it, like, I am. I am what I say I am. And I'm nothing more and I'm nothing less. Whether you are at CIA and you hate me or whether you're on the streets and you hate me, it doesn't matter to me. It's, it's demonstrable proof. And the reason that's so important to me is because my kids will one day be adults, right? And this is a source of truth that they can pull from rather than all the criticism online that's going to.

[Julian Dory]

Exist about their dad, which actually, like, you're also like a great sport about too. Like the very first time I had you in here and I was going to cut up clips afterwards, you know how crazy it was back then with the clips. I would get it all done and work on it and it'd be good. And then I have to title it and I'd be like, oh. And I'd be like. Because normally I don't ask people about titles or whatever, but you know, I'm a human and there's a line and there was certain things and be like, I'm gonna ask on this one, because I don't know about that because it's accurate, but, you know, I don't know if they want that like that. So I remember the first one I texted you, it was like. It was a short and it was CIA spy. Why I'm a criminal. And I was like, oh, he's gonna say, no, this. And you're like, sounds great, brother.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Okay.

[Julian Dory]

And like 9 million views later, we were. But like, you've always been good about that. And what I'm saying is the way that not only things end up getting titled because of what you say, but also then when people go in and click it and hear what you say, you invite that in. You invite people to be like. Especially people who don't trust CIA to be like, you know, or not. I shouldn't say don't trust CIA. The people who want it, like, abolished to be like, yo, fuck this guy, or whatever. So it's interesting to hear that some of that, like, you know, you're at least even paying attention that because you've always been so open and just, hey, let it happen. I mean, we were still talking about titles two years later.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Some clips. And you're like, hey, no, this is great. Go for it. All right.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So, I mean, I appreciate what you're. What you're doing, because what you're trying to do, I think in my. In my perspective, what you're trying to do is, is share information in a way that meets the. The person where they are, whether they dislike CIA or whether they like CIA, the title shouldn't be the barrier for getting them into the content. Once they see the content, hear the content, they can come to their own conclusion. But you don't want to block somebody at the. At the point of the headline. It's almost the opposite of what mainstream media is doing. Yeah, right. Mainstream media is actively trying to block people at the headline. So they use these radical alarmist terms that are very clearly politicized so that their base will read it and everybody else's base will reject it. And they use that as a way of selling advertisement. Right. So a big part of why I'm such a fan of what you do and I will always be here to support you is because I can see what you're doing and I can see why you're doing it. So you create an accurate headline, and then that opens the door to an accurate conversation that some people, you know, get. Get Panty meltdown about.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. That is like, behind the scenes with, like, cooking the sauce here with some of the other creators. I'll talk with, like, Danny Jones and stuff like that. You know, we have to make titles that people will click. But, like, the first thing we have to do at a high level is like, is this accurate? You can ask Joe or Alessi all the time. Like, we'll be bullshitting titles in, like an upcoming video and they'll throw out one that's like, great. And I'm like, it's not accurate. Yeah, like, like that could be. That can be misconstrued or whatever. But once it's accurate, sometimes they're still like, whoa, like, people are gonna click that. But do we want to have that reflected for the people that are in here? So it's interesting that, like, you've always had that perspective and there have been a couple times before where, like, I've given a courtesy text to someone like, hey, you don't want this, do you? And. And I knew it would have a 15 click through, but they're like, I would prefer not. I'm like, no problem. Yeah, you know, because there's. I don't know, like they're. I hear what you're saying about people watching the content and you are right about that to a certain percent. But then there are just people, even with shorts, they just look at the title and they're just so this. And they don't really listen to it. And that's. Look, if you don't like it, in some ways, that's the nature of the Internet.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah, absolutely. The, the point of all of it is just to say, I am a big proponent of transparency because I spent so many years living in lies. Living in lies with family, living in lies with. With peers, living in lies. Even inside the agency itself, even inside the same group that had the same need to know. It's just lie upon lie upon lie. That shit gets exhausting. And then at the end of the day, it's very hard to go back to transparency after you've had a track record of lying.

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[Andrew Bustamante]

It's much easier to go back to transparency when you've always been transparent, when people accuse you of things, when people, when people claim that you said things or claim that you did things, and, and you've got a track record where you're like, I didn't say those things, I didn't do those things. And look at what's actually documented and you'll see that what I'm saying now matches what I said three years ago.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, I, I mean, I don't know how we've talked about it before. Like, can you ever really trust people? And like, of course that's something you struggle with. And I fully understand that coming from the world, you're from, but especially like even seeing the one tidbit, like tidbit really at the end you were mentioning with the one guy who was always so nice to you at CIA or whatever, and then was like advising your wife upon leaving CIA on what to do with her resume, and then went behind your guys back and said, don't trust the Bustamantes report anything to me. It's like you can't even trust someone you've known for years in the organization that's supposedly trying to do the same things you are. It's hard.

[Andrew Bustamante]

It's the reality. And, and when you. Everybody is, everybody becomes what they are, what environment they are kind of groomed in. So from from age 27 to age 34, we were groomed in this professional environment, right? And for me, before that I was groomed by the military. So it was, it was very absolutist in the military. And then you go into the agency where it's all malleable and you're just kind of like, holy, what's real? What's not real. So if anything, what I found is that reality is a mix of how you perceive it. And there's this, this thin common thread that's always there about what's in the other person's best interest, which is exactly what CIA taught us from the beginning. But when you start to realize that of all the things you think are true, they all kind of boil away like, like steam from a pot of noodles, right? That all boils away until you just have this little bit of truth at the bottom. And. And that's the only thing you can really navigate by now.

[Julian Dory]

You, you've made sense to me for a long time. Like I think when we did it the last time on My parents house episode 150 and you told the story about the pre. What's it, the air. The. The air course. Prep school. Is that what it's called?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah, Air Force Academy.

[Julian Dory]

So you do a year there. You don't need to retell the story now, but you go through the whole thing where like, like you supposedly had a job to do and then you did the job and you got yelled at for doing your job or whatever. And you're like, what even is authority? What are rules? So in a lot of ways, like you are an anti authority kind of guy, but to be more specific on that, you're an anti authority when it doesn't make any sense guy. When someone tells you like that wall is black and you're like, sir, it's clearly white and they're like, no, it's black. You're gonna be like you. I'm gonna. The wall's white. I'm painting it white. Right? And I understand that because I also. There's parts of me I see in that too. I have a similar type idea. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? And they've also found a way to combine THC with carefully selected functional ingredients to target nearly every mood and health concern that you can think of. Of course, I'm talking about mood.com and their incredible line of functional gummies. Today you can get 20 off your first [e-mail] using promo code Julian at checkout. Forget one size fits all supplements that only get you Mood's functional gummies are optimized to kick in in as little as 15 minutes and take you to the mood you're looking for. Whether that's Mind magic gummies for deep work and creativity, PMS support gummies to ease cramps and balance mood swings, or their sexual euphoria Gummies to help you feel ready for action and turn every touch into a full body experience. Listen, you can find gummies that just get you high pretty much anywhere these days. But Mood's Functional gummies combine premium federally legal THC with targeted botanicals to help you get into the perfect mood, usually in as little as 15 minutes. Minutes. And everything ships discreetly to your door. No dispensary lines, no awkward conversations, just better days and nights delivered to your doorstep. Best of all, not only is every Mood product backed by a 100 day satisfaction guarantee, but as I mentioned before, listeners are going to get 20 off their first order using code Julian at checkout. So head to mood.com link in my description below, find the functional gummy that matches exactly the mood you're looking for and let Mood help you discover your perfect mood. Mood. And once again, don't forget to use promo code Julian when you check out to save 20 off your first order. But you mention in the book even before that growing up, you know you're born in Arizona, you quickly move with your mom when she married another guy in to Pennsylvania. Which by the way I never knew this about you. Your father was murdered.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah, my my birth father was murdered in California. I actually had a chance to go visit it the block of California where he was killed. What was it maybe three years ago when I sat when I sat up in in San Jose with or Sacramento possibly was with one of the big podcasters up There I went down to the actual block where my father was killed. And I. It happened when I was so young that I didn't understand any of it. I didn't even understand English when it happened. But by the time it was explained to me and I was older, there was like a weird disconnect. So even though it sounds tragic and it sounds horrible, like, it sounds horrible to hear that your father was killed by a stabbing in a violent crime at a bar in the open in.

[Julian Dory]

San Francisco, do you know what happened? Like what, it was over.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah. So he was kind of a dick. Not surprising.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. Apple don't fall. Far from the trick.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So my. My father, the story goes, and I have to say it's just a single source story. It came from my mom's side of the family. My mom's side of the family did not like my dad or my father. But. But the story goes that my father was. He was. He had left the military, left the Air Force in a huff, tried to find a job, couldn't find a job, decided to re. Enlist in the Air Force so that he would have a job when his firstborn son was born. Right. Re Enlist in the Air Force. And then he was out at a bar with some friends celebrating his re. Enlistment. So I can only imagine he was probably drinking heavily. I can only imagine he probably wasn't actually in a good mood to celebrate anything. Right? Yeah. He was doing what he had to do to try to be responsible for a new baby that was on the way. While he was at the bar, he was approached by a drug dealer. And the drug dealer was basically like, hey, do you guys want to have a good time? And instead of just saying yes, he decided to mock the drug dealer in public in front of his friends and whatever else. Well, the drug dealer was tweaking at the time. So the dude left, got himself all ready, came back in, didn't say, and just started stabbing my dad at the bar. So I think it was 17 stab wounds to his back at the bar. My dad tried to. My father tried to escape, tried to get off the bar, tried to flee, and couldn't do it. His friends started to jump up and try to fight the guy, but they couldn't get him off before the. The damage was essentially done. The drug dealer was immediately captured, immediately apprehended, sent to a prison, actually sent to a prison where my mom's brother was the warden. So that guy did not have an easy time in jail, but nevertheless, the damage was done. So my father was killed because he had just enlisted in the Air Force, all of his survivor benefits went to my mom. And I was like three or four months old at the time.

[Julian Dory]

So you, like you said you can't, you don't even know what's going on at three or four months.

[Andrew Bustamante]

I don't know the guy. Like, even, even when I was told the full story, I was probably 9 or 10 years old. It was just a story to me. It's not a dude I ever met. I never met anybody from his family because his family and my mom's family didn't get along. So like this was just a character and a story for me. Even though it was real for my mom, it was real for my grandmother. When I later met my father's side of the family, it was all very viscerally real to them.

[Julian Dory]

But when was that?

[Andrew Bustamante]

I was 20, 22 years old, 2002. I was at the Air Force Academy in Colorado and I had access to the, the official Air Force National Cemetery database. And I decided to look up to see if my father, where was he buried? Because I never knew where he's buried. My mom never knew where he was buried. She always told me he's buried in some national cemetery somewhere. So because I had access to this international database and I knew that my dad was Air Force, that's when I looked it up and I saw that he was actually interred and buried in Denver when the Air Force Academy is in Colorado Springs. So the first weekend I had, I went up there to the, to the actual gravesite and got to see him, see his grave. And it's a really emotional thing. It was a very emotional thing. Even though he was just a character and everything else. Like you're looking at a gravestone with a name and dates that match the story and the last name is the same as your last name. And you know, I'm in my 20s. It was, it was a very strange, surreal kind of moments, but that was when I discovered him. And then I went to the little on site funeral parlor thing where you can look up next of kin. And his next of kin was his mom, and his mom lived in Denver also. So then I connected to the mother and everything kind of connected from there.

[Julian Dory]

Do you have a relationship with her today?

[Andrew Bustamante]

She, I think she actually passed away. After I met her, I realized why my mother's family didn't like my father's family. Because there's. Everything's shattered, everything's a broken family. My mom's family is a broken family. My father's Family was a broken family. Not surprisingly, when my mom and dad. My mother and father were together, they had challenges that would have ultimately probably broken them up, too. My mom's been married four times. Right. So there's just. There's not a lot of cohesiveness in either side of my family. So when I saw and I met my father's family, every time I met a new person, I was always asking myself the question, like, do I even want to get into this swamp? Do I want to deal with another divorce of a divorce and another third marriage and another, you know, adultering spouse and another person with alcoholism and another person with drug issues? Or do I want to just leave it all out? So if I left most of it out, I stayed in contact with my grandfather, who was not my birth grandfather, but was like a second or third marriage. It was kind of crazy. I kept in touch with him for a while.

[Julian Dory]

What made you want to keep in touch with him?

[Andrew Bustamante]

He. He was just insistent. So he was. He adopted my father when he met my grandmother, so he loved my father. My father was like his favorite child. And then when my father died, he was devastated. And he knew that my father had a child, but everybody kept him from that child. So when I met my Grandfather, I was 24 years old, and I was like a prodigal son to him.

[Julian Dory]

Whoa.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah. And even though he was also. He also has passed, but he was also not healthy. He was not, like, on the up and up. He was. He was a, you know, former alcoholic, retired military, three wives, himself. Like, he was all kinds of another military, though. Another military. There's a lot of military in my family.

[Julian Dory]

That's interesting.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah, a lot of military in my family.

[Julian Dory]

Because you. You ended up going Air Force. Your father, who you never knew and was just, to quote you, just a character in your story, when you went to the Air Force, you hadn't even been to his grave before.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Right. He was Air Force. The. The man who adopted him, who was my grandfather, who I stayed in touch with, retired Air Force. So there's. There's a lot of military ties in my story.

[Julian Dory]

Did you know that? Did. So when you were told the story when you were 9 or 10, were you told specifically he was in the Air Force?

[Andrew Bustamante]

No.

[Julian Dory]

So you just ended up at the Air Force?

[Andrew Bustamante]

I ended up in the Air Force because the Air Force Academy offered me the best deal. And my mom was former Air Force, and my mom was kind of my hero at the time. So I was like, I'll try that out. Okay. And I'm one of those people that thinks it's ridiculous that we now have a Space Force because it was always the Air Force. And now to make an Air Force in a Space Force, I'm getting like, I'm old school.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Technically, I would have had to be in the Space Force to do the job I did for the Air Force.

[Julian Dory]

Well, space is above air. I got the scientist over there, I'll tell you. There we go. Anyway, speaking of which, you're supposed to be working on my company. What the. I'm just kidding. But anyway, so that is fascinating that there's that strange pattern that forms without you even knowing them. And then it's also interesting that, you know, you put together that there's broken families everywhere, because I know how important it is to you. Like your personal family now with your wife and your kids has always been priority number one to put that before everything. We'll get to it. You put it before your career, technically and all that as well. So is. Do you think that a lot of that comes from you seeing these examples and saying to yourself, I definitely don't want that. Therefore, I'm going to make sure I put all my focus in this? Because I feel like predisposed to something like that happening. You know what I mean?

[Andrew Bustamante]

You know, there are people in the world who know what they want want and who have always known what they want and they've pursued it since they were kids. And they. They did it in middle school and they did it in high school, and they went to college, and they've been success stories because they pursued what they wanted. And then there's people who have always known exactly what they don't want. And they have crafted their life exclusively by going away from what they don't want. I am one of the latter half. Whatever the I don't want, I just run as fast as I can run away from that. And whatever I run into I know is better than the I'm running away from. And that's served me well.

[Julian Dory]

Why was your mom your hero?

[Andrew Bustamante]

It's such a disappointing story. So my. I think my mom was my hero because in my household, I knew I wasn't my dad's favorite. My stepdad. My stepdad was clearly favoritist towards my sisters who were his whole. His whole blood. Right. They were my half sisters. And there was just a very clear preference that my dad didn't really care for me and he cared very much for my sister. So it was easy to just bond with my mom. My mom was the one that was the more driven. My mom was the one that looked like me. My stepdad was white. My mom was Latina. My mom had curly hair and dark skin. I have curly hair and dark skin. So in a. In a white Pennsylvania neighborhood where we grew up, it was basically my mom and I that looked the same. And I could just really appreciate. She kept going to school and she kept getting promoted, and she kept climbing the corporate ladder, and she worked her ass off all the time. She worked night shift as an ER nurse, and I could look up to that. And my stepdad, like, he spent 30 years working for IBM and came back and played solitaire on the computer and, you know, took my sisters out to donuts every Saturday and didn't take me. And that kind of shit just. It creates a favoritism in a child. So I looked up to my mom, and then as I. As I went through the process of choosing a college, my. My dad never had faith that I would go to college. He was just like, you're out of the house at 18. I don't care what you do, but you don't have a home at 18.

[Julian Dory]

What did your mom say to this, like, to how he treated you?

[Andrew Bustamante]

She. She was old school, too. My mom was old school, like Catholic, Mexican, on her second husband, she was of the opinion that she had to do whatever he wanted to do because. And she told me this when I was young. She was like, I love your dad more than I love you. You. And in her way of rationalizing that, she was saying, I choose to love him every day. I don't have to choose to love you because you're my child. So therefore, because I have to put effort into choosing to love him, I must love him more. And that statement doesn't go away when you hear it once, you never, ever forget it. So I learned early. Eight years old, nine years old. I don't put myself between my mom and my dad, because if I do, I'm going to lose 100 of the time. So I just put myself behind him, but next to her, and I looked up to her for a long, long time. I didn't stop really seeing my mom as my hero until she divorced my stepdad when I was in my first year at CIA.

[Julian Dory]

And that made you stop?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Because I was like, what the is this? You've been married 25 years. I remember clearly being told that you love him more than you love me, and you're choosing not to love him anymore. So what does that mean for me? And what. What Is important to you. How do you prioritize? Like, what's optional, what's required? Like, it doesn't make sense to me at 25. It for sure didn't make sense to me because I was like, this is just fucking crazy. I wasn't old enough yet. I hadn't become a parent yet. Once you become a parent, you start to understand that your parents were just parents too. Confused, lost. I have way more resources than my mom or dad ever did, and I still struggle with parenthood. So they were. They were poorer than me, less educated than me. Like, that was hard. Yeah. So my mom was just trying to figure it out at the time. But just like when you have that moment where, where you learn the reality of how much somebody does or doesn't love you, when you see a hero naked in the bare light, they're never really your hero again. So my, like, whether I like it or not, I can pity her. I can accept her, I can do whatever else, but she's. She's not my hero anymore.

[Julian Dory]

How much of a relationship do you have with her today?

[Andrew Bustamante]

It's there, but I wouldn't say it's particularly strong. I love my mother.

[Julian Dory]

You do?

[Andrew Bustamante]

I absolutely love my mother.

[Julian Dory]

Define love.

[Andrew Bustamante]

She gave me life. She sacrificed decades of her life to bringing me up. She put real effort into my education. She put real effort into creating a person that was independent. That, as she always told me, she always told me her job was to create a person who made good decisions. That was her job. Just to teach me how to make good decisions. Her job was not to love me. Her job was not to. To make me feel safe. Her job was not to make me a contributing member of society. Her job was not. Not to like, turn me into a future husband or a father. Her job was simply create a life that makes good decisions. And once she did that, she was done. And that is something else that stands between us is once I went to a military school on a full ride scholarship, she was like, my job here is done. And every time I tried to share with her a second thought about maybe I should leave the academy. Maybe I'm not a good fit here. Maybe I'm bad in the Air Force. I always knew that I shouldn't ask her her opinion because I already knew what the answer was going to be. But every time I called mom to ask her opinion, it was always exactly what I expected. The opportunity is too great. Your future is going to be made. Just stick it out. Just stick it out. Just stick it out. And she wasn't wrong about the opportunities, and she wasn't wrong about the future. But in that moment, the way that she communicated it to me, it just made me feel like I can't. I can't take. Make my true feelings to this person. And now, as an adult, with my own kids and my own wife and my own business and my own everything, it's still like, mom is there, and I love her, and I know she loves me, but she's not what I would say is a heavy contributor into my life. And she makes it so that I'm not a heavy contributor into her life. She's got her thing that she does, and I've got my thing that I do. And even when I take my family to her house, she still continues to do her own thing. She'll go out with her own friends and she'll go to her own concerts, and she'll just leave us alone at the house even when we're visiting. Which I know to her doesn't sound weird, but to pretty much everybody else is, like, that's kind of weird, right? When your family from out of town visits you, you leave them to go have your normal Wednesday dinner with your friends. Isn't this one Wednesday worth skipping?

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[Andrew Bustamante]

That's not how her mind works.

