Transcript: CIA Spy Andrew Bustamante on Figuring Out With Raj Shamani (FO441)

And then it goes away and all those little heat signatures have stopped moving.

And then you see more heat signatures move in because the military moves in to verify that everybody’s been killed. And then thumbs up mission success and you give each other high fives and you move on to the next target. That’s a non-intimate killing. But it’s very hard to go from college to dropping bombs on people. So they have to walk you through a process.

The Brutality of Cold Exposure Training

RAJ SHAMANI: What’s the most brutal training you underwent?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The hardest training for me was cold exposure. And a lot of cold exposure training is married with first responder or field medic training. Because when you expose somebody to cold for long periods of time, their body starts to react. And it’s a perfect opportunity for you to also practice medical triage. When do they need fluids, when do they need covered? When do they need to stop the exercise?

And I’m not a very big guy, so I get cold very quickly. And when I get cold, my whole body wants to stop working, my brain wants to stop thinking, my body wants to start shivering. I can’t keep my hands still.

And going through that training was brutal. It was very difficult. I remember being there with other people who were unfazed by the cold. I’ve met people who can feel the cold, but they can mentally ignore it. And it’s just incredible. And you see how different everybody is.

And I think the reason that I’m calling it brutal for me is because it showed me how weak I was in one specific area. And that’s a humiliating feeling to discover how bad you are.

Training vs Reality: Preventing Trauma

RAJ SHAMANI: What’s a training that probably you didn’t find hard or maybe even you didn’t even go through that training, but something that you have heard of, which happens in the CIA, and it’s really brutal, it’s dangerous, and something that you would never want it to happen.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: In professional intelligence, it’s nothing like the movies. And when people try to tell you a story that sounds like the movies, it’s a good chance that the story isn’t real because they are always working, especially during training. They have to prevent against trauma.

And if you just think about that simple thing, you have to prevent against trauma during training. Because if you traumatize someone in training, they’re a broken operator. They’ll never be able to operate in the field. So it’s like building your house and breaking your window. When you’re building the house, what’s the point? You have to replace the window. So much of training is very controlled.

It’s watered down in a way that it isn’t scary, it isn’t traumatic, it’s challenging, it’s difficult, but it isn’t traumatizing.

So we had to go through advanced interrogation training, how to give advanced interrogations, how to receive advanced interrogations. But all the stuff that you see in the movies about people being slapped, and I think there’s a James Bond movie where they have a chair and his testicles are cut out of the chair so they can hit his balls underneath the chair. That’s not the stuff that we train on because that’s very, very unlikely to happen in the field. It’s not realistic.

And if you were to train someone that way, you would ruin them. You would traumatize them, or they would come out of that and they say, “F* this. I’m never doing this job.” So you have to counterbalance the two.

I say that because I want to make sure people understand that when you use the word brutal, most training isn’t brutal. The real world is brutal. Training is not. Training is difficult and challenging to prepare you for a brutal reality.

The Most Dangerous Thing: Child Gangs and Street Crime

RAJ SHAMANI: You said you went all around the world and you saw how dangerous the world was. What’s the most dangerous thing you saw?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: So I remember being in South Asia, and there are these gangs of kids in South Asia that are… You think that they’re just beggar kids. You think that they’re just homeless kids begging, but they’re actually all managed by an adult who’s almost like a pimp or a manager for the kids.

And their job is to go out and beg from tourists, beg from locals, bring their money back, give it to their master, and then their master gives them food. Because the kids can’t use the money without the master. And the master is in control of the food, which is what the kids really want.

Well, sometimes the master also coordinates with gangs. So then the kids can actually go out and funnel people into an alleyway, or they can get people into a group, and then a gang of adults can come up and actually mug the people and I’ve seen this in Africa. I’ve seen this in South Asia.

And it’s a very scary thing because the people who are being rounded up don’t know it’s happening. So here’s 20 laughing, giggly kids who all come out of a corner, and they’ll put five tourists into a circle, and the tourists are giving away dollars and giving away candy or whatever else.

And then you’ll have this group of seven or eight adults come out with knives, tire irons, poles, axes, whatever. And they will mug the adults, and they’ll take their watches, take their passports, take their credit cards, take their money. And if anybody tries to resist, they make an example out of them. So somebody says, “Hey, you can’t do this,” and they hit him over the face with an axe. And then all of a sudden, he’s got a big split in his face.

RAJ SHAMANI: And…

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: And I watch this stuff happen all over the world, but particularly in Third World countries, I watch this stuff happen. And the hardest thing is you’re trained not to intercede because you’re in that country illegally. You’re there undercover now. Your passport is not yours, your driver’s license, not yours. Everything’s fraudulent.