[Julian Dory]

It's interesting. Every time I talk with you, I learn new things about you and, like, who you are. And as we already outlined a little bit ago, there's people who hate you on the Internet, and there's people who have severe problems with things CIA does. I'm one of them. You know, and we've talked about this openly before, and you and I have come down on the opposite side of some controversial issues. And that's fine, I think. I think you're a good sport for talking about it. But when people. I will say this as your friend, when people kind of dehumanize you because of where you worked, and I think that's what happens. I wish they would listen to where you came from and what you're about. Because I remember when we did episode 150, that was the fourth time I sat with you. Two times in my place. And then one time, Danny, you, me, and Jim. And after that one, that was like, November 2022, I remember I was just like, God, he's so confusing to me. Like, there's just. There's something I'm missing there. And then when we did 150 and you told the story about the Air Force prep school, I looked at Alessi and I'm like, Oh, I get it now. Since then, we've added so many layers that match that pattern with who you are and what you just described there is beyond what you went into in the book about this. Yeah, because I believe in the book. Correct me if I'm wrong here. What you specifically were saying was I had a mom and two stepsisters and a stepdad who didn't like me, and I was always trying to win his approval or something like that. But what you just talked about was trying to win your mom's approval, which, no disrespect to him, a lot more serious than him, because he wasn't your blood. It was married into. And so I'm trying to imagine the kind of Harry Potter element you had to you, where you're the kid living under the cupboard to one parent, and then the weird. And that's what I'll. I don't have another word for it. The weird, like, love relationship you have with your real parent who's decided she likes the guy she married better than you, which I. You know, we all made a face when you said that, because that doesn't even register to us. I understand where you come from. I see where. I don't think there's any way I can fully understand it, but I understand based on. As best I can from what you're telling me. I see where your motivations come from. I see where some of your. Your shortcomings that you talked about in here come from. I see where your need to prove to people things comes from. I see where your ego getting in the way sometimes like this, I'm gonna do it my way comes from. Because in a lot of ways to me, like, down to where it started before you even knew what was going on with your dad being killed in a bar. Like, you are the. You're kind of the kid in the corner shaking and trying to figure out, all right, how do I survive? And that kid had to grow up. And I have a tremendous. As a friend, I have a tremendous amount of respect for that.

[Andrew Bustamante]

I appreciate you, man. But again, it's not about me. I think what's so powerful to me is that there's many, many of us, many, many people who can relate to those stories. Many, many people who know what it's like to idolize a parent and then not idolize them as you get older. Many of us who know what it's like to have a parent in our lives as adults that we are. We long for kind of, but we also maintain distance from that's not uncommon. I really appreciate the fact that you are verbalizing me as a person because that is absolutely not what the Internet does to any of us. The people who watch you, the people who follow you, the people who criticize you don't see you as a person. Same thing with me. Most of the people don't see me as a person. We don't see Joe Rogan as a person. You don't see Will Smith as a person. You don't see the people who appear on screen, whether they're on your feed or whether. Whether you're paying to see them and eat popcorn born. It's not common. It's not average. It's not typical that people see those people as people. They see them as something else, as the artificial thing they are presented to be. So it took four conversations before you kind of got into me as a person. But I would have shared the same vulnerability with you on the first time we talked if you chose to. But I understand we have. People have to be interested in you before they care about you. And what people are interested in, even now, to this day, people are interested in the CIA. I am the CIA guy with the hair. I get approached a dozen times a day.

[Julian Dory]

Who made you do that?

[Andrew Bustamante]

You're the CIA with the hair. Yeah, I know, I know you take credit for it, but that's. And that's what I am to people, and that's fine. Right? And that's what I. And that's what makes it so easy to disappear from people too, because once I'm another brown guy without long hair, no one's gonna recognize me.

[Julian Dory]

You gotta get you some face tats too. To that's what I'm looking forward to. I mean, you're going to take the mask off as well, so you're gonna look totally different.

[Andrew Bustamante]

There you go.

[Julian Dory]

Like I. I told Gio when he was zip tying you to give it a little pull because the hair is real. Like I have pulled on it. I pulled on in a Taco Bell.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[Andrew Bustamante]

That's how classy we are.

[Julian Dory]

That's right. Yeah. I don't know what they're putting in that food. I don't think RFK would like it. But, you know, either way. Either way. Nah. But it's like the first. The first couple times we talked. You're right. It's. We're talking national security. We're talking what's it like being a spy on the ground. And frankly, that was, you know, probably about seven hours, give or take worth of content in those two episodes, we could have done another 20 on that. And then when we went and talked with Danny, that was the whole point of that. Because we had Jim in there. We're talking about the national security state and everything. So it was really the fourth time where I was like, I thought about it before and I'm like, I want to know him as a person. Did I? Because after, when we talk with Danny and Jim, like I was saying, I walked out of that, like, who is this guy? Because like you and I used to go at it a lot and it was funny, it was like good content and whatever. But it was also like, honestly like the two of us going at it and I would wonder why there were some things that would just like piss you off more than others. And it didn't make sense to me. And then it all came together and I'm like, ah, yeah. Because then I, you know, I remember I sit in an armchair. I didn't do any of this. I don't really know how I know what people like you tell me. I know what I can read in books or whatever. But like, I didn't live in the middle of that stuff. So there has to be like a separation with that and someone like you who's especially like hard headed and wants to go get a job done, when you hear someone like me talking about something that I couldn't possibly understand in a way that it's like, well, shouldn't it be this way? Yeah, I can imagine I'd probably have that reaction too where it's like the, do you know? You know, and you do a lot of these shows and you probably have the same reaction to pretty much everyone.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Because there's a lot of people out there who talk about that. They just don't know. I actually, I spent most of yesterday on set with a very smart lawyer talking about privacy. Okay, here's something that most people don't know. You have no right to privacy.

[Julian Dory]

Here we go.

[Andrew Bustamante]

But seriously, seriously, that that term right to privacy does not exist anywhere. There are only 12 states in all of the United States that have a constitution that say anything about what you can expect with your privacy. The rest of the states don't even have it in their state constitution. Right to privacy doesn't exist in the Bill of Rights. Right to privacy doesn't exist in the Constitution. We have founding fathers like Ben Franklin who warned us about how important it was to have privacy. And even though the founding fathers warned us and thought about it, when they documented that shit, it they didn't give it to us. Why? Because they know that the reason they won the revolution against Britain was because they had secrets and they were allowed to keep their secrets and they hid their secrets from the government, and they didn't want the future people of the United States to be able to hide their secrets from the government. So there's no right to privacy. We all talk about it. But at best, at best. And even the. Even the best privacy attorneys in the world will say this.

[Julian Dory]

What were they saying about this?

[Andrew Bustamante]

At best, you have an inferred right to Privacy that is 100% up to the judge at the moment that a prosecution comes to bear, where they determine whether or not your privacy has been unreasonably or unlawfully abused. That's it. So everything we have in terms of what defines our right to privacy is truly up to the interpretation of the court on a case by case basis, because it's not defined anywhere else.

[Julian Dory]

This podcast is brought to you by Palantir. All right. Yeah, see, this is what I mean. Now, there's gonna be a lot of comments on that because people get upset about that. And my first reaction is get upset about that, too. But I also don't want to argue with some things that could be factual. So to look at this semantically, because you are coming off a conversation where you got to discuss this very legally yesterday. So it's fresh. Like when you talk about right to. Right to. No search and seizure from the government without a warrant.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Unreasonable, unreasonable search and seizure.

[Julian Dory]

Now, how do. But how.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So that's exactly it. How do you define what's not reasonable and what is reasonable?

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[Andrew Bustamante]

This is why I say so openly. And this is what people can. Can understand from stories like the book, stories like what I share in Shadow Cell and any conversation from me. I'm not here to make you happy. I am just here to tell you what is actually true about how the government views its relationship with you. Is it. Is it my opinion? Sort of. It's also my experience and what I was trained. My opinion is that a lot of this stuff is up, but that my opinion is not what you care about. What you care about is what's actually different. If you, if you pull it up on your screen right now, do we have. Simplest question as you can look up, do we have a right to privacy in the United States? It will most likely come back and say, the right to privacy is complicated. It does not exist in the Bill of Rights. Right. So pull it up. But. And I'm not saying that because I Want to one up anybody? It's because it's so important to understand. Because how many times do you find somebody who argues that we have it when we don't?

[Julian Dory]

So what you're saying is technically right, because the word that's used here is. Implies. And I'll read this is from the AI on Google, which some people might not trust that, but it says yes, while not explicitly stated, the US Constitution implies a right to privacy primarily through Supreme Court interpretations of the first, first, fourth, fifth, ninth and fourteenth amendments. And actually, you know what? I'm just thinking of this and maybe people in the comments section can help me out here, but wasn't there. I hope I'm not getting this name right, Maureen Brown or Maureen Dowd or something like that. Wasn't there a New York Times reporter was thrown in prison for like a year for the Scooter Liberty affair for not giving up her source or something like that? And that was a court interpretation which I thought was up and I think it later got fixed. But that I imagine would be an example of what you're talking about where a judge, whether they're normal, corrupt or whatever, there's still a judge. They're in that position where they were able to do this thing. They were able to imply that her as a journalist had a source where the anonymity of that source did not supersede the government's right to know.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Right. And that's. That's the most important thing to understand is the government determines what rights we do and don't have. We may not like the way that sounds, but it's the truth. The government determines what rights you are granted. We might say we have a right. Well, yeah, you do have a right. Who gave you that right? And then I love the people who argue like, oh, we were. We were granted these rights by the creator. These are core human rights, God given rights. And. And I was like, you're human. God granted rights are not the same for every human around the world. So how do you. How do you manage that? Like it. There's a practicality and a pragmatic element that we have to respect whenever we talk about the government's relationship with the people and vice versa.

[Julian Dory]

Well, you had an amazing conversation with John kiriakou in Danny Jones 254, which is like, if people haven't seen that podcast, you guys were electric in that. You're two of my. Like just as far as like having an amazing conversation. Two of my favorites to talk with for wildly things different reasons. By the way. But I was very impressed with the fact that probably 80% of stuff you guys agreed on, like almost wholeheartedly. And you wouldn't think that if you, if you heard where John came from on things and where you come from on things, the 20 where you didn't, you know, there were some good fireworks. And one of them where I was totally on John's side, but it was just wild to hear you go through was, and I'm paraphrasing here, was you were saying you said something along the lines of the US Government is what gives you your freedom, or something like that. I, I don't want to go into all the semantics myself. Why do you say that? And to preface that, why do you say that as a guy who says A openly and I believe you, and we've talked about this before, you're going to leave this country at the first opportunity you get here in the next couple years. You know, B, you, you took your kids out of the school system, you homeschool your kids. You don't trust the very system that the government provides to our kids, which is the future of the country. See, you weren't huge on the vaccine and all that, like all these other things, it would suggest that you look at it the opposite way. Yet you have that stance. Why?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Because I. What. This is a perfect example of what I, what I know versus what I believe. Right. What I know is that, that when you reverse engineer civil liberties, when you reverse engineer rights, when you reverse engineer legal construct, it all goes back to the same thing, definitions that came from the U. S. Federal government. So whether I like it or not is a different thing. But the truth is it all comes from there. Keep in mind that everything that happens, we always run it through the lens of is it constitutional? Who wrote the Constitution? The forefathers of the United States who were politicians, who were people, who became the leaders of the country, the government right before the government, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, the guys who became the government. Like, it all goes back to the same thing. And even though we do progress and even though we do evolve and even though things change and we don't have sweatshops for children and we don't. And we let women vote and we.

[Julian Dory]

See you look disappointed on that one.

[Andrew Bustamante]

When you said that sweatshops for children. My children need a job. My children need a job.

[Julian Dory]

Like we let women vote, but.

[Andrew Bustamante]

But we have civil rights. Like, we have all of these things that we've evolved and we've progressed into only because the government turned it into legislation. Right. We have to accept that they also have the right to legislate it all away, because that's what they do. Our job is to vote for the people who we trust to make the right legislation. Their job is to actually make the decision. Now there's, there's a. There's a silver lining around this cloud that I don't think people understand.

[Julian Dory]

What's that?

[Andrew Bustamante]

The government's job is to incentivize people to come to that country and stay in that country. That's their true job. That's where you have control. So people who want to leave the United States are just people who have been incentivized to go somewhere else. And people who want to come to the United States are people who have been incentivized to leave their current conditions and come to something they believe is better. That's every country in the world. For as long as the countries have existed, there's always been migration because there's incentives and disincentives for people to stay or move or go. Just because we're the world's largest superpower. Just because we have the US dollar, just because we have. We. We are the pillar of freedom, of the, of the free world. For, for some people, that's still not enough incentive for them to leave their home, which is why you have plenty of people who live in their other countries. Right. There are plenty of wealthy people. There are more millionaires leaving the UK to come to the United States than ever before.

[Julian Dory]

They're leaving the UK to come here.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Correct. Because they see the structure in the UK and they're incentivized to leave that message for our mess, which they know is a mess, but it's the best mess. It's a different and better mess than what they're coming from. Likewise, you also have more millionaires in the United States than ever before, pursuing second citizenships and golden visas and buying property in other countries.

[Julian Dory]

I got a lot of problems with things we're doing here. I got a lot of problems with the government and the people that we have elected, you know, and all that. But like, where you're a guy who's been all over the world, world, where is overall not on a one issue here, one issue there. Where would I be luckier to live than here? I mean, I. I literally wake up some days and I'm not kidding. I'm like, oh my God, I'm so happy I was born here.

[Andrew Bustamante]

It depends on what you prioritize. It depends on what you prioritize. So keep in mind, you are a single, unmarried. How old are you? 28.

[Julian Dory]

How old do you think?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah, 14. However old you are unmarried, no children.

[Julian Dory]

You, you that I know of run.

[Andrew Bustamante]

A business, but your business is a creation business. It's not a product business. It's not like you have to worry about tariffs or anything else. So in your calculation, you wake up every day and you're like, thank God I live here. There are other people who, who are married with multiple kids. Maybe they're after. Maybe they've been through a divorce already and they lost half their net worth in the divorce. The kids are in college, which costs a lot more than kids that aren't in college. And that person might be tied to a job that's literally based in the, in products, products made in China, sold in the United States. That person could be looking at the situation being like, I got to get out of here. I can take this business turnkey to Brazil and be fine and still sell on American Amazon. Right? You've, you've got to look at it, you've got to recognize every person looks at the calculation differently. So I don't disagree with your point of view, but it's not any less American for the person who's like, I need to go somewhere else.

[Julian Dory]

So what makes you someone who sells a service as a product? You don't, you don't sell like a physical product or something like that. And as someone who literally can't go to certain countries around the world for the rest of your natural life, however long that may be, what makes you say is better for me to not be here?

[Andrew Bustamante]

I think it's better for me not to be here in the short term. I don't know what's going to happen in the long term, but as I watch what's going to happen to decide when and if I come back, it's going to be better to do it somewhere else. Why? First, I have an international business, so I can really create more business in any place that I choose to land. My largest audiences are the United States, Canada, the UK and Australia. Anybody who speaks English is someone who can benefit from my services. And that's just in English Falls here, guys.

[Julian Dory]

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[Andrew Bustamante]

With AI Translation services. It can be anywhere. So I can actually reroute my family and almost not impact anybody. There's no schools to worry about. We're going to pay less in rent and property taxes and everything else and we'll still be tied to the US dollar. And wherever I go, I can essentially create a second business on the local economy which is going to give me unlimited visa renewals. Because all any country wants is somebody to come in and build a business that keeps people employed.

[Julian Dory]

You could run a bodega. You'd pass for sure.

[Andrew Bustamante]

And if I knew what a bodega was in the, in the way that you're talking about it, I don't all.

[Julian Dory]

Sorts of ideas so it makes sense.

[Andrew Bustamante]

And then I want my children to have a second language. I want my children to have a second passport. I want my children to have the opportunity to see the United States from afar. Yeah, because from afar, I mean, the United States is a little bit like an ugly girl in a bar. After a couple drinks, it looks really good, but when you first show up, you're kind of like, I'm gonna sit on the opposite side of the bar.

[Julian Dory]

But again, what about. Is it one of those situations where you have to go like this and then the girl's not so ugly because all the other girls around them are mega trolls?

[Andrew Bustamante]

It's a lot of different situations, right? It really does matter. Are you looking for a spouse? Are you looking for someone to spend the night with?

[Julian Dory]

Columbia?

[Andrew Bustamante]

You're looking for somebody to just say something nice to you in the next 15 minutes, like, what are you looking for? You got to know.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Be a good spot to go. No, but future proofing makes sense to me, especially, like, trying to pass that on to your kids. Have a worldly perspective as well. Like you said, their school can go with them because you guys are homeschooling them. That. That makes sense. And the idea that you would plan to return, I guess, kind of answers the question as a whole. For what? How you still view this place, even if things are messier than they have been in a while and, you know, are a little rowdy here.

[Andrew Bustamante]

It's important to understand. Yeah, it's important to understand that we are Americans, and all Americans have advantages. The question is, do you think that your advantage being an American is better in the United States, or do you think your advantage being American is better somewhere else? Do you think your currency goes further somewhere else? Do you think your. Your health care would be better somewhere else? Do you think that you would have better experiences somewhere else? Do you think education for your children might be better somewhere else? And if so, we have the right and the freedom to travel, whereas many countries don't give. You don't give their citizens that freedom.

[Julian Dory]

Do you worry about going to countries that aren't on your list of, like, countries I can't go to and not realizing that it is a country that should be on your list of countries you can't go to?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Sort of. I'm not the kind of target that most intelligence services want right now. I don't have any gravity. It doesn't make any sense to seize me. So if I went to Armenia, it doesn't make sense for the Russians to come to Armenia just to take money.

[Julian Dory]

Me.

[Andrew Bustamante]

It doesn't make sense for the Armenian government to take me and pass me over to the Russians. There's no. There's no pawn, there's no value there.

[Julian Dory]

Wait a minute, I don't know if I buy that.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Okay, here's why.

[Julian Dory]

And you can shoot this down, but I want to throw this by you. In this book you outline what you and your wife and your wife's going with you as well. So you guys are like a tag team, right? What you and your wife were able to come up with that is now used around CIA widely and has probably been expanded upon. Number two, so you also have insight into without saying the name of the country, a very dangerous place with a high GDP that other countries would be interested in. Number three, let's call it what it is. You've run a business for the last seven, eight years, whatever it is, where your job is to get clientele at the high C suites of Fortune 500 companies that are multinational organizations that have all kinds of kinds of patents or information or things that people like you who know how to snoop around have access to that. If I were a foreign intelligence service of any country, but particularly powerful country, I'd be very interested in what this Alex Hernandez guy has to say about things that was your name undercover. But like, do you not see that as a possibility that you might have more value than you are putting on yourself?

[Andrew Bustamante]

No, I, I understand the value that I have. What I'm saying is no one, I don't believe that I, I meet the warrant for seizing. I don't, I don't think for a second that I'd live in Armenia and not be surrounded by Russian friends who want to talk about my background. But I don't think that anybody would seize me, take me, apprehend me out of a third country and then take me to their home country and then in some way shape or form seriously affect my life.

[Julian Dory]

I was reading an article two weeks ago on a totally separate story that had nothing to do with it. Where they were talking, they were talking high level about espionage and the dangers of it. And one of the things that would meant was mentioned in there was how in 2011, 2012, I want to say, check me in the comments on that. You can probably google this. There was like 10 to 12 people working for CIA who were executed in China. Right? So blatantly executed. It's talked about in news stories my ass. Read it somewhere or whatever. And you know, I don't remember ever hearing that at the time. I don't remember hearing that a few years after it. This was like a side mention, wasn't even on Wikipedia or something like that. I'm Sure I could find it there if I really went and looked. But like Dwell Joe found it there. 202010 to 2012 killing of CIA sources in China this wasn't like a major thing though, right? So you know, this is just one world power of many. But like we've seen what Russia does on UK soil, on security cameras, dumping polonium on guys or whatever. Like there are places that are, as you've talked about before, brazen. I'm not saying they would do this to you. I'm not saying you're wrong and that maybe it's not worth it. But like what if it is? You know, there has to be a percentage possibility there. Maybe it's not high, but you know, Maybe there's a 1% chance of like, you know, I'm going to go to fucking Georgia the country and get Merchant marked.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah, there's always a possibility. And what we have to do, all of us have to do, is decide what actions we take based on the possibilities versus the probabilities. It's worth noting, right that with this example specifically those, those sources that were killed have never been reported to be CIA officers. They've never been reported to be American citizens.

[Julian Dory]

They could have been sources. Meaning like people on the ground.

[Andrew Bustamante]

I don't even think could it. Well, I mean if, if this is a real demonstrable thing which I'm not allowed to talk about one way or the other. Right. Because it's CIA specific. But a source in, in, in common vernacular in the espionage world, a source is usually a national of that target country. So this means however many Chinese people were killed and those Chinese people were committing, according to the Chinese government, espionage, which is punishable by death.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, this set. And again you can't comment on this. I'm just gonna say this part here, just for semantics. This says casualties 30 to plus killed or captured. And then it talks about specifically 18 to 20 sources were killed. Now casualties includes people that aren't killed and people that are cap. You know, hurt.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Right.

[Julian Dory]

But you know what I was reading was they talked about 10 to 12 people working for CIA who were killed. And the way that it was. I'm gonna go back and look at that afterwards, I'll find that article the way it was stated, my mind did not go to sources. Whereas the full number here, 30 plus. This would absolutely. There's no way there were 30 case officers killed in China in a two year period. That's like, there's no way that happened. But like this would absolutely include what you're talking about which is that there's a high proportion of it where it is just people on the ground who.