So you can’t get involved because if you get involved, you’re going to have to do a police report. You might get interrogated, you might get questioned about what you saw, and none of your cover is going to hold up.

So you watch these things happen to innocent people. Sometimes you watch them happen to people that you don’t like. Anyways, I’ve watched Russians get mugged in foreign countries, and it doesn’t make me feel better that they’re Russian. It makes me still feel like they didn’t realize what was happening to them.

India’s RAW: One of the World’s Top Intelligence Agencies

RAJ SHAMANI: But let’s try to talk a little bit specific about India, okay? Because you went on the record and you said that India has one of the top two agencies in the world. There’s RAW and there’s the Intelligence Bureau, which is IB. These are the two. Why did you say so? What made you say so?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Because people don’t realize it. And part of the reason people don’t realize how good Indian intelligence is is because Indian intelligence is so good.

The Research and Analysis Wing, RAW, is a very close collaborator with the West. They are very effective at being able to identify terrorist activities, threats to the homeland, counterterrorism, counterintelligence. And that capability is largely informed because of their relationship with the west, with the French, with the British, with the Americans, with the Germans, the Canadians.

So there’s this close partnership between Indian RAW and Western intelligence, and that makes them… That gives them the best resources and gives them the best training, but it also gives them access to all the intelligence capabilities of those Western services.

That said, what India is the most focused on is Pakistan. So almost all of their efforts are really focused on countering Pakistan, which makes it simpler for them because they don’t have to look at 160 other countries. They only have to look at one.

They will look at China because China is a growing threat. They will look at other countries in the region, and they’ll keep an eye on factions inside India that are working against the government. But their primary goal is Pakistan.

And Pakistan’s primary intelligence service, the ISI, uses terrorist tactics. This is something that’s so important that people don’t understand. Pakistan’s Federal Intelligence Service are using terrorist tactics in India.

The West’s Role in India-Pakistan Division

“They’re blowing things up. They’re killing people. They carry out atrocities that the United States deems illegal, that the UN deems illegal. But it’s so delicate with Pakistan that people continue to cooperate with them. Why? It was the West that really caused the division between India and Pakistan in 1947 is important. It’s not like India and Pakistan always hated each other.

India is primarily Hindu and Pakistan is primarily Muslim. And the British really came in in 1947 and decided, hey, here’s the Muslim part, we’ll call it Pakistan. Here’s the Hindu part, we’ll call it India. And then ever since then, there’s been conflict because you can’t divide a country based on tribal alliances like that. So much of the animosity between Pakistan and India happened because of the West, didn’t happen because of them.”

Pakistan’s Islamic Identity vs India’s National Identity

“From that animosity, they had to lean into their own strengths. Pakistan is a small country with very few natural resources. India is a large country with a great deal of natural resources. So as India built its commercial enterprise, Pakistan had to lean into its Islamic roots and rely on partners in the Arab world to keep it alive, to help it build its infrastructure, to help it build its own economic base.

So what that means is India became independent, they became Indian. Pakistan became Arab. They didn’t identify as Pakistani as much as they identified as Muslim. And that’s a big part of what we see now, because now, seventy years later, India has a national identity as Indian. Pakistan has a national identity, but it doesn’t trump its religious identity as Islamic.

So they will use tactics that are being used by all across Islam, including Islamic fundamentalism. But India refuses to use fundamentalist tactics because it identifies as a nation first. That’s also why India is the preferred nation over Pakistan worldwide. And I understand that’s going to make Pakistanis pissed, but the truth is the truth.

People see the value of India, they don’t see the value of Pakistan. People understand India is a commercial, growing, entrepreneurial manufacturing hub, tech hub of the world. Pakistan is not. Pakistan is just a strategic geographic ally that sits between the East and the West.

You go back to the global war on terror. Pakistan harbors terrorism. It hides terrorists, including Osama bin Laden. It lies to its allies. It’s a complicated, difficult place that also has nuclear weapons. India is trying to become first world. India is trying to establish and grow itself as a competitor to the Chinese and to the United States by making itself an ally to the Chinese and the United States.

But there is no comparison between India and Pakistan on many, many levels. But the reason that Pakistan turns to these terrorist tactics is because it’s their advantage as Islamic in their Islamic community to use tactics and to lean into fundamentalist Islam and these shreds of terrorist cells that continue to exist.”