[Andrew Bustamante]

You know, this is the same thing that's happening in Iran right now, right after what happened when Mossad launched drones from within the Iranian border and they neutralized leadership and the United States flew in with stealth bombers in Iran. Iran's on a hunt right now for Iranians who they believe are sources of information from Assad. And I think if you look in the last, I don't know, last 45 days, you're going to find dozens, if not more that were at least arrested and possibly executed.

[Julian Dory]

Probably all headed that way for sure.

[Andrew Bustamante]

All headed that way. Yeah. But I mean, what, what are they actually letting the headlines know? What are they sharing right now? I don't know.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, those guys are probably missing some fingernails and teeth.

[Andrew Bustamante]

But the whole thing is a game. Espionage is a game. And it's a game of how much value do you have and how much value do you not have? Are you valuable now or later? Are you increasing or decreasing in value? What's your, what's your strategy? What's your move? Move. And for someone like me who's been out, who does not have access to current secrets, I have historical knowledge only. Is it worth creating an international incident over me? If I fly my dumbass to Ukraine to go speak to the Ukrainian government, then I'm a idiot. Yeah, it might be a problem if I take a trip to Taiwan and I decide to just go be a tourist in Taiwan and go visit like the anti China shrine. Yeah, that's a dumbass move. Right?

[Julian Dory]

Let's bring a free Hong Kong sign there. There too.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Like these are, these are certain things go Uyghurs, right? These are, there are, there are some very bad ideas that would be worth an international incident. Right? Because now Russia can say that they arrested a CIA officer in Ukraine and China can say they arrested a CIA officer, you know, with anti Chinese sentiments in Taiwan. Those things make sense. But if I go to Hungary, does it make sense for Russia to pull me from Hungary even though those two get along? What's the claim? A former CIA officer touring Hungary. Now we have him in Russia. No, it doesn't make any sense. And it's going to piss off the United States because it's a huge violation of American citizenship.

[Julian Dory]

We actually have Pat in here right now. And I'm going to ask you this just because you were talking to icu, nodding over there, you were talking about this just before. There's a new book that came out about Evan Gershowitz. Is that right? Yeah. Can you just give context here? Yeah. So a book came out. It's called. It's called Swap, and it's basically the Evan Gershkovich story, the Wall Street Journal reporter. And it's interesting to hear you talk about this because they talk about how it's all intertwined with, like, Paul Whelan and Brittany Griner and kind of how. How the Cold War era, like, spy swaps sort of emerged now, and how, because the US Changed their policy from not negotiating to now negotiating for people, Putin was like, okay, well, let's do it. And so it's interesting to hear you discuss this because, for example, Brittney Griner, they released when Brittney Griner got locked up. There was another guy, Paul Whelan, who was also locked up at the same time. And Biden got a lot of flack because, like, Brittney Griner was an athlete, and Paul Whelan, you know, was some white dude that was a former Marine. And Brittney Griner got out like that, and Biden took a lot of heat for that. But the reason why, and this is relevant to what you were talking about, is that Putin and the Russians said, that guy is a spy. So only if you give us a spy will we let him go. Yeah, but they let Brittney Griner go from Maria Butina, and that was a quick swap. And was that Victor Boot? Well, I think Victor Boot was the gut. Was who they let go for Paul Whelan, I believe. Or maybe it was Victor. Oh, no, the kid. I think it was the other way around.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Julian Dory]

So. So they gave up somebody for Brittney Griner, but they forced Paul to confess to being a spy, even though he wasn't in Russia. And then in return, by everybody was like, oh, he's a white guy. You know, that's why they're not giving him up. That's why Brittney Griner got the attention, because Biden's a, you know, a democrat, when in reality, Putin. I mean, Russia gets a say, too, and they wanted a spy in return. So I'm curious from your perspective, like, you know, you don't think that you could kind of fall into the same sort of thing where it's like that, you know, they require a spy. It's like, well, we got a spy now. It's just it pieces, right?

[Andrew Bustamante]

It's. It's.

[Julian Dory]

It's leverage.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Correct. But. But you got to keep in mind was Paul Whelan apprehended in Russia.

[Julian Dory]

Yes.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Oh, that's, that's the big difference. Yeah, that's the big difference. Is it worth creating an international incident to reach into another third country, especially a country that might be NATO or a country that might be neutral or something else? Right. To just to seize what you need if it's a true CIA. If it's a true CIA officer. Right. For example, in shadow cell, the, the operational structure that we developed, which is why Putin is doing what he's doing now, the operational structure we developed was called, was a cleansing route, meaning we're going to operate in one place, but we're going to actually live in a different place. And then when we travel between where we live and where we operate, we go through a third place. We do the doc swap in the third place. We change alias in the third place. We make all rebel, all references of travel, one or the other binary. So either it's travel to and from our place of living or it's travel to and from our place of operating. Operating so that no matter who reverse engineers us, they never see a connection between all three spaces.

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[Andrew Bustamante]

When you've built that kind of operation 100%, it becomes worth it to palladium poison somebody in the third location because you have no legal grounds to stand on. You have no way of dodging the international incident. If you apprehend them from a third country. You're basically doing what we did to Osama bin Laden. You're invading Pakistan, an ally.

[Julian Dory]

Well, they got some splinter.

[Andrew Bustamante]

They got in trouble for that, see. Right. So you're invading a third country to apprehend a threat that's a threat to you, but not threat to that country. And then you have to explain it on the back end. When you have your operational outcome completed when, when you know bin Laden's dead, who cares? Now you're like, ah, Pakistan, we're sorry. We'll spend the next two years saying we're sorry. And here's a little bit of extra aid, and here's a little bit of this, and here's a little bit of that, and here's some favorable trading agreements and you're good. But when in, when it's something where you're caught in the act, it's a whole different ball game.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. That's also like the bin Laden one's kind of an extreme example. It is Osama bin Laden, you know.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Right. Which matters.

[Julian Dory]

He was living next to. Maybe I'm misremembering this. Tell me if I am. But he was literally living within, like, eyesight of their military base. That's like our equivalent of Fort Brad.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yes, yes, I've heard the same thing.

[Julian Dory]

Like, they knew, they knew, they knew he was there. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, there it is. Osama Bin Lam was living in a large compound of Baghdad, Pakistan, less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy, West Point.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So if you're going to go into a third country to carry out an operational objective, you better have a really good reason because you know you're going to have to defend it afterwards.

[Julian Dory]

That was the very first clip I ever made of you. That was the first one that, that went where you were talking about you being a third country so that you can go into a second country country to get into the main country and.

[Andrew Bustamante]

You can clean the route the whole way, man. Yeah, it's, it's, I mean, it's, it's just so much fun to me. Espionage is so much fun to me because it's real world chess. And you know that they're going to find you and you know they're going to backtrack you and you know that they're going to look all the way back through the flight records, they're going to find you, they're going to find you, and you name it. Let's say that you're, you're American, living in Canada, targeting Russia, traveling through whatever. Sweden. They're gonna find you going back to Sweden, they're gonna see that it's a dead end. They're gonna know it's operational, but there's nothing they can do about it.

[Julian Dory]

What, what happened in that last mission at the Farm? Because like you said, you were saying this a while ago, but you went through the entire thing, every part of CIA training, surveillance detection, regular surveillance, Going into a city, doing all the stories you've told in the past test, and then something happened on the last one that then eventually led to someone on the board not liking you and, and stopping you from being a full case officer.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah. So in the, in the last and one of the final exercises, you have what's known as a multi meeting exercise, where you develop a, the full life cycle of a target source. So whereas other exercises are different lifespans, or they're like segments of the, of the lifespan of an asset development case, this one was a full lifespan. So from beginning to end and shortly, like right towards the end of the actual developmental cycle, you're supposed to learn how to pitch and recruit and start setting up clandestine meetings with a target and clandestine Meetings are different than public meetings and there's all sorts of tradecraft stuff in there that, that we can talk about. But in that meeting, in that session, I let my target take control of when and how we would meet, which is a clear violation of who's in control of the relationship. But at the time, I was so excited because I thought I was like, nailing it. Just like anybody who's ever been excited because they thought they were doing a good job and then they. Up at the end, I thought I was doing a good job. And then as we were kind of agreeing to the terms of our relationship, I let him take control of when and where we were going to meet next because he's not a real asset. He's a role player. As a role player, he could take that back, back to the other role players and say, my guy up here's what he did wrong. And then to teach me the mistake that I made, they set up an apprehension and an interrogation for me. So when I went to the next meeting, I was essentially arrested in character. And then I was interrogated in character by my own teachers, by my own staff.

[Julian Dory]

It's kind of strange to think about. I don't know, this one was different than other stories like, like when they literally drop you in a city and, and yes, there are role players, but you're running from them. And so you literally really have to steal things out of real stores. Like, it's real, right? Whereas this one, the person is a trainer who has to put on an Academy Award winning performance to make this real enough for you to feel like you're actually playing the psychological game. Like, it's a very strange thing.

[Andrew Bustamante]

It's a strange thing. But you also have to remember that we live in a false reality the whole time we're at the Farm. We have no access to the outside world. The outside world has no access to us. The only time we exist in the outside world is when we get a pass to leave the base where the Farm is held or when we literally carry out an exercise outside of the borders of that base. When we go into a downtown city area to meet somebody in a coffee shop. But it's not like we're going to have a conversation with the barista or meet somebody new on the walk, because we're running a surveillance detection route the whole way there. We're running a surveillance detection route the whole way back. So we're, we're never leaving our bubble of reality. So it's, it's the weirdest thing to admit to when you go into a contrived space for about 14 days, you're kind of chuckling under your breath like, oh, this is so cheesy. Like, look at the. Look at the bad tape player news broadcast that they're playing. And they've played that same news broadcast for the last 20 years. And look at how cheesy it is. And. And here's like the fifth time that we're reading a newspaper that's just printed out of the printer in the office and. And all these fake incoming sources of information, and you're like, oh, this is kind of like cheesy for about 14 days.

[Julian Dory]

That shit's cheesy for 14 days. It's about 14 seconds when he took us in that warehouse. And it was never cheesy because.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Because you start to adapt to the reality that you're in. So after 14 days of, you know, you eat at the cafeteria, you do this, you do that. Whatever else, you've still got months of training ahead of you. So by the time you're four months in, the newspaper is the printout from the office. I see what you're saying. And the bad tracking that's happening on the tape player is the real news story from today. And it's all anybody talks about. And everything that you're doing inside your station, inside your studio, inside your peer group, it's all so real. So when an instructor pulls you into a classroom to interrogate you, it's real. It's this. It is so strange, man. But think you've had the experience now to know, like, you knew you weren't going to get hurt back in the back of your brain, but in the front of your brain, you started convincing yourself of something very different.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, there were a few times where I was like, oh, I don't. Not sure what we signed up for here. When they were. I didn't know they were coming up. We'll talk about it later. I want to get into this now. But when they, for example, when they were coming over to check the pulse on the fingers, which, you know, I didn't know that was like a thing. I thought he was. I thought Trevor was about to break my fingers and I was like, oh, I need those. No, wait a minute. I was. I was almost like, cut. But I couldn't do that because you're so disoriented.

[Andrew Bustamante]

That's.

[Julian Dory]

Maybe that's different. Like when you're being kidnapped right away or whatever. But I'm almost. Now that you explain it, I'm almost surprised it would take 14 days just to kind of get yourself immersed, believing that atmosphere. Because the human mind, to your point, does adapt quickly to surroundings.

[Andrew Bustamante]

It's about how it's resourced. Right. When you are well resourced. And we were all very well resourced. Remember we were going into multi. Multiple months of training and in those multiple months of training were exhausted by the end and we're cracking by like the last 30 to 45 days. But they need us to make it through hundreds of days of training. So we come in well resourced. And for the first few months you stay well resourced, you get full nights of rest, you get really good meals, you get, you know, you're, you're taught academically something in a classroom that you can, you can adapt to, you can take on, you can practice. So you're kind of like walking or you're, what's it called, crawling before you can walk so that you have it enough energy barely to run at the end.

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[Andrew Bustamante]

That's why it took, that's why for 14 days we were fine. Because we were well resourced. We knew enough. We could still remember what happened five days ago. We still knew that there was a new movie coming out by month four. You have no idea what the new movies are that are coming out. You don't even know that there are movies out because there are no movies that get advertised on the internal cctv.

[Julian Dory]

And how was it four months total?

[Andrew Bustamante]

It's many months. It's a classified number.

[Julian Dory]

Classified.

[Andrew Bustamante]

It's a classified number so I can't share it. But there's all sorts of easy Google searches you can do that will tell you what's popular.

[Julian Dory]

So funny that like people at home can now go Google that, but you just can't say it right.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Well, what I love is that I promise you CIA is going to be watching this. They're going to watch all the promo stuff for the book. Yeah. And they're gonna literally hear you say, like you said earlier, I've been talking to you for a long time and you've never explained these details like, and there you go, CIA. I told you I wasn't doing it.

[Julian Dory]

I was paid to say that. I just want to point that out. Gave me twelve hundred dollars and I accepted.

[Andrew Bustamante]

There's the bus.

[Julian Dory]

And I work for Russia. Just kidding.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Don't ever, don't ever air that.

[Julian Dory]

Don't, don't air that too far because that'll be taken out of context real fast. But either way, either way. So you got in when you get to this Last one, you've been immersed into it for however long you were. And you describe it, you were feeling really good about yourself. You felt, like, I'm in control. This guy's doing exactly what I want. And then, you know, the air gets sucked out because, like you said, they end up abducting you and taking you back for interrogation. And it was like, you describe it in a way in your book. This almost like you're like. Like just got that wind knocked out of you and you know, there's nothing else after this. Were you thinking to yourself at the end of that interrogation, like, oh, my God, God, they're not going to let me be a case officer now?

[Andrew Bustamante]

There was a. There was a big piece of me that was thinking that as time passed as, like, hours turned to days, that became the stronger thought. But if the closest thing I can compare it to is anybody who's ever been on the cusp in college between making it or not making it to the next year, passing or not passing a class, and you're like, did I get that C minus or did I get that B plus? Did I hit the score that I needed or am I. That's really what it felt like. I was like, okay, I up. I know I up. I know this is bad, but is this like D minus bad or is this like C plus bad? How bad is this? Because I don't know, because it's all subjective to the. In the instructors. And I know that if enough instructors like me, they're going to make it more C plus. And if enough instructors don't like me, they're going to make it D minus. Right? So I don't know where I land right now on this pivotal, massive exercise that was worth the majority of my, you know, of my college grade, if you will. So it's super, super parallel to what we've all experienced in college, and that's where I sat. Like, am I about to graduate or do I have to do summer school? Except there is no summer school. So am I about to graduate, or am I about to spend the rest of my life without a degree?

[Julian Dory]

Where is jihee in the program during all this? She became a targeter. So how does. How did. What's her track?

[Andrew Bustamante]

She aced everything. Yeah, jihy was a superstar. And she's. She's smart enough not to appear on the Internet very often. That's. That's how smart she is. Right. So case officer training is probably four times longer than any other training that happens at the Agency, longer than analyst training, linguist Training, staff operations, training, tech training, anything. Because there's so much of it that goes into keeping you secure, keeping your assets secure, keeping the information secure, and then how to operate in different, different environments. So jihee went through her training course months before, or she started her training course while I was still at the Farm and finished months before I was done.

[Julian Dory]

But you guys came in at the same time. Okay, we started just a totally different track.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Correct. Totally different parallel. Again, she's a targeter.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, yeah, but is that under another subcategory or is it literally a category.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Just called target targeting? Exactly. So under the National Clandestine Service, which is now known as the Director of Operations, you have multiple title tracks underneath there. There's special skills officers. Those are kind of your paramilitary guys, as well as some other various special skills, like doctors. Then you have your targeters, you have your mission planners, which are called staff operations officers. You have your tech ops officers, you have your logistics officers, you have your budget and finance officers, you have your targeting officers. So all of them fall under the clandestine services, and they all have their own different training tracks underneath. With the idea being that once you kind of finish your training track, you're able to all play nicely together in the real world world. But like, what a budget and finance officer does in the real world is completely different than what a targeter does in the real world. Of course.

[Julian Dory]

So you're under the K. You were at the Farm to be under the case officer part. And then they come out to you at the end and say, board didn't pass you.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yep.

[Julian Dory]

So.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So you go back like, it's the walk of shame, dude. It's the. It's. It's a horrible feeling because everybody else there is passing by the. By the time you get to the end, the real riff raff get cut about halfway through. The people who really can't keep up get cut at what's called the first round of murder boards halfway through. So the second half, everybody's close, everybody's friends, everybody can do the tasks. It's just whether or not you meet this, the subjective desire of people wanting to work with you. And just like you said, like, I'm kind of a dick, people don't want to work with me. So I'm not surprised they got cut at the end, in hindsight. But at the time, I was. I thought I was pretty hot. So I get cut, and it's the walk of shame. I call Jihy and I tell her what happened, and she's like, I can't believe that happened in my group, in my classroom. Only one other person got caught out of the, say, 25 of us that were there. And he was so devastated. He just walked into the woods and didn't come back. He took a bottle of scotch and a fat cigar and walked into the woods.

[Julian Dory]

Like at the farm.

[Andrew Bustamante]

At the farm. Alarm. And the security people had to go find him after. He didn't show up for like the rest of that day or the next morning's check in or any. And he wasn't in his hotel room because we all live in, like this mock hotel room. He just. He just walked off the campus and then was deemed like, what's the word I'm looking for?

[Julian Dory]

Psychologically unfit.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Unfit for retention. Yeah, I don't think they use the word psychologically, but unfit for retention. So they. They took him out of the ncs and they're like, hey, would you rather do something else in the agency? Like, would you rather make fake passports or be a courier or something like that? And he was like, I'm done with this. And he left. And he went and created an incredible life for himself as like a. He goes back and forth between Miami and Paris, putting together these badass nightclub parties and.

[Julian Dory]

And so he works for Diddy. You're telling me this was a CIA operation?

[Andrew Bustamante]

I feel like he made a better choice than. Than I did because he's. He's been making a lot more money for a much longer time.

[Julian Dory]

We had that on camera. That. Wow. Yeah. Geo was a little shocked by that one. I do. All right. That's a rabbit hole. I. I feel like that was staged. I feel like he walked off into the woods. So they're like, oh, Jimmy's crazy. And they go in, they're like, son, you ready to work for Agency now? And it's Diddy, like, yeah, get over here, boy.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Back in the day. Yeah, back in 2000.

[Julian Dory]

Miami to Paris. Wow. Okay. So did. Did it all after they say no to you and you walk back to the hotel or whatever was there. I don't know. It was tough to tell what was like 30,000 in the air, feet in the air. You writing it now? Thinking about it versus what you were thinking in the moment, Were you immediately thinking those things to yourself? Like, I'm my own worst enemy. I got in my own way. My dick got too big and that's why this happened?

[Andrew Bustamante]

No, just like most of us don't think that when we fuck up. Yeah, right. I'm thinking, this place is so unfair. I've got to Escape the shame. I'm not going to. Like, we all get bused in and we all get bust out like it's a fucking summer camp, right? And when we get bust out, there's no fucking way I'm going to sit on a bus with hundreds of other people who have all passed, and they're all going to be talking about their next assignment and their first assignment, and they're all going to be making plans to talk to their, their assignment officers and the office that they're going back to. And I don't have any of that because I'm going back into a bucket of, of people where the question is, do we even retain these people? That's where I'm going back to. I'm going back to check into an HR office under an HR officer who's going to be like, we're going to see if we can find a place for you to land right? What the. I. And in my mind I'm like, I finished all of the training. I've been through the hardest thing you guys can throw at me. And it was just, just whether or not seven old men, all of which were men, seven old men, chose whether or not to keep me on as a case officer, certify me as a case officer, or, or not certify me as a case officer. And you're telling me that because one of them voted on the wrong side that I'm not only not a case officer, but I'm not even useful, not even worth keeping. Like, it was a horrible feeling. So all I was like is, I got to get the. Away from this. And I'm. I'm on my own. I got to get away from this. I can't trust these people. This is how the whole system works. I can't trust this place. I got to find a way to make my own life. But I'm in this serious relationship with Jihy, who's a rock star.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[Andrew Bustamante]

And when I come back, she understands the system. She understands the process. She understands how flawed it is. I, I take this long kind of minute to not go back to CIA. They, they're smart enough to grant us an extended leave after we finish the farm. They give us 60 days off. And they're like, you have 60 days off to kind of prepare yourself for your next assignment or to, you know, get over your hissy fit when you don't make it. And that's exactly what I did for my 60 days. And gee, he was just there with me every step of the way, supporting me one way or the other. And. And I just. At the end of those 60 days, I was like, there's. If I do anything else, if I go work for Booz Allen Hamilton, if I go be a barista, if I go do something else, I'm going away from jihy, So I might as well go sit in that little pool at the HR office and see what job I get.