The CIA-ISI Complicated Relationship

RAJ SHAMANI: You know, we come back to India, RAW and intelligence agencies, but let’s dive into Pakistan, ISI for a while. ISI and CIA also hold relationship. Now you say you’re aware of this whole thing, that ISI is using terrorist tactics against India, against a lot of other places, which is problematic, which is illegal, from the U.S. standard, from the West standard, from the world humanity standards. Still, you have a complicated relationship. Still people support them in some sort of way. Why would they do so?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The fact that you call it a complicated relationship is exactly right. And the answer is in that definition. Pakistan also has incredible access into the Islamic world, into fundamentalist Islam. So while they may try to harbor terrorist activity directed at Afghanistan, directed at India, they don’t want to harbor terrorists that are hiding there from Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar. They don’t want to harbor other terrorists.

So they have a very robust counterterrorist capability. Their people are trained. The United States, the British have trained Pakistan to find and counter terrorist activity in Pakistan. The problem is Pakistan doesn’t share all of what they know. They only share a portion of what they know. And what they share is valuable enough that the West continues to cooperate with them.

The other thing is Pakistan doesn’t trust the West because again, Pakistani identity is heavily tied to being Islamic. So if their primary focus, their primary identity is Islam first, well, the West is not Islamic. The West does not believe in Islam. The West does not follow, predominantly follow Islam. So there’s always this distrust on a religious level, which is a distrust on an ideological level.

And then of course, Pakistan remembers that it was the West that split the continent between Pakistan and India. So there’s this inherent kind of animosity towards the West. So they help just enough for the West to reward them with money, training, resources, military equipment, etc. And Pakistan generates enough revenue that it can buy Western weapons.

RAJ SHAMANI: You specified an incident with Osama. So CIA didn’t share any intelligence with Pakistan because they were afraid that ISI would leak it. But at the same time, for twenty years, they were getting a lot of intelligence and working together against Al Qaeda. So there was like at one point, you try to not share things because it’s illegal. It’s some sort. You understand that they support certain terrorists in some sort of way. And then at other side, you share intelligence.

And still till date, there’s no clear, are they ally or are they an enemy? Are they doing right or wrong? Are they good for the world, bad for the world? We need to take a stand at one point, right?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: That’s the average person’s thought, is that you have to take a stand. That’s not the way that intelligence works. That’s not the way that the government works.

Why Intelligence Agencies Never Take a Stand

Once you take a stand, once you make a statement, then you are at risk of being a hypocrite. You are at risk of looking like you’re going back on your word. That’s why you see so many politicians who never really take a stand. They always move. They say, hey, new information came in or they changed their mind or there’s something they didn’t know about. You have to trust me on this.

There’s all these reasons that people don’t take a stand, because when it comes to geopolitics, there’s no benefit in taking a stand. For example, let’s just say that we stood against Pakistan today. Well, what if a new president’s elected? What if there’s some sort of upheaval in the country? Do we still take a stand or do we change our mind?

Look at what just happened in Syria. For decades, people have seen Syria as a safe haven for terrorists, as a dangerous place, as an ally to Iran. And then there was an uprising. A new government took over and people had, there was about a year and a half where people weren’t really sure, should we support this new government or shouldn’t we support this new government?

And now we’re seeing more support the government, but only after we saw continued attacks. And the new government that we’re supporting in Syria is backed by a former Al Qaeda member. The world’s a dynamic place. So you don’t want to take a final stance. You want to do whatever’s in your temporary best interest at any given time.

RAJ SHAMANI: What’s the advantage for America or CIA to continue supporting Pakistan?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: We have spies that can tell us about India.

RAJ SHAMANI: And why do you need to have that? Why do you need intelligence against India at this point? Because, you guys, India and CIA is sort of allies.

Why the U.S. Needs Spies in India

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: They’re partners, very similar to Pakistan and the United States being similar and being partners and allies. The truth is India is mature enough. India is smart enough to know that India has to take care of itself. So let’s not beat around the bush. India is not trying to be a Western country. India is not trying to belong to a Western bloc. It’s not trying to belong to a Western group.

In fact, it’s associated itself with an Eastern economic group called the BRICS, which involves China and Russia. So India is very independent. Well, India’s not going to tell us everything either. So how do we know when India is lying? How do we know when India is telling the truth? How do we know when India is operating in the best interest of American interests and when it’s working against us? We need spies in India. Well, who’s the best at getting spies in India? Pakistan.

RAJ SHAMANI: That’s the only reason.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: That’s the main reason. The other thing is, you know, India’s increasing its cooperation with China, not in a military way, but in an economic way. So if we want to get to China, we can get there through India. There will be Chinese people in India. There will be Chinese technology that goes into India. There will be digital trails that travel between India and China.

So the easiest way to get access to China might not be through China, it might be through India. So that’s another reason why we want to have spies in India. We want to have relationships in India. And as much as it might be difficult to understand, as long as there’s conflict between India and Pakistan, there will always be an interest from both sides to get help from the United States. Weapons, intelligence, tactics, training.

So we don’t want peace between India and Pakistan. If there was peace between India and Pakistan, nobody would need us. So the United States knows that. So the United States is happy to play on both sides to just keep enough friction that you don’t turn into nuclear war. But you do continue to distrust each other.

How Superpowers Fuel India-Pakistan Tensions

RAJ SHAMANI: So you’re telling me that the United States of America and CIA, they fuel certain sparks between India and Pakistan to make sure that they keep fighting the whole world because it’s in the interest of USA.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The whole world does that.

RAJ SHAMANI: How do they do that?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: So part of it’s covert influence, part of it’s political.

RAJ SHAMANI: Give me specifics. How does this happen?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: So there are, you’ve got social media in India, you’ve got newspapers, you have TV channels, you have billboards, you have politicians. So all the first world countries, the United States, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, we are going to fund both sides, both the pro-peace side and the pro-conflict side.

We’ll pay for ads, we’ll have cutouts, we’ll have assets that continue to kind of keep the distrust alive. Whether that’s in magazines, whether that’s stories on the Internet, whether that’s TV shows, whether that’s production companies that fund TV shows. We can place screenwriters into the script writing department of television channels, we can hire journalists to write certain stories, we can create bots that post stuff on Facebook or post stuff on Instagram.

The world is incredibly easy to shape with covert influence, especially when there’s already an inherent distrust in the country. It doesn’t take much to just validate somebody else’s fear. You can just create an AI picture and just say, hey, here’s Pakistanis hurting an Indian child. And the same picture with a different poster can say, hey, here’s Indians hurting a Pakistani child. And that can just fund, that can fuel enough conflict back and forth.

And that’s what more nefarious countries, Russia and China would absolutely take advantage of doing that kind of operation. Whereas what the United States would do is more sophisticated. It would only give certain intelligence to Pakistani intelligence that shows egregious activities in India, and it would hold back other intelligence and then it would give India intelligence about egregious activities in Pakistan, but hold back other intelligence.

And the whole reason that we’re doing that is just to continue this internal conflict between your two countries. Because as long as your two countries are in conflict, your resources are being used against each other, your attention is being focused on each other, your economies are both being depressed, so you can’t grow because your GDP is being focused on military and intelligence activities.

You’re manipulating geopolitics the same way that you manipulate children in a playground. Hey, Johnny doesn’t like your hair. Hey, Jimmy thinks your mom is stupid. And now all of a sudden Johnny and Jimmy are fighting.

The Reality of Global Power Dynamics

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It’s f*ed up, but it’s how the world works. It’s how the world works.

Do you think the world’s going to be better if we just let everybody grow? If we just let everybody have a fair chance? If we just let everybody try to become the biggest and the strongest?

No, because as everybody gets bigger and stronger, there is more conflict. Inevitably, big strong people run into other big strong people and they want to know who’s the bigger and the stronger. There will always be a limitation of resources. This is economics 101. You can’t have everyone succeed.

Right out the Bible in the Christian faith, the Torah in the Jewish faith, the Book of Mormon in the Mormon faith, the Buddha in the Buddhist faith—they have all taught us there will always be suffering. Human beings will make each other suffer. You can’t fix it. You can only prepare for it.

But we have been sold this idea of fairness and equality. Fairness and equality is what you feed children when they’re in school to make sure that they grow up to become adults that work quietly in a factory.

In real life, you should know this more than anybody. There is no equality and there is no fairness. You either have it or you don’t have it. You have the network, you have the money, you have the power, you have the vision or you don’t. And when you have it, you don’t give it away.

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you think this is just because of economics and you don’t want everybody to grow to keep the world in a peaceful way? Or is it just America’s play to control the world and they just want to keep being at the top? They want to rule, they want to maintain their position, and they don’t want anyone to challenge them in any sense, any form of ways.

The Historical Pattern of Empire

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It’s a great question. It’s not America because it’s a strategy that existed long before the United States. Before the United States, there was the British Empire, there was the Ottoman Empire, there was the Soviet Union, there was the Persian Empire. Like it goes back. There’s the Aztec Empire, the Incan Empire.

We’ve learned as human beings that you need to create an economic benefit. Whether that’s agricultural, whether that’s technological, whether that’s informational. You need to create an economic base power structure and then you need to use that power as leverage to protect yourself, and then you grow more power to protect yourself even further.