[Julian Dory]

So this. We're gonna explain how this happens in a little bit, but this ends up coming full circle, and you end up getting to do these things under a different title effectively, and you get to test the same kind of thing in the field in the scariest of ways and pass the tests with flying colors, which I think is cathartic for you. However, in the short term, at this point, before any of that happens, I can only go off what you wrote here. But it would seem to me that minus, you know, some regular human flaw, people on the board don't like you and relationships and stuff like that. This was a situation where they probably looked at you. They probably looked at all the other stuff you did at the farm, and you probably had very high grades. They looked at you physically and said, this dude can pass as every race known to man, including, like, if I pulled your eyeballs a little bit, and Asian, like, you could do literally anything. Like, you're. And you got a lot of the right emotions, the anxieties, all of it. Like, you. You're like almost an IVF test tube, like, genetic baby of what they would look for.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Right.

[Julian Dory]

In a case officer. But there's one thing that's a problem, and that is you had a high probability of being a star on that wall because you didn't follow orders. You were exactly. You were a cowboy. And you. And when you wanted to do something, you would do it and just go a thousand miles an hour. And it cost you on the last drill. And they're like, well, I. That might cost them in the field. So in some ways, that could have been it. Do you think that that could be an explanation?

[Andrew Bustamante]

I absolutely do, but it took me a long time to come to any explanation where CIA was acting in my best interest, right? Just like every American out there is going to. It's going to take a minute before you stop to realize that CIA might be acting in your best interest. Right? So that's. That was the same thing that I had. The benefit that I had is that I had my wife, who was my. My girlfriend or fiance very shortly thereafter, was a true believer. She still is a true believer. True believer, right? Where she still looks at CIA and she still feels more like pity than she feels outrage. And she still looks at CIA and she sees more. More honor than she sees frustration, right? She. She is very much so.

[Julian Dory]

She doesn't like jfk.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Jfk. Oh, I get you now.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, it took a minute.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Took a minute. It took a minute. I don't know. I don't know. My wife.

[Julian Dory]

We're gonna have to ask her.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah, you're gonna have to ask her. But my point with all that is just she planted that seed and she kind of kept trying to fertilize it for a long time. Like, they did you a favor. They did you a favor. Especially when we found out, out, we found out what my assignment would have been had I graduated. If I would have graduated and certified, they would have sent me immediately to a war zone to your exact point. And then because they didn't, I ended up getting sent into Africa instead. Because that, as silly as this is, Africa is where you send all your troubled children. Because nobody cares about what happens in Africa. Nobody's. There's not a lot of money in Africa. No matter how much you, you screw up, you can't really make a big splash in most of Africa. Right. They're not going to send me to the sweet places in Nigeria. They'll send me to some place somewhere else. So I end up supporting just like to your exact point. He's got all the makings. He's got all the physical attributes. He's got the scores, he understands the skills. He's just not a case officer. Well, once you're not among case officers, all of a sudden having all the same skills as a case officer without the title becomes a big advantage.

[Julian Dory]

Where did. So they put you at Soo? So can you explain, like, because the way I. I think a lot of this had to get skipped over in the book because you had to get to the. Yeah, just the story. So let's get to some of the things that aren't in the book here. When, when you become an SS An Soo, the way you described it, this was one of those buckets you talked about a few minutes ago. It's like you are all the mission support. You very often are working from Langley and you're working with all the case officers in the field, and you don't go into the field a lot lot, but you ended up coming up with some ideas that then led to them being like, oh, yeah, put this dude in the field. And that doesn't happen often.

[Andrew Bustamante]

It doesn't happen often. Correct. So Soo is called a staff operations officer. So, so if you, the official term for case officer is actually called operations officer. OO case officer is really just the, the, the more common term outside of CIA. Inside of CIA you're called an ops officer. Oops. Know a staff operations officer is essentially the staff support to operations officers. You're supposed to know everything that they know, understand their needs and then essentially look around corners to make sure they get what they need before they ask for it. So you're getting them money before they ask for it. You're getting the alias docs before they ask for it. You're anticipating all of their needs because you know what they're going to need. But you're not a direct competitor career wise because you're not out there doing the job. So they make me a staff operations officer because the, the board, the staff operations officer board different than the case officer board, the SIOUX board understood that I was a shoe in for a staff operations officer. I could speak the lingo. I could speak the lingo. All of the next generation of case officers were coming out of my class so they already knew that I was going to know more than half of them. So they're like this guy is a shoe in, let's just set him up there. And I did a good job because they were from my class. They knew I was good at what I did. They listened to me. I trusted them. I wanted to keep them safe. Safe. I only hated the leadership. I didn't have any problem with the men and women who are out there doing the job. So I poured myself into helping them and kind of pissing off everybody who was a leadership above me. And one of the things that people don't know about CIA is there's often pressure back and forth between what people want and need in the field and what headquarters wants to give them. The field needs money. Headquarters doesn't want to give you money. They want to retain their money so they can make what if somebody else needs it later on? Right, right. They need new docs. Well how are we going to get you those docs? And what's the logistical headache? And blah blah blah blah. So there's this weird sort of push and pull. There's like a conflict between the field and headquarters all the time. And I was sitting on the headquarters side supporting the field. So anybody who worked with me didn't have that pressure because I would fight that fight for them. That made me a well liked Sioux in the field, but not well liked at headquarters. And I didn't really care for a long time. So I went, I had success because I would make sure that my case officers got what they needed. Needed. That success in the field speaks more than your reputation at Langley for a few years. So I ended up having a lot of operations that came my way where I got to exercise my skills and exercise my knowledge and exercise my relationships across human trafficking, counter proliferation, counterterrorism, money smuggling, like all the bad. But I never got to do anything that was high profile or high threat get because leadership couldn't trust me. On the, on the other side of this, my wife is doing the exact opposite. She's getting all the high profile, all the high sensitive operations that a targeter can get because the leadership trusted her through and through. And targeters were carved out so they really couldn't talk directly to the case officer. So they would send dossiers and they would send targeting packages. And leaders would decide whether targeting packages are kinetically acted upon or, or targets of intelligence. And then the case officer would be told what to do from there. But the targeter was cut out of it. So she had this dream job for her of living in a skiff, in a, in a larger skiff, in a larger skiff in a contained building and never being bothered right outside of people to form patterns all day, all day, find patterns, form patterns and, and push, push, push, push information out. And she loved the it.

[Julian Dory]

And that was a job that was really, I don't know if the right word is invented, but it metamorphosized post 9 11, correct.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Before 911 it didn't really exist, you.

[Julian Dory]

Know, minus the technology that we have now or even then, that we didn't have pre 9 11. Why wouldn't a job like that, which is basically to put it at a high level and correct me if I'm wrong here, it's like taking a lot of data and making sense of it. Why wouldn't that exist? Like why didn't that exist pre 9 11?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Because it's very expensive be hiring a person whose job is just to create 25 page targeting packages like they do in the movies, right? Here's a person's favorite drink, here's where they hang out, here's where they went to college, here's their second roommate and what their roommate did. Like those Packages prior to 911 were unnecessary. They're very, very expensive, they're very slow. And then even though you might build a package on a person, that's not the same thing as having somebody Successfully recruit the person. It just gives them a benefit for the first meeting after 9, 11, Congress came in and basically said, hey, CIA and FBI, you guys up. We're going to create the DNI. We're going to flood the DNI with money. And the DNI's responsibility is to staff you guys up to like 300% your current size. Well now they're flush with money, flush with, with billets to hire people. And this idea, that was an idea for the previous director, hey, let's create these, these operational support professions. All of a sudden that idea took off and got funded. So now professional targeters didn't ever exist. They were something that kind of accidentally happened. Well now my wife became one of the first professionally cultivated targets targeters. And they've gone on to be very successful since because CI continues to be well funded until what I've most recently read about Tulsi Gabbard. But they continue to be pretty well funded. And it became worth it because the success rate, when a case officer targets a target with a targeting package, the success rate is it, it, it's multiple echelons higher than when they just wing it and go shake hands at a diplomatic amount event.

[Julian Dory]

All right, so we'll get into some good examples of how Chihi was able to leverage her targeting expertise to help the sellout here. But in, in the meantime, when you were saying you became soo and they sent you to like kind of support a lot of African missions and stuff like that, what was the context of the first time? Without going into exact details where they said, all right, you gotta actually come here, you're not gonna be at the desk, you're coming here and going undercover and doing something.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Something. So there's a, there's a culture at CIA where everybody hates being at Langley. And it's true, it's a very real culture. If you're at headquarters, you're kind of second class. You're a second class citizen. You don't know what it's like to be in the field. You don't know the realities of the field. You can't keep up with the tempo in the field. So you're second class. And the real tip of the spear is in the field. So because of that culture, the men and women who operate in the field always have this, this Benny, this, this reward they can give you, which is basically called a tdy, a temporary duty yonder. They'll invite you to come be part of the field operation. And even if all you do is come out to the field, and sit in an office for five days, you get to not be a second class citizen for that week. And as you build up those TDYs, the actual, your actual career category sees you differently because every day that you spend in the field counts, counts towards an early retirement. So if you get enough days in the field, you can actually qualify to retire 10 years earlier than anybody else. Right? It's not, you don't need 10 years of time in the, in the field, you need two years of time in the field. So if you can get two years of time in the field, you can retire 10 years earlier than anybody else at the same rate. So Everybody takes these TDYs, everybody wants them, everybody loves them. I didn't really want to go on TDY because I was never going to retire from that place. I just wanted to be with my, my fiance, the girl who gets me, the girl who's a rock star, the girl who's cool and everything else I was doing was just so that I could be with her. They start sent the field starts requesting me to come out to the field. My wife, my fiance of course at the time is encouraging me to go. She's like, you gotta go. Like you gotta go. Just show your face. It's gonna be good for your career. They like you, they want you there. And don't forget that the people that you're helping in the field today will become the leaders of tomorrow and they will decide your future. Then again, she's wise. It makes sense. So that's when I started going out. And sometimes I would go out and I would do nothing. I would just sit around in the office. Sometimes I would go out and I would procure a cell phone or a SIM card or like drop money somewhere. Like, I would do little things that I could do because of my suit, my training at the Farm, but I wasn't qualified to ever recruit an asset. That's what a case officer, an operations officer is technically certified to do is to say, hey, why don't you work for us? And in exchange for you giving us secrets, we'll give you whatever Johnnie Walker Green label or cash or whatever else. That's the only thing I couldn't do according to the certification rules. So every time I went out in the field, they liked me, they wanted to reward me and they love the fact that I would go do the shit jobs that no case officer wants to do. No case officer wants to runs to run a 90 minute SDR to buy a cell phone and then another hour long SDR to come back Just so that they can have an extra cell phone. That's off the record, but when I go out in the field, I can.

[Julian Dory]

Do that detection route you're talking about.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Correct. So there was, every time I went out, people loved having me there. Every time I went out, I got to meet cool people. I had more fun than I expected I would have. And that built up over the first two years of my career.

[Julian Dory]

Okay, so you're working primarily across Africa when you get called. Well, before, before I get there, was there a part of you? It seems like you and Jihy have like an amazing relationship and everything and actually have strongly support each other's careers. Heard it's, it's clear. Like her advice to you and how to handle some of these situations was you took it and trusted it and it worked out out and like you encouraged her to continue being a rock star and, and all that. But like, as a human being, was there ever a part of you that felt like you during this time period, like you were a second fiddle to her? Yep.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yes. But it was a comfort. It was a comfort because I didn't have. My ego was crashed. I didn't look at myself and see myself accurately. I looked at myself and saw myself kind of victimized. But at the same time I was like, this is easy. This is easy work. I don't have to do more than eight hours a day. I don't really have to stress out about bringing work home. Like she would work 12, 14 hours a day sometimes because she cared so much. Yeah, I didn't care that much. I was like, it, I'm gonna go hit the gym. I'm gonna go get us some takeout Thai food. And by the time you get home, I'll feed you, we'll watch a movie, we'll bang it out, we'll go to bed. Like it's a good deal for me. And that was, that was how I viewed life kind of day to day. And just like most 27, 28 year olds, I didn't really have a clear vision of the future. I was like, this is pretty good. We'll keep doing this and it's not getting worse. Might as well keep doing this. And one day an opportunity will present itself. And one day we'll figure it out. And. And you always have this question of what's the next assignment? Every two to four years you can get reassigned. And my wife was getting reassigned like every year, year and a half. So she was climbing the ladder quick. So I was like, anything could happen the next two Years. So let's wait and see what happens. Maybe we go to France. Maybe we go to. To Rio de Janeiro. Maybe we go to, you know, New Zealand and live there for next tour. Who knows? Who knows where we're gonna go? But let's just. Let's go. So second fiddle was a very convenient place to be. You didn't have to practice as much as first fiddle.

[Julian Dory]

And you still had it in your mind, if I heard you correctly, a few minutes ago, that, like, you would just work there forever.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Well, not forever. I never thought it would be forever. But there was nothing better I could do right then. So I always. What I always thought would happen, what I always was kind of talking to Jihy about, was that she would get some sweet assignment overseas and I would quit, officially follow her, and then become an English teacher wherever we went. And then she would spend however long she was going to spend there while I'm building our local network as an English speaker. Not a. Not an intel network, but an actual professional network. And then. Then she could quit, and then we could just live wherever we want to live. And we had our favorites. Like, we knew. We like. South Korea is a great place to be a. An English teacher. So we're like, oh, maybe we'll go to South Korea. Nigeria is a great place to be an English teacher. Croatia is a great place to be an English teacher.

[Julian Dory]

Croatia's sick.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So we were like, if we could. If. If we get one of these assignments, then I'll become an English teacher and I'll build our escape plan for two years. And that was always a. Was something she was willing to entertain.

[Julian Dory]

So what. How did Falcon come up? Falcon is the country you refer to in this very red book about a country with very high gdp. Your words, not mine. In Asia. How'd you get pulled in there?

[Andrew Bustamante]

So that's a. There's a multiple kind of answers to that. So as people read the book, they'll discover partly we were pulled into a conversation with leadership because they wanted to create a new way of handling operations. They wanted to find a new way to collect information. The reason they wanted to collect information a different way was because what. What the world didn't know is that CIA had a mole. So there was a mole in their midst in a leadership level position who.

[Julian Dory]

In that specific part, like in that.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Specific part in the. In the area that controlled Falcon. Yep. Which is a very sensitive area. It's so sensitive, it's got its own office called Falcon House. Inside CIA, the most sensitive areas are all houses they have their own house.

[Julian Dory]

Is it actually code name Falcon House or. No, I was gonna say you changed even the name of the code name, Right?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Correct. So every. Every synonym. I'm sorry, every. Every Kryptonym that we have in the book.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Is different than the Krypton that we have in real life to further kind of insulate against anybody using it. But Falcon House had a problem. They needed a new way of creating operations. So they called us in and they said, hey, Lucky, you guys, you're going to go create new operations for us. What we didn't realize is that we were going to go create new operations because they had a mole and they were trying to use us to flush the mole out. Because if we started creating new operations, the mole would want access to our operations, and then that would make the mole make some kind of mistake that they would be able to catch, snare, and use as part of a case.

[Julian Dory]

And this is just one mole that you guys knew existed. But hypothetically, this could have been several in other. Not even just here, but in other types of houses that exist at all times that you don't even know about.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Absolutely. We have a rule of thumb at CIA that every time you find one mole, you have to assume that there's four others, so that there's a. There's five at any given time. And that's what kind of inspires us to keep up the hunt. Always be looking over your shoulder. Always be speculative. Always be suscept or suspicious. Always be thinking that if you found one, that's proof there's more. More.

[Julian Dory]

But you can't ever trust anyone doing that. Anyone to your left or right, whether you know they've been in. In gun gunfights with you or not. You have to assume anyone, including the people around you, have to assume you could be a mole for somebody.

[Andrew Bustamante]

And that's the culture at CIA. You don't trust anyone. You don't trust anyone to back your career up. You don't trust anyone to back you up in the field. You don't trust anyone not to be a double agent. You are always kind of watching and thinking, what have they done most recently? Is there a change in their behavior? What could explain the change that I see? But you're always suspicious. And even. Even at the end of all of this effort, just like you were saying earlier, one of our closest friends suspicious that was skeptical of us for trying to leave. For trying to leave CIA, well, apparently you're not allowed to do that, didn't know how to do it for sure.

[Julian Dory]

It's like, wait a minute. No one leaves here.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So we get called in by leadership, and they say, we want you to build a new. A new type of operation.

[Julian Dory]

And you were called in separately, Right. We didn't know jihee was being called in at the same time.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Right. We were called in separately based on the leadership that we had at the time. And then after we both got called in, we went back home and we were like. Or basically over a phone call, and we found out that we had both had the same conversation at almost the same time in our. By our two different supervisors.

[Julian Dory]

Now, even though you both work for CIA, you felt. Felt that wasn't something that is classified specifically for either of you to share.

[Andrew Bustamante]

That, because the need to know is defined by the operational area. So when we were briefed and said, hey, we want to bring you to Falcon House, that's not. That's not classified information about Falcon House. So we can go back to each other and say, I just got offered a job at Falcon House because we're not. We're not divulging anything sensitive to each other. Other. What we didn't expect is that we were both going to go back and have been offered jobs at the same time. So then we got to have a conversation where we're like, hey, Falcon House knows they're approaching both of us, and Falcon House knows that we're engaged, and Falcon House knows that this is the date of our wedding because we've had to clear all this stuff with the entire CIA. So they're not stupid. Why are they doing this? Why are they bringing us both in? And more importantly, why are they bringing me in as a dumbass? It makes sense why they'd hire my wife because she's hot. But why would they bring in me? I've never done sensitive operations. I'm. I was never deemed qualified for that. And I've had success in the of the world. Wouldn't it make sense to keep me in the of the world?

[Julian Dory]

Does this change your title too? Technically, when you do that? So you're not an Soo anymore.

[Andrew Bustamante]

No, it's. It kind of cements the title because the positions that are created are positions defined by title. Title. So what Falcon House did is they basically created a whole new title, a whole new operation that was staffed with a Sue and staffed with a targeter.

[Julian Dory]

So where did they call you from? Like, take me there that day, where they're like, you got to show up over here to this thing.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So every office, CIA has two buildings Each building has, I think, seven floors. There might only be six floors in the new headquarters building, not counting basement floors.

[Julian Dory]

Al Qaeda might be watching this, bro.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Come on. On. Well, they can also see that on Google Maps, but, but there's all. There's two buildings and there's multiple floors. And depending on where you're assigned geographically, you sit in a different floor in a different part of the different buildings. We communicate with each other all day through a encrypted messaging system that lives on our computers. It's not that different from like WhatsApp or Signal. It's just on your computer. And then you communicate all day to anybody who, who is on the same index for CIA as you are. So if you need to talk to somebody in a different office, you just look up their name and you talk to them, it's no problem. But that's also how we get most of our alerts. We have emails, and emails are official correspondence, but messages are how we tell each other where to go. So about the same time as Jihee, I get a message on my instant messenger device tool that says, hey, you've been scheduled for an appointment with, with our group chief, which is on the same floor in the same office, just the bigger office down the hallway at whatever, two o' clock in the afternoon. I don't remember the time, so I'm just doing my doing, writing my cables, doing my research, doing whatever I got to do, you know, probably trying to stay awake at, at one o' clock in the afternoon when I get this message and I'm like, oh, I don't think anything good's going to come of it because there's no reason that the group chief should want to talk to me. There's like four people between him and me that he should want to talk to. But I get, I get the message. At 2 o', clock, I'm outside of his office. I probably wait 15 or 20 minutes because he's not going to talk to me right away because they're dicks that way. But then I go in, I have the conversation, and he explains the intention. He explains, hey, we're going to move you to Falcon House. So you have to tell us. You have 48 hours to decide whether or not you're going to take a Falcon House assignment. They think that you'd be a good fit for something over there.

[Julian Dory]

What was your first thought when you heard that?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Because this was. It's a mistake. Yeah, yeah, it's a mistake.

[Julian Dory]

I was like, you, like you like the Drewski meme I was like, yeah, who me?

[Andrew Bustamante]

At first I was like, you guys, I think you're. I think you're looking for somebody else. But I mean, I'll think about it. And then the second thought I had after, after they made a mistake, the second thought was it's just something stupid. They must need some courier to run like casino chips from one place to another place. It's probably something stupid, right? It's not, it's not the big leagues. It's the smallest thing that you could do for a major league team. They need someone to like, you know.

[Julian Dory]

You'Re the hot dog vendor.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah. Someone needs to hot hand dry the in cups. I don't know what it is.

[Julian Dory]

When did that, when did that change?

[Andrew Bustamante]

When my and I talked to Jihy and she had the same conversation. We got called in together a few days later when we accepted the. The operation, we got called in and then they gave us more context.