It’s kind of like when you build a hill out of dirt. One scoop of sand creates a small hill, and then you have to scoop more sand to create that hill. But eventually your hill gets so big that your sand starts to fall into the holes that you were digging. So you have to dig holes further out and further out again and further out again because you have to pull in resources to make your hill big.

This is how the whole world has always worked. It’s just that up to World War II, it was never global. Prior to World War II, you had a strong country in Asia, a strong country in Latin America, a strong country in Europe, strong country in North America. And we were all kind of segregated. We were all different.

But we had to ally during World War II. We had to start sharing resources during World War II. UK is getting bombed. America’s not getting bombed. So America gives its money and weapons to the UK to protect it. The Soviet Union is trying to fight a war, but it’s running out of resources. So the United States and China support Russia in World War II. And the same thing’s happening across Europe. The Nazis are pulling resources from every country that they attack to consolidate resources to build a bigger pile of sand.

So the strategy that America is using now is no different than the strategy that’s been using that the world has been using forever. And if America is no longer the leader of the free world, some other country will have the next biggest sand pile, and they will continue to draw on the same process.

RAJ SHAMANI: So how America maintains a superpower now, what are they doing? What are the ways they’re trying to control and maintain the power?

Trump vs. Biden: Two Approaches to American Power

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The chaos that you see in the United States right now is because the United States is trying to answer that very question. Donald Trump, our current president and our previous president, President Biden, had two very different ideas of how we are going to secure the United States.

What I don’t know and what we’re all going to discover with the next election cycle is whether those ideas are personal to the president or whether they’re based in the party. Is it that the Republican Party, the Conservative Party, thinks one way, and the Liberal Party, the Democratic Party, thinks a different way? Is that what’s driving us? Is that what’s driving the chaos?

But in the case of the United States, what’s driving all of the chaos is for sure this question of how do we maintain our superpower status?

Donald Trump believes we need to carve out our technological advantage. We need to put tariffs on other countries because we have all the money. And if we put tariffs up, then they have to work with us if they want access to our money. He believes we need a stronger military. He believes that we need to essentially tax everybody else in order to have access to our market. That’s what he believes. That’s what he’s trying to carry out. And there’s part of the American population that doesn’t agree with that. But there’s another part of the American population that does agree with that.

Joe Biden and before him, Barack Obama, believe that the way the government, the United States maintains its superpower status is with diplomacy and positive relationships. We should be attractive to other countries, so they want to do business with us. We should help the countries educate their own population so we give visas so that Indians can come to the United States, learn a great education, go back to India and make India stronger because a stronger India is better for the United States.

Because Joe Biden and Barack Obama still manipulated India behind the scenes. They would still choose what intel got shared and what intel didn’t get shared. They would still fuel the conflict between Pakistan and India. We understand as the world superpower that it benefits us when countries can stand more on their own but are still dependent on the United States.

So you’ve got President Biden, President Obama trying to make the world dependent on the United States quietly. You have people like President Trump trying to make the world dependent on the United States very obviously.

The Tools of American Superpower

RAJ SHAMANI: Well, let’s go to the specifics of how US is trying to do this whole game and how are they maintaining their superpower. First, we divided into multiple parts. Let’s say CIA as an operation forming, controlling, making and breaking different governments around the world. That’s one thing.

Then 800 military stations all around the world covering the military power. That’s one. Then data colonization by controlling the data of the world by what you said, covert operation, making sure that countries fight with each other. Then there’s economic colonization in some way that you give people certain debt, money, control their economies or put sanctions and bunch of stuff. Let’s go one by one.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Yeah.

RAJ SHAMANI: Why do they do this and what’s the real reason behind it?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I love that you’re going down this road because it’s so interesting and I’m happy to talk about why and how we do it because everybody will understand that other countries do it to each other also. It’s just that for the United States, we’re the easiest, the easiest person or the easiest country to watch because we’re the largest country.

RAJ SHAMANI: Also because you do it at scale, which is insane.

American Primacy: The Core Doctrine

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: And the best place to start is to understand right now there’s only one global superpower, only one. It’s the United States. Everybody else is trying to rise up to the level of the United States.

So that seems very unfair for every other country. Why does America have all the wealth? Why does America have all the freedom? Why does America have all of this information?

RAJ SHAMANI: Right.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It seems very unfair. But put yourself in the shoes of the American government. The American government knows it actually has no friends. There is no other country out there that will cover our back. Every other country in the world wants to see the United States diminished because the weaker the United States gets, the better everybody else gets. That’s the way everybody wants it to be.

Again, it’s just like at work. Everybody hates the boss because the boss makes the most money. The boss has the most power. Well, in geopolitics, everybody hates the United States because the United States has the most power and has the most money.

So we already know, as a CIA, as an executive branch, as a legislative branch, as a political body, as a civilian population, we already know the whole world wants us to fail. If India becomes the next superpower, the whole world will want India to fail. If China becomes the next superpower, the whole world wants China to fail. Because when you’re the biggest, most powerful, everybody’s your enemy.

So the reason CIA does all four of those things that you just talked about is because we know everybody else is against us. It just depends who is partnered with who, who’s friends with who, at what time, how much money they put into fighting us versus how much time they put into fighting some other threat. And because we’re so wealthy and because we’re so powerful, we can impact, we can influence.

So the number one reason why we engage in all of that is because we have to protect what we call American primacy. One of the first things you’re taught when you join CIA is American primacy.

RAJ SHAMANI: What is it?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: American primacy is the idea that as long as America comes first, the world is a better place.

RAJ SHAMANI: Why do you believe so?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Because we are only looking through the lens of Americans. Another way to say it is as long as America comes first, American lives are better. As soon as America doesn’t come first, American lives will be reduced.

Americans only speak one language. By and large, soon as we’re not the world superpower, we’re going to have to learn somebody else’s language. We’re going to have to depend on somebody else’s economy. We’re going to have less control over our own financial markets. Our currency is going to be dependent on somebody else’s currency. So the US Government under no circumstances wants that to happen.

RAJ SHAMANI: What’s something that you guys do to maintain the influence or increase the influence, which probably people like me don’t know about?

Currency Manipulation and Global Economic Control

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: One of the biggest areas is understanding currency. I don’t think people understand how currency really works. Currency is kind of like a stock, like a stock for a company. Currency is kind of like rice or milk or bread. There’s only a certain amount of it, and that certain amount is determined by how much has been created at that moment. And every country can create more currency. That’s part of the problem that we’re economically in right now.

But let’s just assume that there’s only a fixed amount of currency. If there’s $100 on the table right here, every one of those hundred dollars is worth the same amount. Well, if you reach out and pull 50 of those dollars off the table and you say, “Hey, these $50 are mine. Nobody else can have them.” Well, for the rest of us in the room, the remaining $50 just increased in value because there’s $50 that none of us are going to get, and the rest of us have to split whatever’s left.

How do we get it? We have to start grabbing and reaching for it and taking it as quickly as we can. And then at the end of that day, somebody’s going to have $10, somebody’s going to have $2, somebody’s going to have $25. So it’s not equal.

Well, now, if you take your $50 and you put five more dollars on the table, we’re going to fight for those five extra dollars, which means that we’re going to fight harder than we fought for the previous 50. So that means that $5 that you just put on the table are worth more than any of the other dollars that were on the table. And then once we fight and bleed over those, you might put out $2, and we’re going to fight over those even harder.

You’re literally controlling the value of the money, even though empirically the money is all the same price. You’re actually creating the perception that the money is worth more because instead of having $100 to choose from, now we only have $5 to choose from.

The United States does this all over the world. We do it with the US Dollar because sometimes we put more US Dollars in the market and sometimes we take them off the market. But we also do it with other currencies. If we want to increase the value of the yen, we’ll buy a bunch of yen, which is going to make the UK buy yen and France buy yen and China buy yen, and the price, the value of the yen goes up.

And then we sell, and now we buy more US Dollars back with the yen that just went up. And then what does everybody else do? They sell their yen to try to recoup their costs. We were the only ones that did this for a long time. But then China started to mimic us. And now you see China doing the same thing with their renminbi that we do with the US Dollar, with a major difference being that the United States has different divisions of government that control the value of the US Dollar, where in China, only one government controls everything.

So they can literally say the renminbi is worth more at the snap of a finger, and then everybody reaches in and buys it. So we manipulate currencies just like people manipulate stocks, just like you and I would have manipulated the dollars that were on the table. We’ve been doing it forever.

I think people know to a certain extent that it happens, but maybe they don’t realize how easy it is to impact entire national governments. We can make every person in India wealthy overnight if we chose to. We could make everybody in Pakistan wealthy overnight if we chose to. So we choose instead to make them systematically poorer.

Here we’re going to make your currency worth less simply by putting it back on the market. And then nobody else wants the currency either. So now your economy goes down until you sign an agreement with us to help us in this certain policy area. And then we’re going to buy your currency back off the market, which is going to increase your national wealth, which is going to make everybody happier.

That’s what you see with the tariffs that Donald Trump put out there. The tariffs are just there to make your money worth less because you have to charge more for the same product. And then nobody wants that. So the government officials don’t want you to suffer. Your government doesn’t want you to suffer, so they have to go negotiate with the President.