[Julian Dory]

And what did they tell you then?

[Andrew Bustamante]

That was when they told us that they want the two of us to create a new way of operating and they wanted us to do it because we had a sue background and we had a targeting background and we were actually legally married and our. Our cover identities were legally entwined with one another. So it made us kind of a unique pair to go out and build this operation. And they've told us that they, they wanted us to have a blank check for the operation that was still going to fall under approvals for spending, but they trusted that we could do was very clear in that conversation that they trusted jihy to be responsible and they trusted me to keep jihee safe. That was basically how I put it all together. It's like, oh, so you guys, you're gonna send us somewhere and it's a posh somewhere. We didn't go somewhere harsh. Right. When they assigned us to our third country location, when they assigned us to Wolf, what we codename Wolf in the book, Wolf is not a hardship place. It's a pretty comfortable place to be, but it's not necessarily safe. So it was really clear to me, gee, he was supposed to be the superstar and I was supposed to just help her. Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Did you like do that consciously where you name the safe country like something bad and then the bad country, like something kind of cool.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So here's, here's the funny story. We had named everything, the real country names at first, and then it was classified. And then as part of the negotiation to try to reach a common ground, they let us encrypt everything. So we encrypted stuff with really obscure names. I think we were using, like, flowers and trees. Right. Really obscure names. And then CIA came back, and they were like. Like, we don't like your encryptions.

[Julian Dory]

They're like, that's kind of gay.

[Andrew Bustamante]

They're like, we don't like your. We don't like your encryptions. We want you to change your encryptions. And we were like, what the do you want us to change them to? And they were like, we want you to use North American predators for all of your cryptid.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, okay. I mean, a falcon is a predator, but it. You know, I'm not worried about a falcon attacking me. I am worried about a wolf attacking me. A falcon's, like, kind of cool if I see it. Like, I think the ovon owns falcons. He seems like a nice guy. Right? Like, so you name the safe country wolf and the not safe country falcon. Again, what's the logic?

[Andrew Bustamante]

There's no logic there. We just named them North American animals, and we didn't know if CIA was going to approve the book or not. And they didn't, but we never had them. They never argued with us about the different names. I think badger is in there.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, Badger was hard. I like that. That was good. Okay, so you guys, what year are we in? Like 2010 at this point, we're actually.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Not allowed to disclose the specific years, but we're mid career for me.

[Julian Dory]

Okay, so I'm gonna say it's somewhere around 2010. Somewhere in that area, whatever. But you get sent over there again, this isn't going to be one where you're back at Langley. You are sent over there, and they've told you there's a mole. It's here. Like, where we're sitting someone high up. We don't know where. And your job is to be able to manage things on the ground. Set up something on the ground that involves, you know, undercover work to try to root this out and also acquire intelligence on Falcon. So what you guys set up here is really amazing with this whole cell concept. And rather than me try to explain it, can you just. Just tell me how that even came up? Like, where you and Jihee were, where suddenly it was like, oh, eureka, we got it.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah. So we were in. We were in Wolf. We had already arrived in Wolf, and we didn't get much of a warm greeting from anybody because we were outsiders coming into their. Their location. And of course, it's a posh location. It's a great location. Everybody has a friend that they're Trying to get hooked up with Wolf. And here we walk in, you know, two second tour officers, 29ish years old, like, whatever. And we're jokes. So we walk in and we introduce ourselves and we tell them what we're there for. We're here to create new operations, but we're not case officers. So guess what we need in order. We need case officers. And all the case officers that are there at Wolf are supposed to be doing stuff for Wolf. So all of the leadership at Wolf was like, you guys, you can't take our case officers off of our tasks to bring them into your fantasy.

[Julian Dory]

It's kind of weird that CIA would just like kind of send you and no pun intended, into like the Wolf's Den here and be like, yeah, you know, talk with people there, figure it out. Like, make a team. And they're looking at you. They're like, you guys aren't case officers. Like, you're, you're in a different lane anyway. So what does that lane have to do with us?

[Andrew Bustamante]

And that's, I mean, you would think that that's silly, but that's actually how a lot of CIA works. Like, there's the left hand, doesn't talk to the right hand. Remember how we were talking about the conflict between headquarters and the field? Field to headquarters. It makes sense. We're headquarters. We're sending you to the field to do this important thing. The field is going to follow our orders. And then you get to the field and the field's like, headquarters has got their head up their ass. We're not helping you. So we get there and we can't get support from leadership. So my wife starts doing everything she can to support local Wolf operations, to build a good reputation there. She's anti conflict and she's anti confrontation, and she's, she's got anxiety anyways, which we talk about in the book. So it's a very easy way for her to kind of integrate because she doesn't fight anybody.

[Julian Dory]

So she's just allowed to do that, join some of the active missions there because. Just because she got sent there and she's a targeter.

[Andrew Bustamante]

And a targeter is something everybody wants, right? So it's like, it's like a Thneed, right, if you, if you read Dr. Seuss. But everybody wants her. So everybody's giving her assignments and she's finding her, she's finding what they need. And she's, she's a superstar at what she does. So she's having this excellent success and she's winning this excellent reputation. Meanwhile, I'm sitting there and I'm just kind of like, well, what can I do? What can I do? And. And one middle ranking case officer, a guy named James in the book James finds out about us. And James actually has experience working against Falcon. He's the only one in all of Wolf that has experience working against Falcon. And he starts to talk to us about why we're there. And we explain, hey, Falcon House picked us up, up when we're out here to build new operations against Falcon. And he's like, that's pretty cool. And then he tells us some of his experience working against Falcon. And he's like, the hardest part is the bureaucracy. You got to go through five lanes of approval before you talk to a guy. And we tell him that our charter is actually the opposite of that. We don't have to tell anybody what we're doing. And we have a blank check. And then he just gets excited because he is an aggressive officer that wants to go after that country anyways. And he's senior enough that he's like, why don't we just try a couple of things and we won't tell management until after it's successful.

[Julian Dory]

So he can just make that kind of call.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Anybody can make that kind of call. But you have to have wasta, what we call wasta. Wasta is the Arabic word for influence. If you have a few tours under your belt, you don't mind going toe to toe with leadership because leadership also most likely has the same amount of tours as you do, or they've worked with you in the past. And James is Falcon House. He's, he's come from Falcon House himself. So the leadership at Wolf knows that he's got, he's got connections and he's a pretty hot officer on his own. So when he gives us a little bit of leeway, we're like, let's do it. So we put together a little package, we do some initial research, we send him out to find somebody, and it clicks and it works. We save one of his cases, he brings it back to Wolf leadership. And he's like, hey, these guys are on to some something. They just made a case that headquarters was going to close. They just made it active again.

[Julian Dory]

Was this the bridge guy?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Correct.

[Julian Dory]

Okay, so can you just give the context on him and, and where he was situated such that James thought he had already kind of burned dry?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah. So CIA can only collect intelligence based off of priorities that are set by a time the dni. So the DNI says, I want information about this. And if you have a case, you have to basically say, hey, this case is producing, you know, line 7, 12, 28, and 200 of what the DNI wants. Bridge was this engineer from a third country, a non Falcon country, but he was this engineer who was helping the Falcon national government create military technology, Steel. Military technology, essentially from the United States. So he's kind of the middleman helping them get information from the U.S. the problem is that what he was stealing from the U.S. the U.S. already knew was being stolen. So according to the lines on the dni, Bridge had no value. He wasn't giving secrets that we didn't already know about. So they couldn't approve. CIA technically couldn't approve James to keep meeting with Bridge because there's no new information that's coming out of the it.

[Julian Dory]

And James hadn't really worked with targeters much in the past.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Correct? Correct. So James is sitting here and he's just. He meets a guy and he's like, this guy's an engineer against Falcon. I hate Falcon. And Falcon's stealing our. How could this not be a good case? And of course headquarters is like, it's not a good case, so we're not going to pay for it anymore. And you can see that conflict between headquarters in the field again. Jihy and I walk in, more specifically Jihy, and she comes up with the idea. She's like, hey, if he's an engineer in Falcon, he must know other engineers who are actually Falconian, like in the country. So what if we stop thinking about what information Bridge has and we start thinking about who the other people are that he's connected to? Because he must be connected to Air Force generals and Navy colonels and whatever else. Like, he must have connections so we.

[Julian Dory]

Can get to them.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So Jihy does her targeting thing, and she finds five or seven connections that are connected to Bridge directly from his cell phone. People he's calling, she sends that back to headquarters, Headquarters comes back, and it's like, holy, we really like these guys. Can you target these guys? And she's like, yeah, we can target them, but you need to keep running Bridge, because if we lose Bridge, we lose access to this source of information.

[Julian Dory]

You had access to his cell phone.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Because James was meeting with him.

[Julian Dory]

Was that James like, slate a hand, like. Like unlocking his phone when he wasn't looking, or was that that was microchipping his technological tools?

[Andrew Bustamante]

That I am not at liberty to disclose.

[Julian Dory]

But guys, we're good. There's nothing bad happening here. Just want to Throw that out there.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Thank you. So we were able to start targeting new targets that are of interest to CIA that do fit under categories of the DNI's notebook book or the DNI's requirements list because of Bridge and because of James, which makes everybody happy, makes leadership at Wolf happy, makes James happy happy, makes Falcon House happy, makes me and Jihy happy. Because now we have a case officer.

[Julian Dory]

Proof of concept.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Proof of concept.

[Julian Dory]

Now is this when you actually come up with the. Wait a second, we could do a cell model type thing?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yes. So what ends up happening? So, so Jihy and James are having this conversation and, and James is geeking out because he's just a fun guy and G, he's a giant dork. So she's also getting excited. So we got this whole nerd fest going on in, in James's office where we're like, holy. We have almost unlimited money approval from both sets of leadership. You have this case that doesn't have to die right away. This is all good news. So of course James is like, how do we get more? How do we do more? What can we do that's different? Right? What can we do that's new? Because, you know, two days ago I would have thought this case is dead and now it's got new life. Life. Well, Jihy starts talking about how the, the biggest challenge that we had in back at headquarters was dealing with terrorists. And I start to chime in the same way. I was like, yeah, terrorists are like, they're the worst thing in the world to try to fight because they're ignorant and they're broke. But they have this model of communicating with each other where 10 terrorists don't know who nine other terrorists are.

[Julian Dory]

Are.

[Andrew Bustamante]

They only know who one person is. And that one person might know 10 people on their side, but the other night, 10 people don't know each other.

[Julian Dory]

Like the courier for bin Laden.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Exactly. The courier for bin Laden knew, got orders from one person and took his orders to one place. Like that's, that's how it worked. He was super cut off from everything. So even if you were to access the courier and try to get intelligence from the courier, they wouldn't know dick. I get my info from here and I take my info there. That's pretty much it just so happens that they found out that that curio where he took his info was to bin Laden to like, you know, enemy number one. That's how terrorist networks work everywhere. No terrorist knows everything except for one kind of cell leader. And that cell leader is disposable because as soon as that cell leader is killed, they know they're going to be killed, and they already know who's going to replace them. So when that cell leader is killed, a replacement pops up, and we don't know who the replacement is going to to be. Only they know who the replacement is going to be. So it's a game of whack a mole every time you fight terrorism, which is why we didn't beat isis. It's why ISIS still exists. It's why Israel can't beat Hamas, because Hamas is going to continue to exist. It's why Hezbollah is weakened but not gone. It's why Al Qaeda still exists and has splinter cells all over the world. It's so hard to fight these guys because of the way they communicate and the way they plan and execute their operations. So after kind of verbalizing this back and forth between me, Jihy and James, Jihy kind of had this light bulb go off, and she was like, we're the only ones that know that we're the only ones fighting the war on terror. We're the only ones that know that this is how terrorists work. Nobody. China doesn't know this. Russia doesn't know this. North Korea doesn't know this. Turkey doesn't know this. France doesn't know that. Nobody else knows because they're not spending hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the global war on terror. To them, they're just watching us beat our heads against a wall. But we actually can can understand the modus operandi of a terrorist cell. And of course, I'm like, that doesn't do us a lot of good. James looks at G and he's like, I think I know what you're saying. And gee, he's like, yeah, what if we start building a terrorist cell right.

[Julian Dory]

Here in Wolf so that if you have Falcon headquarters knowing they have a molecule mole, the mole only may know who the courier is, and they have no idea who the courier is talking to. So you guys set up your own splinter cell where you guys lead, recruit, lead, and manage case officers underneath you to go in and do missions that only you know the results of and. And. And the people they're talking to. And then you just give the amalgamation report back to headquarters.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Bingo. So now, in theory, we have another situation, like we did with Bridge, where everybody's happy because our case officers get credit for the cases they're running, because the reports that they write get communicated to Wolf leadership. Wolf leadership can basically say, yes, so and so contributed 30 reports this month, Wolf leadership gets to take credit for those reports going up to Langley headquarters and Langley headquarters. Like Wolf's kicking ass. Everybody's. Everybody's getting that pat on the back all the way up. Up. Meanwhile, in Falcon House, Falcon House is getting the reports that they need. They just don't know where it's coming from, which means the mole can't find who it's coming from. So the mole has to step out of line to reach somewhere else to try to find the information he's looking for, which is baiting him into making the mistake he needs to make for Falcon House to find him.

[Julian Dory]

Hey, before you came, before the day where you came up with this idea, obviously you had known for a while because they told you there was a molecule and, gee, he's a targeter. Had she spent any time, like, trying to figure out who it was?

[Andrew Bustamante]

She spent a little bit of time wondering. But the thing is, we don't have all the information. We don't even have enough information. We know that somewhere there's a leak, but we don't know what that leak is it. So just to give you some. Some context, right, Is it a person who's stealing information from a classified database or. Or is it somebody who's not stealing anything because he found a vulnerability or a weakness, a backdoor into the technology and the information is just there to grab? Or is there like some penetration, some technical element where he is surreptitiously gained access to the system and is using that surreptitious access intentionally? So is this malicious? Is it active? Is it passive? We don't know. And how do you even start to reverse engineer a case that you don't know know.

[Julian Dory]

What was the reaction at Falcon headquarters when you took this idea to them and said, you know, can we get permission to set something like this up?

[Andrew Bustamante]

So it was, it was actually Wolf first that we took it to, so our local leadership first. And we were like, hey, we're going to, we're going to build a model that's based off of Al Qaeda and we're going to use it against Falcon. And Wolf leadership was like the. You are. They're like, we're not going to be the ones that approve this. That's crazy. There's no way you're doing that.

[Julian Dory]

Relax, Osama.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So you kind of look like them, too. So we, we got knocked on our heels a little bit there, but we still had the right to take. To take conversations directly to Falcon House. So we sent a separate cable to Falcon House. And we were like, hey, we have this idea and we're not getting a lot of leadership. Leadership support here in Wolf. What are your thoughts there, Falcon House? Again, they were less interested. We didn't realize this the time. They were less interested in the new operations as much as they were interested in us creating something that worked so that we would smoke out the mole. So they came back and they were like, if you need support from headquarters, you'll get support from us formally. So go back and tell your leadership team again that if they need formal direction from headquarters, we'll provide it. But we think this operation would be better handled in the field.

[Julian Dory]

Okay.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So they're kicking the ball back and forth for all intents and purposes. So we go back to Wolf leadership and say, hey, Falcon House would like to see this happen. They're giving you first right of refusal, which is basically a way of saying, do you want to make it your idea or do you want to be told by. By mom that you have to do it?

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[Andrew Bustamante]

And that's when Falcon House. Or that's when Wolf caved to us. And Wolf was like, okay, you guys. You guys can have 60 days. And James, 60 days in. James to. To show us what this creates, the case officer.

[Julian Dory]

So how does this work then? Is it like a fantasy football draft now where you get to look at case officers around the world and say, oh, she'd be great, or he'd be great. And you call them and say, you know, the Philadelphia Eagles would like to select you with the fifth pick in the draft. Like, how? What's the layout here?

[Andrew Bustamante]

I wish it was that way. No, it was more like backyard kickball, where who's in the neighborhood, who's allowed to come out and play, and then who wants to be on your team? That's basically what it was like. So we had proof of concept with James, and we started to have more success with James. Like I was telling you earlier, between every one and four years, there's a rotation. Always new officers coming in, always new officers going out, always new case officers coming in, always new case officers going out. So new case officers were coming in about every six to 12 months. So as new case officers came in, we had a chance to basically say, do you want to come play on our kickball team? Here's what we're doing. Here's how it works. And we had James, who was this mid tier, like, hot case officer, who was like, hey, we're doing some cool. And what we do here, nobody gets to know about, which is Just really appealing, really attractive, to the right kind of case officer.

[Julian Dory]

Kind of like Ocean's Eleven. Like, yeah, like, we got a job here.

[Andrew Bustamante]

We got a job for you. Yeah, yeah. The problem is anybody who comes to work for us is essentially going to have to work twice as hard because they still have to meet all their requirements for Wolf. So we're kind of like we're a second job. And not everybody wants a second job. So we had a lot of people who were like, we're not interested in helping you.

[Julian Dory]

So you got to meet. You still have to meet your quotas.

[Andrew Bustamante]

You have to meet your quotas for Wolf.

[Julian Dory]

Yep.

[Andrew Bustamante]

And then everything you do for us is on spec, if you will.

[Julian Dory]

Interesting.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Okay, so we had a couple. We had a couple that came on really early because they. They liked the idea of a challenge.

[Julian Dory]

This was Beverly and. What was his name? Luke.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yep. Beverly and her husband Luke came on early because Beverly's a high flyer, hard charger, go getter kind of gal. And Luke does what his wife wants. They were also married. That works. Yeah. And then. And then we also had Tasha come on board. And Tasha was like this complete.

[Julian Dory]

Like the flower girl.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Hippie.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah. She was like a hippie at heart, but she was just a complete outsider. She, she, she. I don't. She's so good at CIA, because you would never think that she belongs at CIA. You would think that she was going to be selling soap at some, like, farmer's market somewhere.

[Julian Dory]

What made her want to do it? Like, what made. Because she was really like that as a personality. The way you describe her in a book. Like, what. What made her want to be a spy?

[Andrew Bustamante]

I know that's a good question. Actually. I don't know. I don't know why she chose CIA. I don't know if she's kind of like jihy, where she would have never chose CIA, but CIA chose her, and she was like, well, why not? Let's give it a whirl. Interesting. But I think she chose to work on our cell because CIA was never a family for her. Like, she didn't have a lot of close friends at CIA. The. They didn't believe the same things she believed in. They didn't jive with her. She. Her husband was unemployed and he followed her around, so. So, like, that was just so much different about her life than the typical CIA officer. So inside the cell, she found a family. Family. And we all. We all loved each other. We took care of each other, backed each other up, helped with kids, helped with spouses. Etc. So I think with us, she came into a new place where she already felt ostracized. And we were like, hey, we're building this close knit group. Do you want to be part of it? And she, she was willing to take guess that we were going to do the right thing because she already believed everybody did the right thing until somebody stomped on her flower.

[Julian Dory]

So James, Tasha, Beverly, Luke, anyone else in the there.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So those were our case officers.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[Andrew Bustamante]

And then we had a regional tech ops person who came and went depending on where he was needed in the region. And we ended up having a local interpreter, local translator, who was also assigned to Wolf in a rotation and who was previously friends with Jihy.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So Jihy was able to pull that girl aside and say, hey, you're amazing at languages and we could use you for our work. Work. And for friendship reasons. She was like, sure, let's give it a whirl. And that became our cell. It developed over the course of four or six months, and we had success that grew slowly for each of our case officers as we kind of built the rail, the rails for this train largely on Jihy's back.

[Julian Dory]

Now, there were all different people. You go through a bunch of different cases in the book of. Of sources that you targeted, who were, you know, people you wanted to turn effectively within Falcon.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Let's.

[Julian Dory]

Let's start with the converse one. This one was fascinating to me. So this was someone who was not on any flowcharts anywhere, completely unknown in any agency records, probably anywhere else within US Government who you found basically she was a girl following around this other known guy.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Correct.

[Julian Dory]

So what. How did you figure out who she was? And who was she?

[Andrew Bustamante]

So this is all. This is all targeting magic from Jihy. Right. So one of the things that makes a very good targeter is somebody who can see a pattern in a lot of noise. And Jihy is capable of seeing the smallest pattern in a very large footprint of noise. And what she found was, was a series of flight manifests where this known Falconian intelligence officer was traveling. And this other name would appear on the same manifest. Unrelated, not in the same seat.

[Julian Dory]

It wasn't his guma, his mistress or something like that.

[Andrew Bustamante]

We didn't know. But what we found is that there's this person who's appearing over and over again. Same manifest, different seat, same locations. Is that a mistress? Mistresses normally sit close to the person. Is it somebody else on their team? Some junior officer, some minder, some. Something else we don't know. So we see the person Multiple times. And we decide, you know what? Let's. Let's have someone target this individual. So, gee, he starts to run as much information as she can on the person. There isn't anything on our formal records. So ge. He turns to social media and open source, and then she starts to see that this girl is a girl. She sees that she's active. She sees that she plays tennis. She sees that she's sporty, she sees that she's girly, and she's like, if we're going to target this person, I think we should send Beverly to target her. Because Beverly is like that. Tasha couldn't have a conversation about pedicures if it killed her, but Beverly could. Right?

[Julian Dory]

And Beverly's older, right?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Beverly's older. We didn't know that the older thing was going to be a big deal until after they actually started talking. But that's kind of the. The magic that a targeter can bring to an operation is they can say, here's what we know about the person, and here's the. Here's the talent that we have on the team. So let's pick this player to go after that target.

[Julian Dory]

And you guys talked about something interesting here that relates to spies all around the world at all these different agencies, which is that by this point in the story, social media is a part of culture, and you would think, oh, a spy is going to stay off that. But it got so mainstream in countries around the world that a spy, you know, needs to be on that to kind of maintain my normalcy, cover or whatever, so to speak. If they're looking at it like, well, I'm gonna go out there and I'm gonna be getting information from other people. So if I'm doing that, they can't know who I am. So if I have an Instagram, then, you know, we're all good.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Right?

[Julian Dory]

So that it seems like this girl was kind of a bit of a. Almost like represented a symbolic pivot where you guys were realizing that, like a. Wait a minute. So she's got this Instagram that shows her traveling places, playing tennis, doing normal stuff. That's a good cover story.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Well, what's great about it, and I love that you're bringing this up, because there's a difference between a cultivated account, as we call it, and an actual account. A genuine account, because a cultivated account demonstrates operational security within the content that it shares, whereas a actual open account, a genuine account, does not. So, for example, a genuine account might talk about where specifically you are at a specific time. Right. I'M going to tag myself at Giovanni's restaurant. I'm going to say I'm here right now. Here's a picture. Timestamp says it's 5:45 and I just got here at 5:40. That's not operationally secure. Somebody could see that you're at Giovanni's restaurant, see that the time was five minutes ago and then boom, they're going to Giovanni's restaurant, right? So that's, that's how a genuine account generally works. A cultivated account obfuscates that they take a picture at Giovani's and then in the comments are like, I really enjoyed my dinner at Giovani's yesterday. They don't even post it within a 24 hour period of time. Or they don't say, they don't tag Giovanis at all. They say really appreciated my Italian dinner at this great place and whatever, right? And that's how you, you create an account that looks genuine to the average viewer, but when you put it under scrutiny, you can't reverse engineer it. And that's what we found with, with Converse, with Converse's account is that as she continued to post, it was crafted, it was good. You didn't know where she was when she was, you knew that she had friends, you didn't know who her friends were. You knew that she liked sports. You didn't know exactly which sports they were. You didn't know what, where her favorite tennis shop was, where she liked to play tennis. You didn't know her favorite tennis team, you didn't know her favorite drink, you didn't know if she drank. You didn't know where she hung out, what nightclub she went to, where she went to church. You knew nothing.

[Julian Dory]

Air mystery.

[Andrew Bustamante]

But to the average person scrolling through, she looked totally normal.

[Julian Dory]

Now it would turn out she was a intelligence officer training under this guy.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Effectively correct. He was different. Intelligence agencies around the world work in different ways. CIA has a very formal pipeline and a training program and a protocol and a group of old people who decide what young people become the new case officers. Other places it's more tailored, it's more mentor based. In this case, she was mentoring under the senior case officer or the senior case officer above her.

[Julian Dory]

And that was the hypothesis you guys had come up with.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Well that was correct. Correct. That was the hypothesis that we had come up with with as we started to meet her and learn more about the relationship between her and the other case officer. And then we became the ones that built the foundation for her case.

[Julian Dory]

Now why would this is what I can't really wrap my head around. Why would someone like that, who's learning under such a senior person, is clearly talented and has been picked up to be talented, Living in a world of spies where you're not supposed to trust anyone. One, why did she go for Beverly's advances so hard and, like, actually become friends with her? And Beverly is very clearly, you know, an American and trying to ingratiate herself in her world.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So this is where culture plays in, and this is why it's so going back to the beginning of our conversation, how people are people, and oftentimes we're not interested in the actual person. It takes us four hours of conversation before we care about a person. We care about everything else about them, but we don't care about them as an individual. In the case of Converse, Converse was a female, and she was younger and she was single, and all of those things worked against her in the culture she was coming from. So when she met Beverly, Beverly's older, married to a younger guy who is attractive and younger, and they are both successful and powerful to Converse, she was like, how did you do that? I gotta follow this old guy around everywhere he goes. I have to make him feel special. I can't even verbalize the fact that I ever want to get married. If I admit to ever wanting to get married, they're going to kick me out of. Out of my job. Because what they want is somebody who loves the job. Job. How do you have both a job you love and a person you love? Like, there were all these mentoring moments that were almost like. Like sisterly. And that was something she couldn't get.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. Wow. Okay.

[Andrew Bustamante]

And that's how espionage works. Espionage is. Very few people commit treason for money. If you were to just look at the surface level, it would look like everybody commits treason for money. It's what they're going to do. Do with the money they get from treason. Saving for retirement, helping a kid, helping a parent get through a cancer treatment, you name it, right? Buy an investment property somewhere else that's going to be there for them as a Social Security plan. Nobody, just nobody is greedy and betrays their country just for greed. They want to do something with that money. Even the biggest traders in the United States, your Robert Hansen's and your Aldrich Ames, they didn't take just money. They were playing a game where they were beating their service. CIA underestimated Aldrich Ames. So every time he took money, he was sticking in their face. That's why he drove Jaguars and and wore fancy suits to work. He was basically saying, you. I'm so, so much smarter than you, CIA, that I'm giving secrets to the Russians and making more money than you can give me. And you need to know that. That and Robert Hansen and FBI was doing the same thing. They. They didn't care about the money. They cared about what the money represented.

[Julian Dory]

All right, real quick, I go to the bathroom, but we'll be right back. Yeah, Gio was actually just asking. We're back now. But Geo was just asking off camera, like, how do you trust your wife? Because I would. The whole time I was reading this, I was kind of thinking that I'm like, is G. He just working Andy? Are they like, yo, we got a real case of cowboy fever here. So you. You just, you know, you keep an eye on them. I've heard of that before.

[Andrew Bustamante]

She may very well be working me, for all I know, but I think the way. The way I trust her is I feel like I don't have an option. She's smarter than me and more successful than me, so I'm not going to outsmart her or dupe her or trick her. So if anything, it makes for a very easy way to be very honest and transparent with my wife, which has been all the difference in our relationship to. To. Whenever I have an insecurity or a doubt, whenever I see a hot chick on the street, it's just so much easier to tell her the truth, because whatever comes next is going to be easier than if I lied to her.

[Julian Dory]

Gee, you see the rack on that chick? I need you guys to, like, put a. Put a GoPro on and just, like, walk around town. I need to see this, like, in.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Action, what it looks like. Yeah, yeah.

[Julian Dory]

You just see Andy's head turn all the time with the GoPro turns back to jihy. Come on.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So it's worth noting. I mean, I. And we talk about this in the book as well. My wife has an anxiety disorder. She has. She suffers from depression. She has mental health issues that made her almost ideally suited to work at CIA. As long as I don't violate her own mental health challenges, it's actually more comforting to her. What drives an anxious person crazy is when they wonder if you saw the girl with the nice rack. Right. As soon as you say, I saw the girl with a nice rack, it's like talking to Rain Man. Oh, yeah, it was a nice rack. It was. It was a good rack. It was a good. Definitely a good rack. And that goes way better than. Did you see the rack. Are you lying to me? You're lying to me. I can see that you're lying to me. Sorry.

[Julian Dory]

That's so good. Well, I'm happy for you. That's a great relationship. There's a lot of guys out there right now going, I need that. Do you have anxiety?

[Andrew Bustamante]

A little more anxiety in my life.

[Julian Dory]

All right, so back to the cell, though. You. You are the go between, like we said. So you're going to be the guy who's now as soo even you've had a lot of experience, like on the ground doing things there. So you have that skill set as well as managing the cell with jihy. But you're gonna go into Falcon, as you said, always through a second country under an assumed identity, which you've talked about out of context on a lot of podcasts with me before, where you're like, yeah, I work for a business or. And something like that. So I think in the book you said you worked for Acme and like, what was it? Procurement or something like that.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yep.

[Julian Dory]

Okay, so you would go in there and what was your. You're doing some different things every time, but high level. Like, what was your main job when you would go into Falcon?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Whenever you enter into a hostile country, and by every country to a certain extent, is hostile. But the definition that we're talking about, when we talk about denied areas or we talk about these areas that are. Are the most aggressive adversaries to the United States, when you go into those countries, you can't do more than one operational act at a time. So if you were to go into a more permissive environment, then you would be able to go in and you may be able to do two or three things in a day because nobody's really watching. That's what we're like here in the United States. Foreign adversaries can come here and do whatever they want to do. Because we don't have cameras on every intersection, we don't fund our police enough to make them anything significant to a foreign intelligence threat. We have. We treat everybody who comes into the United States essentially as a US Citizen first. So they all have. They have privacy and they have. They have the benefit of innocence until proven guilty. Like they have rights and, and privileges that are essentially granted to them, them because we give them to our own citizens. Other parts of the world are not like that. So what that meant is that inside Falcon, our case officers couldn't go to Falcon to execute an operation and also on that operation procure their operational support requirements if they Needed bulk cash deposits. If they needed special watches, if they needed certain SIM cards or batteries that were specific to Falcon, they couldn't do that on their own. They couldn't. Couldn't show up and then procure those things and carry out the operational act. It would create a trail, right, that would identify that what they're doing is espionage. So I would go in ahead of them. I would do the actual procurement part of espionage. I would buy a cell phone, I would buy a SIM card, I would make a mass deposit or a withdrawal of cash, and then I would essentially cache those things or dead drop those things somewhere where a case officer could pick it up when they arrived.

[Julian Dory]

So did you really, you really had a cover working for, in this case, Acme?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah, I really had an identity that allowed me to transit Falcon without coming onto suspicion. There's a lot of roles that are immediately suspicious and not always suspicious for espionage reasons. Sometimes people are interested in you because they think that you're wealthy. Sometimes people are interested in you because they think that you have access to ip. Sometimes people are interested in you because they think that you have familial connections or celebrity connections. So it's actually quite hard sometimes to build a cover Persona that doesn't catch anyone's interest. So in this case, Acme Corporation was one corporation that does something mundane. They. They do something that has to do with. With everyday needs. Think like souls on shoes or printer cartridges and printers or the person. Or like, like the nail clippers, right? Something stupid. That nobody anywhere is concerned with the IP of nail clippers, and nobody anywhere is concerned with the celebrity connections of a company that makes the souls for shoes. And like, it's all mundane and silly, but it's big business, right? It's big enough business that you want to have the natural resources that either provide the beginning, or you want to have the trade route that carries them, or you want to have the manufacturing that builds them. Them. So there's every reason in the world for a real world business person to do that job. And there's also every reason in the world for local businesses to want to meet with you. But basically police, law enforcement, and intelligence don't care about you.

[Julian Dory]

But you really had to have that cover because you had to represent this, whoever the actual real company was, and.

[Andrew Bustamante]

You really have to learn about it, and you really have to know the lingo, right? So.

[Julian Dory]

So you literally reported to a guy working for that company in another country, or was it you were disconnected and just said you worked for them and would Approach it that way.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So this is getting into the sensitive side of how these operations are built.

[Julian Dory]

Okay.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So what I will say is that I was not alone. There were people that I had to speak to and people who had to speak to me. That's part of what makes it a backstopped cover, what we call a backstop cover. So I could send emails, emails would come. I can make phone calls, and phone inbound phone calls would come in. So everything is legit. Actually a registered business actually registers a profit and actually has regular revenue. And P. L like, it's all a very real thing. But where that person was located and how much that person was dedicated to my cover versus, you know, multiple businesses or whatever else that. That gets into the classified area.

[Julian Dory]

Okay, okay. All right. So I won't, I won't pull on that. But essentially how. I don't know if this is classified too, but, like, how often are you going there to do this kind of stuff?

[Andrew Bustamante]

So I would go maybe once every 40ish days or so. I would go frequently because I'm supporting four case officers. And not only am I supporting those four case officers, I have a very active targeter who wants more information. More restaurant locations, more intersections, more street names, more maps, more, you know, imeis and ismis from different cell phone manufacturers. Like, like there's just tons of information, there's tons of collection that needs to happen on the logistics side of a CIA operation. So there's always a reason to go. And the more you go, the less suspicious you are.

[Julian Dory]

Right?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Because the more regular your passage is, the more you look like a regular business person. You always stay for two or three days, you always stay in the same hotel, you always do the same, same, like things in the same city. You go to the same restaurants, you, you know, borrow, rent the same car from the same rental car agency. All that stuff's very common. And now all of a sudden, it. It puts you almost above suspicion.

[Julian Dory]

What about for someone like Beverly, though, who I believe met. You said it's converse. Not converse is how you say, I think converse is better.

[Andrew Bustamante]

I always thought converse is better too. This was literally a conversation I had with my wife. I was like, why am I call this person converse?

[Julian Dory]

And she was just call it converse.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Converse.

[Julian Dory]

It's better.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So you see like the black shoe and the star and everything on the.

[Julian Dory]

Julian dory podcast, we're gonna call it. So you meet, you meet Converse in. Or Beverly meets Converse. I believe in wolf, not in Falcon. So she straddling between Wolf and Falcon.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Correct.

[Julian Dory]

How does she manage that and not, you know, because it's a different role than you.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Right. So every case officer has their own justification for going into and out of of Falcon. So their frequency is something that we schedule. We plan to make sure that there's never two of them in the country at the same time. Their routes, their third country cleansing routes are all different. We have a specific plan for everyone to make sure that the operations don't overlap or collide. We're also carefully controlling what geographic regions they're going to, to make sure that they're not in the same city, possibly staying in a hotel that's on the same block. We want to isolate as much as possible so that if Falcon intelligence does spot one of us, it doesn't lead to the others. Okay. Right. So while converse is happening inside of Wolf, the information that Jihy is collecting that she gives to, she gives to Beverly. Some of those cases are happening inside Falcon, Some of those cases are happening in third country locations where the Falcon target comes out of Falcon for a day or two. But we're trying to build an excuse for Beverly to meet the person in Falcon later.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, okay. But you're going every 40 days is like the CIA's own bin Laden courier, effectively. And you're, as you said, you're doing things from procurement that can't be traced back to literal dead drops. It was kind of cool, like the spy craft you were talking about. And, and you know, why you would pick this type of park over that type of park, you know, versus how many people are going to be here versus there is wild. But every time you would go in Falcon in this country, that everyone out there should be able to figure out, they had like, every person that's coming in from the outside, it sounds like they send starting with like low level minders onto them. Meaning, like literally, dudes, they pay five bucks, you know, to go buy a coffee if they go through this person's, you know, drawers in the hotel or something like that. So you knew that going in. And when you're first going in under code name Alex Hernandez, as you know, on that fake passport and everything, you were encountering, always these kind of low level minders. So that meant, and correct me if I'm wrong here, you didn't think they were suspicious of you. It was just. That's just what you should expect as a foreigner going into this place, staying at any decent hotel.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Correct. If you and every business owner, every mid level to high level executive who has traveled through a country that is, is not on good terms with the United States. And there's many, many countries beyond, just like the big two or three that you would think of when you travel into a foreign country, that's not in great terms with the US they watch you and they watch you with what I, what, what I call bumbling surveillance. And that's what you're talking about. The low level minder, like this is a dude or a gal who they run like a food cart 14 hours a day and they don't make enough money to keep, keep their family alive on a food cart. So then they work a few extra hours every night by watching foreigners. Sometimes they're assigned a foreigner, sometimes they voluntarily watch a foreigner and then go to the local police station after they watch them and try to sell their information. Right. Sometimes if they can't sell their information to a local police officer, they'll sell their information to like a local gangster and be like, hey, you got a guy staying at the local Radisson who wears a Rolex. But they're always trying to pedal what information they can to make a buck just to make ends meet. These individuals are really easy to spot. These bumbling surveillance are really easy to spot. And when you see them, it's a comfort because that's all, that's all that's covering you. It's when you don't see them that you have to ask harder questions. Why am I not being watched now? Am I more interesting than I think I am? Did no mind or show up today because they're hungover because they drank too many beers last night? What's the explanation?

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, so you had described back the first time we ever Talked in episode 97, the three types of surveillance. There's like discrete to lose. What's the terminology for the other two?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah, so there's, there's discreet to lose surveillance. There's close surveillance and discreet not to lose surveillance.

[Julian Dory]

Okay, can you just redefine all those real quick for everyone so.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Absolutely. From the, the, the, the simplest, least sophisticated form of surveillance is called close surveillance. It's when the person who's following you essentially wants you to know you're being followed. They stay right on your shoulder if they're driving, they stay right on your bumper when you park. They try to park you in like they're, they're trying to intimidate you. And they are also following and watching you.

[Julian Dory]

See, these are more, the bumbling guys.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Close, Close. What these are, is these. Yeah. I mean when it comes to training, these are Your bumbling guys. But we're talking specifically about trained surveillance, okay? When a surveillance team is trained for close surveillance, that might be more like a police surveillance team. They, they know a drug dealer is coming in. They don't want that drug dealer to do any drops. So they're going to follow that drug dealer. They can't arrest him. He hasn't committed a crime. There's no proof. But they're going to stay on his ass everywhere he goes. They're going to neutralize his ability to do an anything.

[Julian Dory]

Okay?

[Andrew Bustamante]

That's a close surveillance team. The next step down in terms of, or the next step up from in terms of sophistication is something called discreet not to lose. Discreet not to lose means you don't want your target to see you, but you also can't lose them. So if they make a left turn, when they shouldn't make a left turn, when they make a U turn, and they shouldn't make a U turn when they run across the street and there's no crosswalk walk, you have to go with them because you cannot lose them. So you might stay farther back. But if they do something stupid, you're going to do something stupid too, because you can't let them disappear. So you're watching them because you're confident that they're going to execute some kind of operational act. And when they commit that act, you have to be there to catch them, apprehend them, or collect evidence. That's discreet not to lose. The third most sophisticated form of surveillance is called discrete to lose. Discreet to lose means you don't ever want your target to know you're there. You want them. You want to be completely invisible to them because you're being so discreet that if you lose them, you're going to escalate the case to another resource that will pick them up. So I'm following you down the streets in Hoboken. You turn left, you turn right, I lose you into a coffee shop. I don't know where you went. I can make a phone call, and all of a sudden I've got a helicopter above head looking for you, or I've got a series of drones that are triangulating you, Or I can find someone who's going to ping your cell phone from a local tower and we'll find you and I'll get right back on you two blocks from now, right? Discreet to lose is the most sophisticated form of surveillance because it's the most dangerous, scariest one. It means that you're so interesting, they're willing to spend the money of almost infinite resources to see what you're doing.

[Julian Dory]

So you had been going and doing these trips for a long time. How long? I guess you're not allowed to say, but a while. You've been going in roughly every 40 days. You're doing all these different things to manage for your people on the ground, depending on which two are in the country at the time. And then you have this three day trip plan where you know the COVID is you're going to be going and meeting with these different procurement companies for your job, but you're going to be doing some of your regular things. And you notice, I guess, day one, when you come downstairs into the hotel lobby, something's off. What? Why? Why was something off to you?

[Andrew Bustamante]

I don't know. I don't know why things were different that day. But for whatever reason, I couldn't find a minder. I couldn't find a bumbling surveillance. And it was winter, it was cold, it was nasty outside, but that had never stopped. That had never stopped minders from being there before. So in that moment, it felt. It felt comfortable, it felt like victorious. I felt like, I am so good at this.

[Julian Dory]

Here we go.

[Andrew Bustamante]

This is what I've been. This is why I'm coming here every 40 days so that nobody thinks that I'm suspicious, so that I can be free to do whatever I want to do. So that, like, this is what it's all about. I used to joke with James back in the building when we were back at Wolf get to together. We used to joke about the day that we would become invisible inside Falcon. The day that we were so commonplace, so boring, so dull, so predictable that they wouldn't even follow us. It wasn't even worth the. Wasn't worth paying the homeless guy $5 to watch us, right? And I was like, today is that day. I mean, I finally, I'm here and I'm gonna tell Jane I can't wait to get back and tell James that I beat him to the punch, right? Like that's. That was what was going through my head. And it didn't last long before the second thought came to my head that, that if they're not following me with a bumbling surveillance, they might be following me with something better. Because it doesn't take a lot to follow somebody without a person. You can follow them by following a cell phone signal. You can follow them by following a. A driver. You can follow them by following, you know, a series of static surveillance that stand along their route. And remember, we do the same thing almost every trip. So it wouldn't be hard to set up a series of static surveillance that just watch you go from point A to point B to point C, and you never see them at all.