What does the President want? You’re going to buy your technology from America, not from China. Okay, fine. We’ll sign that paperwork. And now your tariffs get lowered from 300% to 37%, right?

RAJ SHAMANI: See, US dollar is equal to controlling the money of the world.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: And that is why everybody wants the US dollar.

De-Dollarization and the Shift in Global Power

RAJ SHAMANI: And people have understood this, especially countries like India, Russia, China. They’ve understood and there’s a massive thing going on which is called de-dollarization. The world has understood and that’s why now India wants to trade in their currency, China wants to trade in their currency.

And especially after more incidents like the petrodollar conspiracy and entire thing, people have understood not to buy oil anymore in US dollars because that’s the most expensive thing that people are buying all around the world. So now that people have understood dollar and they’re refusing to not choose dollar, do you think that this stance and this self-awareness will eventually lead into the change of world order?

Because in instances which something which was not possible 20 years ago, like dealing in oil with your own currency is now getting possible. India does that, China does that. Russia I’m sure is doing that as well.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It’s a great point. And de-dollarization is a fantastic example of what happens when the United States and other countries start to abuse the currency. Now, the world has woken up to the fact that the dollar is a controlled, manipulated currency. So how do we decouple from the dollar? Because as long as you’re reliant on the dollar, you will always feel the effect of what the United States chooses to do.

The only way that you get to be independent is if you take yourself away from the US dollar. And even economists in the United States all agree the dollar is dying. But just because something is dying doesn’t mean it’s dead. Just because it’s slowly declining doesn’t mean it’s going to go away. Doesn’t mean it may not rebound and come back in popularity again.

Because what the United States benefits from right now is there is no other currency that is comparable to the dollar. If there was, people would have been able to abandon the dollar quickly, but they can’t. The Euro is strong, but not strong enough. The renminbi is popular but not popular enough. The yen is historic but not historic enough. So people still rely on the dollar.

If anything, they’ve moved from the dollar into precious metals. They’ve moved into gold, they’ve moved into silver. They’ve tried to move into blockchain currencies, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. They’re trying to find alternatives, but nobody trusts the alternative as much as they trust the US Dollar.

So the decline of the US Dollar has been happening, but slowly. That’s what you see the American administration trying to fix. Donald Trump doesn’t want the US Dollar to decline. He wants it to be strong. All of his wealth is also in US Dollars. So he needs to find a way to make people faithful to the US Dollar again.

He thinks he can do that by changing regimes and bombing across borders and making threats that eventually the world’s just going to stop trying to decouple from the dollar. The Liberal Party of the United States, the Progressive Party, thinks that we can do it by being more reliable and more trustworthy, because they know that to change from the US Dollar to something else is very risky and very expensive.

RAJ SHAMANI: What do you believe? The change in world order is coming or no?

The Shift from Unipolar to Bipolar World Order

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I think there’s a change in world order coming. I think we’re already seeing a change in world order. I think that 10 years ago, the world was unipolar, meaning it had one superpower, and everybody fell under that superpower 10 years ago. Now it’s a bipolar world. There’s an Eastern power and a Western power.

That Western power is still led by the United States, and it’s still very ideological, meaning it’s very focused on democracy. It’s very focused on equality. It’s very focused on gender rights and work rights and taxation and representation.

But then there’s the other half of the world, the Eastern half of the world, that’s very pragmatic. They don’t care about your ideology. You want to have a democracy, fine. You want to have an autocracy, fine. You want to have a monarchy, fine. What matters to the east is that we have economic trade, that we all work in a way that makes us all wealthier and richer and more stable.

That practicality is a very strong, very attractive alternative to what has historically been the United States forcing its ideology upon everyone. The United States has fought more wars and lost more wars over its ideology than it ever did before. Vietnam, failed ideology. Gulf one, Gulf two, failed ideology. Afghanistan, Iraq, failed ideology.

We haven’t been able to export democracy at the tip of a sword, and we keep losing these major conflicts because of it. I understand that the government says that we won. All the soldiers know we didn’t win.

But this practical, pragmatic approach that was originally started by Brazil, Russia, India, and China has now grown. Now there’s 13 members of the BRICS community. Many of them have always traditionally been allies to the United States, like Saudi Arabia. You’ve got these countries that are realizing we don’t have to follow your ideology to be economically powerful.

And that bipolar shift that’s happened in the last 10 years is not slowing down, it’s speeding up. The BRICS countries have greater value for their currency, meaning they can buy more from the grocery store than they ever did before. And the purchase price parity, the amount of groceries the US Dollar will buy against the amount of groceries any of the BRICS currencies will buy, has been changing.