[Julian Dory]

Did that thought come into your head where you're like, could this be major bondoi all over again?

[Andrew Bustamante]

It didn't come into my head in that moment. It just struck me that I could be wrong, which was not something that the younger version of me would have ever thought. The younger version of me would have been like, I am so good. But instead I had a few years under my belt and a little bit more like humble stew. And I was like, this could be something else too. Just. Just having the ability to recognize that there could be an alternate explanation than what you think think is a lot harder than most people realize. Most people are so sure that their opinion is right. Most people are so sure that their perspective is right that they don't even entertain, seriously, entertain a second point of view. Right? You can count your, your religious extremist activities on the backs of people who do this. You can see how many people have lost their fortunes because this is what they did. You can see how many people have lost relationships because they truly believe that they were so right. There could be no other alternative. Alternative. All that I had learned in my life and up to that moment at least gave me the sense to say, what if I'm not that good? What if this is just something else?

[Julian Dory]

But here's the other thing, too. There's. There's two other variables here. Number one, speed of processing. Because something could go wrong at any instant. And, you know, worst case scenario. But also, like, you take this for granted. If I'm sitting out there with Joe trying to, like, cook something up when we're not recording and come up with a title or whatever, and then. Or, you know, some type of idea, I might be like, wait a minute. No, I don't know about that. Let's back it. You see what I mean? Like, you almost have, like, a physical reaction to it in tone and shift. It's not like you're talking to someone necessarily in the hotel lobby. But you can't be like, you know, or show any sign that you're even thinking, but in your head, you're running these, like, algorithmic calculations of like. Like, okay, well, those 13 people over there weren't doing this. The two guys over there aren't looking at me right now. That's not the norm. You know what I mean? Like, you have to put all this together and you have to stand there like this.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah, it's true. It's true. And that's part of the reason why you don't have anything else you have to do. Starting a business can seem like a.

[Julian Dory]

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[Andrew Bustamante]

The the reason you schedule your day on this day in particular, I had scheduled the day so that I had two business meetings in the day and I knew that there would be someone else driving me from business meeting to business meeting. And I knew that the drivers had already known what time to pick up and drop me off because that would. It was all pre determined in email correspondence. The backstop cover organization. Right. So my 100% job from point A to point B was just to determine my surveillance status. And that's what a surveillance detection route is supposed to do. Nothing else except determine your surveillance status. You know what the route's going to be, you know what the turns are going to be, you know how long you're going to be on a certain side of the street. You know everything. And there's always room for street lights to go long or for some traffic accident to slow you down or whatever else. So you, you leave space for variables, but you're giving 90 of your resources to one task. So you are correct. You have to process quickly, but you don't have to prioritize between processes. You're doing one thing and one thing only so you can have those processes without biting your nails or looking around the room or, you know, awkwardly scratching your belt line.

[Julian Dory]

So how did you catch the initial surveillance in this case?

[Andrew Bustamante]

So the. There's a process for surveillance detection and we get to go through it almost step by step in the book. I'm really excited about that. That's one of the things that CIA didn't like about this book. There were several that they didn't like and we can talk about some other time. But. But one of the things they didn't like is that I expressed how we detected or how I detected surveillance on this race out. As I went from point A to point B, as I Went from the hotel to the first business meeting someone else was driving. My entire focus was just on finding surveillance, which means that I could observe the environment around me. And when you are looking for surveillance, what you're really looking for is a change in the environment that doesn't make sense. When you move, let's just say you move from Hoboken to New Jersey or Hoboken to Manhattan. Whether you're driving or training or ferrying you, if you do it enough times, you know what to expect. You know what normal looks like. Surveillance happens when normal doesn't look normal. When you see one face too many times, or when you see one card too many times, or when you. You make a mistake and you take a U turn and somebody follows you through the U turn. And then that same person that follows you through the U turn just happens to be the person who walks into the delta on 37th that you walk into. You're looking for strange patterns that don't fit the chaos of normalcy. And that's from point A to point B. I also had a second meeting scheduled that day. And in between those two meetings, I was going to take kind of a lunch break. So again, I get out, I leave from point B to go to my lunch break. And I'm looking for the things that don't look normal from point B to point C. But I'm also looking for anything that repeats what happened in the first leg. We call them legs. You have multiple legs to a surveillance detection route. Sometimes 3, sometimes 5, sometimes 7. What you're looking for is how often do you see the same outlier from leg to leg. That's how you truly determine if you're under surveillance. And that's what we detail in the story. That's how I found out not just that I was under surveillance, but who specifically was following me.

[Julian Dory]

You were seeing some of the same people and you were seeing. Seen it. There were multiple different people, multiple different cars. Which now says it's been in your head. This has been escalated.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Correct.

[Julian Dory]

At what point did you start yourself?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Second leg. Second leg. Picking up the same vehicle from the first leg. Identifying. Identifying people who. When I moved from driving to walking and seeing the same people again, both in cars and on foot. That shit's scary. That shit's scary because now you realize there's a team. The team has resources. Like, it's easy for one person. We. When you learn surveillance detection, you learn that all the advantages do not go to the surveillance team. The surveillance team has all the disadvantages because they have to react. Yes. So they're always one step behind. They don't know where you're going next. They don't know when you're going there. If they lose you, they have to find you again. So you might think that the surveillance team has all the advantages. The only advantage the surveillance team has is technology and resources. It's actually the field operator that has all of the advantages in a surveillance detection route.

[Julian Dory]

You're the wide receiver, they're the cornerback.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yes. You choose everything, right? So you, you become acutely aware of these advantages and disadvantages. Because if you up and you make them suspicious of you, they can plus up with more resources, they can fall off and come back on you the next day. They can escalate you even higher. And all of a sudden you have a SWAT team or a takedown team rather than a surveillance team following you. So it becomes this really difficult dance where you have to act in such a way that's so calculated that they don't realize it's calculated. That's so predictable without seeming predictable that they just watch you and don't care. They don't escalate, they don't chase, they don't worry.

[Julian Dory]

And this is one place you said the movies get wrong all the time.

[Andrew Bustamante]

All the time. Because in the movies, what does somebody do when they're under surveillance?

[Julian Dory]

They run. They try to do crazy jump on buildings. You're basically saying, I love the visual you gave where you're like. It's like when you see a bear, you don't run because it says that's danger. So it's gonna come after you. You have to like, like, very cautiously look at it and back away. So you're like, hey, amigo, I ain't here to do anything.

[Andrew Bustamante]

I'm not here. I'm not. I'm not worth your time. That's the whole goal. We call it lulling surveillance. You're trying to lull your surveillance to sleep. You're trying to lull them into making an error. You're trying to lull them into. Into giving up on you. Right? It's a job for them, too. It's a job for them, too. They woke up at some time, got their kids off to school, ate their breakfast, took their coffee. They're gonna have to take their morning at some point too. So the whole goal is to make their life so simple and predictable that when 4 o' clock comes around, they're like, nothing here, folks. And they go home. That's what you want to do. You don't want to be interesting enough that at 4 o' clock they call in and they get overtime and they're like, hey, we're gonna stay on this guy for another three hours. Hours.

[Julian Dory]

What made you want to go to an arcade once you knew that this stuff was going down? It was, it's really cool. People are gonna have to like, read to get all the details of different places you were picking and what you would have to think about going into them. Like, plan out why I would be there and why it would make sense to be in this place. Like down to the microscopic type. But what made you say, you know what, I'm gonna stop and, you know, shoot badly in an arcade so they know I'm not a good shot.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So surveillance teams are made up of people. And every one of the people on a team is creating a surveillance Persona for the day. So if, if you were to come to my surveillance training course, one of the things everyday spy teaches is it certifies people in discrete to lose surveillance. If you were to come, I would teach you about how to make a profile and how to change your profile to fit into different environments for different purposes. Professional surveillance teams know how to change their profile for different circumstances. Because at, at the first hour that you're following somebody, you might need to look a certain way. But by the fourth hour that you're following somebody, you need to change your profile. I was at a point in the surveillance detection route where I knew that the next person who should follow me is the younger male on their team. You, you can literally see the pattern in how professional surveillance works. So to lull them to sleep, you try to make it as easy as possible for them. Them. So I didn't want to go into the quilting store because if I went into the quilting store and some fucking 22 year old kid followed me, he would feel awkward. But maybe the 60 year old woman or the 55 year old woman wouldn't feel so awkward. But she wasn't the next one up on the, on the rotation.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, you had that calculated?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah. I knew the next person up on the rotation was the young kid. Well, where's he going to fit in the arcade? And one of the other things you always want to do on a surveillance route is you want to be able to control your time. So if you walk into a coffee shop, for example, logically you think, oh, coffee shop's going to be quick. You don't have any idea. The barista could be lazy, they could be slow, there could be A long line. There's all sorts of reasons why you might walk into a coffee shop and you think you're going to be there for two minutes, but you're there for 15 minutes instead. That's. That's a showstopper for surveillance detection route because you lost control of time. You walk into an arcade, you control every element of your time. Do you play one game? Do you play four games? Do you die quickly in the game? Do you just walk around? Do you go buy a coffee or a. Or a coke? If the line is short, do you. Do you just use the restroom? You can control every element of your time. So I knew I wanted a place for a 22 year old guy to follow me. About 22 year old to follow me. I wanted it to be a place that only he would fit in and the whole team so it makes it very easy for him. And a place where I could loiter so that as soon as I saw him with me, I could play three, four, five games. Give the whole team a 15 or 20 minute break so that they can smoke a cigarette, they can restructure who's in what cars. Like I want them to have a really easy life so they don't think that there's anything suspicious about me. And that 22 year old guy can follow me anywhere in this arcade he wants to because he doesn't even have to be close to me. He can be on the second floor and watch me on the first floor. He can be on the first floor and watch me on the second floor. It's easy. That's why I picked the arcade.

[Julian Dory]

But you don't want you or him to make each other because you never want to make eye contact with these people. And that's what, that's what happened. Here, I'll read this little passage. You were. You were in the. In the arcade and you said. I squinted down the barrel of the plastic rifle. You were playing some dinosaur game. Shoot the dinosaur. The T. Rex was looking right at me.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Me.

[Julian Dory]

Clawing at the dirt with its hind leg. I had a good clean shot at it. My finger hovered over the trigger. At that moment, a figure appeared around the right hand side of the arcade cabinet, little more than two arms, breaths away from me. It was someone I recognized from earlier in the day. But it wasn't Puma. It was Bomberman, the guy from outside the knockoff shop hours ago and miles across town. In the confusion of that moment, there was no time to calibrate my reactions. We locked eyes, each of us visibly recognizing the Other, my heart stopped. I had been made. Now they knew for sure that I had intelligence training. Bomberman's mouth hung open. On impulse, I squeezed a blue plastic trigger. My shot went wide. The T. Rex roared and charged me. Its jaws clamped shut and blood red text filled the screen. Game over. There's no way the timing was that perfect. I. This was one part I didn't buy. Like, you definitely shot, and that was, I don't know, five minutes later, but you locked eyes with this guy, you know, and that's. Are you horrible?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah, yeah, it's horrible. I mean, it's. The thing that's so nasty about it is how fast it all went wrong. Yeah, I mean, I'm in the arcade. I'm playing the game. First of all, if anybody's played like, these, I think this was like a Jurassic park game. Nobody ever beats the Tyrannosaurus in the actual game. It costs.

[Julian Dory]

They're good.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Cost like $5. But regardless, regardless, I thought I was doing everything right. Fight. I was like, oh, yeah, they got the team out there. They're gonna send the young guy in. You know, the next person up on the list is the. Is earmuffs. I'm gonna be good to go. I've got four more hours to kill, and then they're gonna be off shift. I thought I had it all on lockdown, and. And then my peripheral eyes caught somebody familiar that was not the right person. Had I had my periphery caught Puma, the guy wearing the Puma suit, I would have been perfect. I'd have been like. Like, got it. Like, that's exactly what I expected. But instead it's like when you see something that's just out of place and you do a double take, the wrong person was there, and I looked at him and I was like, what? And then clearly he was also surprised to see me because there he was looking at me. If you've ever been to an arcade, this is what kills me. Every time I go to an arcade.

[Julian Dory]

Now he's got arcade ptsd.

[Andrew Bustamante]

It's sith. In a way. It's ridiculous, this, but the next time you're an arcade, the next time you go to, you know, whatever the. The adult arcade is or anything else, you'll notice nobody makes eye contact. Yeah, nobody looks at anybody. You're there with your friends, you're looking at the bar, you're checking out asses and tits, you're doing whatever you're doing, but you're not making eye contact with strangers. And it felt so horrible in that moment. Because I was like, we're looking at each other in this place where nobody's looking at each other.

[Julian Dory]

How long was it? It like 2 seconds, 5 seconds?

[Andrew Bustamante]

I think in reality it was probably a second to a second and a.

[Julian Dory]

Half, but it felt longer.

[Andrew Bustamante]

But it felt so long.

[Julian Dory]

Was it kind of like that scene in the town where they like get out of the car after they, they did the big getaway and the cop staring right at him and they're like, just look at him like this. And then the cop goes, he didn't see anything. And he just walks away because he's like, that wasn't supposed to happen.

[Andrew Bustamante]

I don't remember that sound, but probably got to watch that movie. Yeah, but it doesn't feel good and, and it feels so naked and dirty and. And you're. And then however long it, it was is irrelevant because what it feels like is I just, I just stepped on a hornet's nest. Like this whole thing is going to explode. I thought for sure that this dude, he saw me, I saw him. He's going to step away day and he's going to call in on the radio and he's going to be like, I got made. And as soon as he says he got made, the commander of the unit is going to be like, this person's intelligence trained. Because you can't, in the game of espionage, you can't be on the surveillance team and claim that you got burnt or claim that you got made and have it be because of your own error. They all cover each other's backs that way. So it can't be your mistake that made you get caught. Caught. If you got caught, it's because they were trained and they saw you. That's how you always escalate cases. That's how you make sure that nobody ever questions the surveillance report. Right? So I was like, oh, this is standard procedure. This person's going to get out, he's going to say, I got made. Commander's going to call in to command and say, hey, we've got an intelligence trained operative. At that point, either they're going to send in the capture squad because they've been waiting for me to give them a cue that I'm intelligence trained, or they're going to escalate the case and I'm going to have a new team on me in the next two hours or I'm going to have a team that picks me up in the morning. Like it's going to get worse. There's no way it goes from this to Better. It only goes from this to worse. And I don't even know what worse is going to look like, which is just incredibly disheartening.

[Julian Dory]

You were saying that you were doing some things during this time that I guess you were trained on, like at the Farm or at CIA to reduce stress. Yeah. And prepare your body for what's coming next. Like, is this strictly, like, breathing type things or. They're also thought exercises.

[Andrew Bustamante]

They're both. Yeah. It's a great point. There's. There's breathing exercises. I mean, things that you can learn in, in anybody who's been through adult therapy has probably learned breathing exercises that we learn at CIA. From box breathing to deep breathing to. To resistance breathing, where you, where you take a deep breath and then you resist as you exit, as you exhale it. There's all sorts of ways that you can artificially slow your heart rate, which reduces your blood pressure, which allows for clearer thought. So of course, I'm doing that as best I can without looking like I'm doing that as I'm in like a crash, bang, wreck up car game, trying to burn more time. But then you're also going through thought exercises where, where you're creating multiple hypotheses about what may have happened and what may happen next. And you're trying to identify what's the most probable, what's the least probable, and what can you do next. Because you want to create the most important thing when you feel overwhelmed with emotion, the most important thing is to create time. Because your logical brain works much slower than your emotional brain. So when you feel emotional, you feel the pressure to make fast decisions, when in fact, what you need to do is you need to give your emotions time to do whatever they're going to do. But don't make a decision until you give your logical brain a chance to catch it up. Because your logical brain will catch up. I. I think I've given you this example possibly, but at some point, I'm sure when you were a kid, you were walking through a dark room and you saw something in the corner that spooked you. Oh, it's a rat. Oh, it's a snake. Oh, it's a monster. And then a split second after that, you realize it's just a crumpled up T shirt or it's just a, a book that fell off the bookshelf laying open, Right. And then after you have that, that you feel a sense of relief. That's exactly how the brain works. Even as an adult, something triggers you and you jump or you startle because your, your emotional brain works so fast, it takes a half a tick or two before the logical brain is like, oh, wait a second, that's not a monster, that's a book. That's not a rat, that's a T shirt. Right. The same thing happens when you're making decisions in business. When you're making decisions in the field, it's never as bad as you think it is. First, you just have to give yourself time to work through it. It. So that's what I was trying to do, is give my logical brain a chance to catch up so that instead of just thinking a SWAT team's going to show up and I'm dead, I think, well, maybe not. Maybe something else will happen first.

[Julian Dory]

When did you start the process that maybe you had dodged a bullet? Like, how long after that?

[Andrew Bustamante]

I didn't, I didn't think that I was safe.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, you never thought you were safe. But when did you think, like, oh, they're not literally sending in, like the SWAT team to take me to the torture chamber. Remember this instant?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Oh, this instant. Yeah. I would say it. The last stop that I made before I called it a night was at a men's clothing store. And when I walked into that men's clothing store and I still had surveillance behind me and it was still the same team with the same people in the same vehicles, that's when I started to think, like, it's not game over yet. Something else is happening. There's still, there's still room somewhere. There's still room for flexibility.

[Julian Dory]

You were trying on belts. You were saying, belts, jackets, you trying them around the neck or.

[Andrew Bustamante]

No, just there's. If you've ever traveled. It's just shocking how predictable men's stores are. They all have the same thousand options for belts and jackets and hats.

[Julian Dory]

All right, so you get back to the hotel and you're still thinking like, oh, maybe they're going to take me at the hotel. And it was cool. And you were calculating, like the most logical times they might, like, burst through the door to take you based on what the attention would be from the people on hand. And you thought it was going to be between 10 or 11 o' clock at night. Why did you think that?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Because it's the right time of day to make the biggest scene with the least reaction. Here's, here's what was so fascinating to me in hindsight as I was going through writing the memoir. You know, everybody makes a big deal, especially the United States. We all promote training. Like, oh, get training and We've got the best training, and, you know, we. We go out of. We spend money out of pocket to go through, you know, survival training and SEAL training and all this other kind of training to try and make ourselves tough. What nobody ever talks about is how that training can work against you. And what happened for me, as I was reviewing, as I was going through my memoir, as I was writing the memoir, I was like, holy, man. I. My training, in a lot of ways, created a whole hell of a lot more stress and effort than if I would have never been trained. Don't get me wrong, the training saved my life. But nobody talks about the fact that when you actually need to use that training, all the other that's going through your head is just burning and burning. It's burning resources, it's burning cycles, it's burning speed, it's burning all sorts of stuff. So. So I thought, like, I. I'm exercising my surveillance detection route because I think I know how to do it, because I was trained a certain way. And then they actually reacted in a way different from my training. And now I'm going through this exercise in the hotel room where I'm like, well, if they're going to burst into my room, here's how I would do it. So then I'm building up this reaction to something that's going to happen in my mind at a certain time, because that's how I would do it. It doesn't happen that way. They did it differently. And it's like there's these instances throughout this, the memoir, where I'm like, I was trained to do it this way, they did it a different way. I was trained what I would call best in class. They were clearly not operating best in class. So then that makes it really difficult to predict how someone's going to operate because what. What's their training? School.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. Now, did. Were you already thinking to yourself.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Because.

[Julian Dory]

You'Re, like, sitting on your bed in the hotel room and kind of sweating this out, but it's a long time you're sitting there sweating this out. Had you already, like, accepted in your head that this was the last time you're ever going to be coming to this place?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah, I think I. I mean, even before that.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[Andrew Bustamante]

I knew that this would be my last trip into Falcon, probably for the rest of my life. Yeah. Which I'm not super sad about. Falcon's a cool place, but it's definitely not that cool a place. But, yeah, it was. It was a little bit of a bittersweet moment because the last. There are still places I would have loved to have gone. Like, there's my favorite restaurants, my favorite coffee shops, my favorite tourist stops, my favorite museums that I. That I came to love while I was there. And now they're gone to me forever. Like, I could have had one more chance. I was at the MoMA here in Manhattan yesterday and I had no idea that Starry Night by Van Gogh is on the wall in MoMA. I'd never seen it before in my life and I'd seen hundreds of pictures of it just like everybody else has, but nothing compared to standing six inches away from the. From Starry Night. Bingo. And seeing the paint and seeing the sword and like seeing it. And I know I can always go back and see it again.

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[Andrew Bustamante]

The stuff that I saw there, I'll never get to see it again.

[Julian Dory]

You'll never go there. Yeah. I mean, you do kind of know though, going into the job. There's a D day at some point.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

You know, even if it, you don't want it to be as dramatic as yours ended up being. But there's a point where something gets revealed afterwards or, you know, you have a successful mission and now they're on to it and you're not gonna be able to do that. So in some ways, I mean, mentally, you had to be prepared for that.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah. I mean, I would say yes, but that's another kind of sign of my age and ignorance. I didn't expect it to happen so soon. I didn't expect it to happen second tour. I didn't expect it to happen when I was still like, you know, in my early 30s. I thought that's the kind of thing that happens to you when you're mid career, 15 years in the job. Right, right.

[Julian Dory]

So you were still nervous because it was supposed to be a three day trip, but during this whole day where you're were doing SDRs and trying to evade these guys, you were also getting your flight changed to the morning to basically get out of there. And you had in your head a cover story that, you know, you accomplished what you needed to at your meeting. So you're going back home to the third country that you always go home to. And it was an early flight. You get out of there and you go to the airport, but you're thinking to yourself, the most logical way for them to take me, me, even before you were going there is to have them pull me out to get a second security check at the airport. Because you go into a room, no one sees and they never have to see you again. So did you. It seemed like you thought that was probably gonna happen.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah. So, you know, it's. Let's. This is a great opportunity to talk about how different the movies are from real life. Hopefully even just the people listening to the conversation who haven't had a chance to read the book yet or maybe will never. Read the book.

[Julian Dory]

Book.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Read the book, but link in description. Even the people who don't. I hope that by now they've come to realize professional intelligence is a game of disappearing, of not acting suspicious, but having nefarious intent nonetheless. So when it comes time to self evacuate or self exfil out of a country, you really only have two or three options. You can run for the hills and do whatever you need to do to escape through a jungle, on a boat, over a mountain and get out. Problem is, you're being followed. And as soon as you make a break, everybody knows what you're doing.

[Julian Dory]

That's it?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah, that's it. And then they just call in a wilderness team instead of a downtown urban surveillance team, and they wrap you up in the wilderness. Or you try to go some route where you have somebody else facilitate your escape. You try to rent a private boat charter, you try to rent a private plane. You try to hide yourself in somebody's trunk. Problem is you have a signal in your pocket in your cell phone. Everybody is helping you. Has a signal that's coming out of their device once again. They see you make a break for it. They watch you fall off the cellular map, and they're like, we got a runner. And then shoom. All the teams come in. The. Strangely, the way that you get out easiest, the way that you get out with the highest chance of success is to actually use all the formal borders that are in your place. So for me, I did the calculation in my head. I was like, you know what? I got made in the arcade. They haven't wrapped me up yet. I still have the same surveillance team on me outside that I did for the rest of the day. Either they're not communicating, or they're communicating poorly, or. Or there's something else going on here. Maybe it's budgetary, maybe it's logistics. Who knows? But I don't have any reason to try to run. So let's just try to cross a border. Let's see if the best chance is actually just to cross the border, because I know if they suspect me, they'll wrap me up at the airport anyways. And at least if they wrap me up at the Airport, it's in front of everybody. It's a formal government thing. Like now, all of a sudden, it's going to be an international issue because they took me at a legal border.

[Julian Dory]

It's public. Yeah.

[Andrew Bustamante]

So that's why I chose. We. We made as big of a splash as we could. I sent emails, I made phone calls to try. Sent out lots of signals that said, hey, I'm leaving early, leaving tomorrow, 6am leaving from, you know, this airport, you guys, I'm not trying to hide it. And. And that was the best I could do until I got to the airport and got pulled aside in the secondary.

[Julian Dory]

What happened when. When you got pulled aside, obviously you're like, oh, but what. What went down in there.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah, me is right. And then on top of that, I'm glad I was right about this. At least I knew that this could happen. So here are the chips that they have, here's the chips that I have. And then it got really strange and, and I, and I love this part of the story and I really. There's no other reason to read this. It's almost to read this for the story that happens at secondary because I was just telling you how training works against us sometimes. This is one of those instances where the training that I had received in handling an interrogation, countering an interrogation, resisting an interrogation, all of those things were very useful. But what was the most useful to me was understanding how the interrogation I was being exposed to was so different than what I was trained. It was so much less professional, it was so much less specific, it was so much less intentional. It was almost chaotic. And if anything, what that did is it gave me confidence through the interrogation. I was like, holy. What I went through at the Farm was worse than anything I'm going through now. Right. What I went through after I up with Major Bondo, however many years ago, four years ago, is worse than what I have now. And I could actually walk away from that, and I can't walk away from this. It was just so wildly interesting to see the training really come full circle where I was like, this is why we do what we do now. If only I can tell somebody this and I have to not this up.

[Julian Dory]

Right now know, but they. You felt like they, the guys who were questioning you were either like out of the loop or under trained. And when they were doing it, like you're saying it wasn't up to par. So how quickly after you sat down did you realize, like, oh, I might be getting out of here.

[Andrew Bustamante]

I mean, it was fast. So here's what's. Well, I didn't know how fast I'd be getting out of there, but here's what I will say. I sat down, and it was just within a few minutes of sitting down that the interrogation started.

[Julian Dory]

Started.

[Andrew Bustamante]

That's a no. No. That's a no. No. In real interrogations, you let them sweat.

[Julian Dory]

Well, you got a flight to catch.

[Andrew Bustamante]

They don't care about my flight.

[Julian Dory]

I know.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah. I mean, think about what you went through when we interrogated you, right? We. We at least let you. We were literally on us on a filming schedule, but we still let you sweat it out for five or seven minutes. There was no sweat shop at all here. Right. You're supposed to force a person to sweat and let the time do the work for you. You. You're supposed to sit them in a room that's uncomfortable. I sat in a room that was perfectly comfortable. You're supposed to sit them in a room that intimidates them. I got sat in a clean, bright white room. Nothing uncomfortable here, folks. Right. Like, it just wasn't up to snuff for what we do in the West. Now, either we're monsters or these guys were not prepared to be interrogating a potential suspected intelligence officer. Officer. One way or the other.

[Julian Dory]

How long was it overall?

[Andrew Bustamante]

It took about 90 minutes. Right. For the entire. For the entire interrogation to happen, which was plenty of time for me in an air. Well, not plenty of time, but it was. It was enough time for me to still get to my airplane, but it was just another example of that's not how it would have worked for me. Right. I would have let the dude sit there for 90 minutes with no food, no water, and I would have turned the heat up or down, and then just check in and be like, oh, we haven't forgotten about you. Are you doing okay? Is there anything I can get you?

[Julian Dory]

Dump a little water on them to the chair, Right?

[Andrew Bustamante]

The little things. Yeah, the little things. Let them know you care.

[Julian Dory]

So they. You get through this. They're obviously, like, somewhat out of the loop, but they had been told at least to flag you, and then they let you go. And you were like, you gotta act normal. Going to the. Even though you're trying to catch this flight, you gotta just walk to it, and you get there, you get on the plane. Then you got to think about how long it takes to get out of the airspace. Falcon.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yes. It was a. It was the worst flight I've ever been on because it's never far enough. Every time the Plane turns every time. It's like, it's just doing what a plane does, but in your mind you're.

[Julian Dory]

Like, are they going back?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Come with us.

[Andrew Bustamante]

What is going on? And then, you know, you finally. It wasn't until I entered my third party, my third country location, I was actually on the ground because I'm on a country, country carrier, a country controlled aircraft for Falcon. So it's not until I'm off that airplane that I feel like I'm actually not still on the ground in the country.

[Julian Dory]

Kiss that ground when you get down.

[Andrew Bustamante]

There, dude, I don't even care if it had someone, homeless guys pissing out with it.

[Julian Dory]

I've never been so happy to be in this all my life.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah, and then you celebrate and then you realize that you're hungry and then you have a giant diarrhea and. And then you're. You're all up because you realize all the cortisol dump and you're just like, right. I'm not a superman at all. I'm just a frail, weak little.

[Julian Dory]

Gotta be an insane rush. You got to be like, I got those.

[Andrew Bustamante]

I mean, there's a little bit of that. That's only a little bit, though. The most of it is like, holy, holy, holy.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[Andrew Bustamante]

And then, then you start the whole explanation to CIA and guess how many of them believe me?

[Julian Dory]

Zero.

[Andrew Bustamante]

I mean, James, James and the rest of the cell had my back. But once I started telling people like this is what happened to me, everybody was like, you up. You need to report how you up? Because we don't know because we weren't there. So. And then that turned into a whole after action report and the whole cell had to start. We had to scrub everybody's records, everybody's files, everybody's cases to see where the up it happened because we had to assume that the reason I was under surveillance was because somewhere we had made a mistake. Mistake.

[Julian Dory]

Did you ever find it?

[Andrew Bustamante]

We never found a mistake on our side. So that left the only other explanation, the mole.

[Julian Dory]

So even though you guys were a cell set up so that the mole wouldn't have access to that, something happened to where they at least knew who you were.

[Andrew Bustamante]

The mole. We had set up the cell so that I was exposed. That was something courier. I'm the courier. So that's how we had set it up. And we set it up that way intentionally and. And setting it up that way was beneficial to the CIA mole hunt on their side. So even after we had done our scrub and Langley had done their scrub, everybody Came back and was like, there was no error in operations. This was. This was the mole found you, and the mole reported you. And the good news, happy story at the end, they found the mole, and they were able to operate on the mole in large part because we got the right person to make the right mistake at the right time.

[Julian Dory]

That was always confusing, man. I found them all in one Google search. So everyone out there can. I don't know, like, are we allowed to do that if the camera's on me and I say search something and then it pulls up, try it, and you don't confirm?

[Andrew Bustamante]

I'm not going to confirm or deny.

[Julian Dory]

All right, so I'm going to. You. Let's. Let's get the camera on me. Joe, Google this, because I'm going to use the words in the book. CIA informant arrested o' Hare Airport, cash.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Which way do you want to go, Chief?

[Julian Dory]

That first one camera's still on me, right? Can I read the headline, Andy?

[Andrew Bustamante]

Go ahead, man.

[Julian Dory]

All right. How a $230,000 debt and a LinkedIn message led an ex CI officer to spy for China. Kevin Mallory went years without a steady job, making him a right target for recruitment. Court documents say now you're not going to confirm or deny, but the person that you write about in the book is named Scimitar. And what was confusing to me is that the guy had a CIA background, according to what you write, but had been outside of that for a long time. So I think you wrote, at some point he tried to get back into, but didn't necessarily get in. So how did he get access to, like, clearly some of the highest people in Falcon House to be able to get information?

[Andrew Bustamante]

You know, so one of the things that we. We find with moles, we found with what we call internal penetrations is that they. They have a ability to tap into networks of persons, people that they know, and then they also have the ability to tap into physical controlled networks that they have access to. So whether or not Kevin is the right Scimitar or whether it's somebody else, what we found is that the person who was able to report on Falcon House had both access to the systems at some point to some level, and access to the people at some point and at some level.

[Julian Dory]

And that was. You said this in the book. He. He wasn't discovered till after you guys had left CIA.

[Andrew Bustamante]

And if you think about it, let's just. I mean, let's talk about the. The meta. Right, the meta strategy behind the book. We created a book that was transparent because that's what we wanted to give. CIA read our transparent book and said, the American people will never see this. So then we asked them, how do we make this story? How do we make the details of this the important parts of the transparency that we want to share? How do we make this available? At first they said no, no ball. Later on, as we got into more legal back and forth and we started exploring the option of suing CIA, then they started to play ball a little bit more anymore. So what is in this book is still what CIA would have considered to be classified from three years ago, but it also allows for the areas where they have reviewed it and they have said, you're allowed to say this. So whether the o' Hare Airport was something that we intentionally intended to say at the beginning or whether that's something CIA came in with at the end is up to the reader to determine.

[Julian Dory]

But either way, it was allowed in there. So correct that we can pull on that kind of threat. Did you like, while you guys were still there though? First of all, when once you get made and get out of there and have this daring escape and then report it back and it gets handled and whatever, what happens to the cell after that? Because now they don't have a courier.

[Andrew Bustamante]

They find a new courier. When we built the architecture for the cell model, we made it in such a way that couriers, the nodes, as we called them, could always be replaced and that the scale, the model could be scaled in other places. So Wolf found a new. A new courier. And when, when Jihy and I both left Wolf to go on to our next operation, they found a new target or two. And then we helped start to train other units of CIA around the world how to build their own cell model. Some people picked it up, some people hated it, but everybody that picked up the cell model had their targeter, had their case officer pool, had their courier. Courier wasn't always a Sue. Sometimes the courier was a junior case officer or a tech person or a logs person, logistics person. But we all had the same kind of model with the same idea in mind.

[Julian Dory]

So you, this mission was clearly a success because you invented something new by using something that previously, like an enemy had used against you, you. And eventually part of the work leads to them actually uncovering the mole. And also along the way, you're getting a lot of intel on Falcon that you wouldn't be able have been able to access if the people that need to get that information had, you know, some sort of direct connection to the mole.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Right. It's actually funny because from CIA's point of view, the success was for the exact opposite it of the order that you laid out.

[Julian Dory]

What do you mean?

[Andrew Bustamante]

The first reason we were successful was because we got information on Falcon that we didn't previously have.

[Julian Dory]

Right. Okay. And then.

[Andrew Bustamante]

And then because we got them all, we also got them all.

[Julian Dory]

Okay. So you see that later, there's people from CIA who are publicly talking about not necessarily the detail you did, but the model of, like, having compartmentalization, which is kind of what. For case officers, which is kind of what. What you invented here. So clearly, in the modern day, some version of this has been adopted at a high level across the agency, around the world for different missions.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Right. So what's fascinating is that in the immediate aftermath the. The last few years of my career, I trained other people how to do this. My wife was also called in to train other people how to do this. We very quickly rose through leadership ranks, from middle managers to senior managers, based on the success of operations and our success exporting this model. But then we left, and we left for personal reasons. We wanted to raise a family. We had been promoted so fast in CIA that we were basically being pulled off of operations together. So there was. It just wasn't conducive. CIA is not an organization that really cares if you want to be parents or really cares if you want to be married. They want you to serve the American people. So we came to the conclusion. I had always come to the conclusion, I'd rather be married and be a dad more than be a public servant. So once my wife kind of landed on the same shoe in our success, we left CIA. When we left CIA, Allegedly, when we left CIA, we didn't take relationships with us. We didn't stay in contact with our friends who were still undercover. To do so would have been to risk their status. It wasn't until, I think, 2000, it may have been 2019, when the director announced publicly that CIA was going to reorganize. And he was reorganizing the entire agency into the same model that we had built in our shadow cell and the same model that we had taught around the world. So it's almost like our model went from the field to headquarters, which is exactly how we would expect change to work. Work because the field drives the operation, headquarters reacts. And that conflict must have continued for years. And to my understanding, it still continues because after the reorg, most of the NCS was angry. The only thing that. It's not the only thing, but one of the Main things that I am a little concerned about with this book coming out is all the angst and all the ire of CIA case officers who hate John Brennan's reorganization of CIA. They're now going to know we were part of what contributed to that reorganization that they all hate so much.

[Julian Dory]

John Brennan's not a well liked guy. And I'll, I'll go so far as to say he's not a good guy. Very, very clearly. I, I can't think of one thing I like about that guy at all. But him taking something that was successful and putting it into operational planning is what you should do. And I don't understand why. I could see why this wouldn't be useful absolutely everywhere. But when you need to compartmentalize things to basically create a safety outlet where you're still, not only are you still able to do your job, you actually really have more freedom to do it because no one's looking over your shoulder. Shoulder. I would assume as a case officer that would be something that you're like, well, yeah, sign me up. So why are people like, no, we don't want to do this. It's like they're saying they want a daddy at Langley.

[Andrew Bustamante]

It has no, it has nothing to do with the operation. And that's what's so sad. And this is one of the few things that I will say is really, really sad about CIA. It is a careerist organization. So everybody who's there and who stays there is always thinking, how do I get up in my career? How do I climb one rank higher? How do I stab my friend in the back so that I can be the next GS14 or GS15? Because they all know, they all know that at the end of a 20 or 30 year career, only a few people will be making $200,000 a year. The rest of them will be making $90,000 a year. So they have to stab and climb and scratch all the way up that, that pyramid. It used to be that you only had to compete against other case officers. Well, now, thanks to the cell model, thanks to John Brennan's reorg, anybody can become a leader. Anybody can be a courier, anybody can be a mission planner. Anybody can choose to start a new cell. You could be an analyst, you could be a targeter, you could be a tech person, you could be a politics. It's politics. And now if somebody runs a good operation and they're an analyst, they're dictating operations to a case officer. When it used to be only case officers could ever do operations the fact that I was a sue dictating operations to case officers, they didn't like that. They hate it. People back at headquarters hated it. The people in my cell were like, yeah, man, Andy has an idea, and we all decide if we also like the idea. It's a very collaborative environment. I had lots of bad ideas that never saw the light of day because my case officer peers were like, we don't want to do that. I also had lots of good ideas where my case officer peers were like, I never thought of that. That's not the way it works at headquarters. At headquarters in Washington, D.C. it's a game of how do I get out of this bow tie and how do I stab somebody in the back so that I can get back out to the field and do real work? And they don't like it when, when anybody else gets promoted ahead of them.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. You've always hit on the bureaucracy point with CIA and how that gets in the way. And I, I, I, I get it, because it's not. That's where it's like, how would it be different than the dmv? Makes sense to me.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Because you just have enough people like the Jim Diorio 1/3 he talks about. There's enough of those at a big organization that it just pulls down a lot of weight on the ship and stops things from happening.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Yeah. So there's again, it's a little bit bittersweet. Even the release of the book is bittersweet. Tweet. Because for all the CIA people that think that I'm worthless or think that I'm a faker, think that I'm overstating my, my success, which I've never overstated my success. I've always just said I'm a guy with a, with a voice. That's all I am now. They'll see. Guess what? I'm really not a success. I am a farm flunky. I'm not a case officer. People have called me case officer. You'll never see me once say, I'm a case officer. Officer.

[Julian Dory]

I think we've always referred to you as just CIA spy.

[Andrew Bustamante]

For the record, a lot of people just refer to me, what I call myself as just a field officer. Right. That in many ways, yes. All you haters on the Internet, you're right. I'm not great. I'm not God's gift to CIA. I never said I was. In fact, I wrote a book telling you about how bad I was at being a CIA officer. But I actually did get to do some Cool. I actually did get to work for CIA. I actually did get to. To impact the safety and security that we used to get to enjoy that is now depleting every week. But it's not about me. The really impressive people were the people who were in the cell with us. And this. This book talks about how awesome all of them are. Even in this conversation, I don't talk about me as much as I talk about how awesome they were. My wife was so awesome. The operators at case officers were super awesome. We haven't even touched on how badass the tech ops and the linguist were that worked with us. The people that work at CIA are incredible. And the few of us that get to talk about CIA. I have no problem being the target of your jokes, because these people aren't.

[Julian Dory]

Are you happy with how your career went in hindsight?

[Andrew Bustamante]

If it didn't go the way it went, I wouldn't be where I am now. I can't argue with that. There's. There's some famous inspirational quote out there that I don't remember talking about how your. Your darkest moments are your greatest opportunities or something along those lines. And that's certainly true. I wouldn't have my two amazing kids. I wouldn't be living where I live. I wouldn't have the wealth that I had had. I dedicated my life to that joint.

[Julian Dory]

All right, there's a lot more on the bone here, but we've been talking for, like, 3 hours and 35 minutes or something, so unless you wanted to do a second podcast, and I think you got places to go, we'll have to do that another time. But your book, we're putting this out, I believe, like, the day the book is coming out. So the link is in description below. It is excellent. You have another one coming behind it as well. And I think what we should do. It would be better if, like, you came in here and I had both you and Tommy G. In here, and then we could do, like, a full recap of that and really get, like, Tommy's perspective on planning this whole thing out and, And. And how it went down, because in hindsight, it was. It was pretty wild. I mean, I wouldn't do it again, but, you know, it's nice to say we did it once and, you know, we could react to some of the footage from Short too, but that was a. That was an interesting experience, and I was very impressed with how. In character. Yeah, I think they were all impressed, too. You were the entire time? Because it was. There were a few. Oh. Moments in there.

[Andrew Bustamante]

I had your back, man. I knew you weren't gonna get hurt.

[Julian Dory]

Hurt, yeah. But still, I was like, I can't let Andy break me for clout, so I'm gonna have to feel some pain today. And I. I hadn't really thought about that this morning, but here we are. So, anyway, thanks as always, for coming in, everyone. Go check out the book, and I'm sure the comment section will love you, as they always do.

[Andrew Bustamante]

Thanks, brother.

[Julian Dory]

All right, everyone else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.

[Andrew Bustamante]

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[Julian Dory]

Let's go.

[Andrew Bustamante]

And young Mason Moore got more done quickly uploading HD product demos and video conferencing. Without freesight, the numbers look good. Brad, you're on mute. Switch from cable Internet to ziply fiber and get more of what you love for $65 less per month than cable@z fiber.com.