Where American dollars buy you less at the grocery store and the Indian currency buys you more at the grocery store. That’s unignorable. And yet somehow the average American ignores it.

RAJ SHAMANI: Which country do you think has a fair shot of leading this new change which is going on in the world? So China, Russia, India. I think these are the three frontiers. Anyone else?

India’s Strategic Position in the New World Order

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Yeah. What I anticipate happening. So China is creating, China’s leading it. China is leading it through the lens of anti-Western sentiment. That’s their ideology essentially, right? Hey, the United States has been abusive, the United States has been manipulative. The United States has undermined you and they forced you to follow a certain ideology. We will help you get stronger. But you don’t have to agree with us, you don’t have to be communist, you don’t have to use our currency, you don’t have to agree with Xi Jinping. But we’re an alternative, right?

China’s leading the charge because it has the wealth to compete against the United States. It has that wealth because it stole technology from the West. It has that wealth because it was focused on growing its military and growing its telecommunications infrastructure while the United States was fighting a war on terror. It didn’t get that wealth organically. But that’s kind of irrelevant. They did what they had to do and now they are a power to be reckoned with.

But as that pragmatic world kind of grows, China will be less of a manufacturer. They’ll be the head of the new body, but not the heart of the new body. So who will be the heart of the new body? I think that will be India, because I think India is already poised to manufacture more. It’s already poised to take in more investment than any other country because it’s lacking in infrastructure, it’s lacking in manufacturing base, but it’s got an incredible amount of people, an incredible amount of land, and it has very flexible policy.

Because Indian leadership, generation after generation, Indian leadership understands that to serve all Indians, it needs to be a very wealthy country, whereas China has the opposite. China doesn’t think about serving all of the Chinese. It’s planning to just let the old Chinese people die and just have a smaller population in the future.

Xi Jinping doesn’t say that outright, but you can see from their policy, they’re not worried about old people dying. They’re not worried about their social welfare system. They don’t value family the same way that the Indian people value family. So India wants to be big and wealthy. China wants to be smaller and wealthy.

The United States has already proven that if you have a civil war, you’ll cut your population down by 30% and now everybody’s wealth goes up. So we’ve kind of set the standard for what China is trying to do. But that puts India in a position where it can benefit from both China and the United States and India can 100% benefit from the conflict between the Chinese and the United States.

RAJ SHAMANI: Where do you see India? Do you see India supporting China or US if there was a war between US and China?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I see India being neutral. I see India being neutral. I understand that inside India, the politics are very unpredictable, right? Very volatile. And that’s because Indian people are very volatile, right? I have yet to meet a calm Indian.

RAW vs CIA: Comparing Intelligence Approaches

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It doesn’t take much before they get very excited about something, right? So it makes sense that India and their politicians are so volatile internally because externally they’re very consistent, they’re very collective.

That’s one of the reasons that India continues to be a closer partner to the United States than Pakistan. Pakistan is not consistent. They have radical changes in their promises and their focus and their economics and their military stance. India doesn’t. India is very steady, like a train, right?

So if there’s a conflict between the United States and China, India will serve both sides. India will be very similar to what Switzerland has always been. And I think India models itself off of that neutrality.

So when the United States puts sanctions on Russia, Iraq, India doesn’t accept those sanctions. It will still do business with Russia if it’s in the best interest of the Indian people. And the United States can complain about it all they want, but India knows, “Hey, if you don’t want to buy from us, that’s fine. We have this whole other Eastern bloc that will purchase from us.” And the United States was all, “Well, shucks, we’re going to keep buying from India anyways.”

The United States knows that we are heavily dependent on Indian talent in our tech industry. They can threaten to shut down visas all they want, but there is no country in the world that pumps out intelligent, scholarly, technologically inclined, mathematically inclined engineers like India. English speaking and also English speaking.

So what are you going to do? You’re just going to cut off that whole talent pool because of your ideology? No. So India as a government, and not just the current government, the previous government too, and the next government as well, they understand like, “Hey, the United States may make a big noise, but they need us.” And India plays that. And they know the same thing’s true about China.

RAJ SHAMANI: If you were still in CIA today and you were still active with the spy network and everything that you understand how United States work, how India works, how would you explain India to the America right now? Because India from 50 years ago was very different.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Yeah.

RAJ SHAMANI: India today is very different. Forget 50, 20 years ago, India was different and today India is very different. India used to be dependent on certain people or certain countries. Now we are not. India used to be very neutral. Now we still are neutral, but with our clear stance as well.

Earlier we used to not comment on anything. Now we are clear that Indian rights, Indian interests, national interest over anything and anyone’s ideology. Indians have started calling out for the first time about the Western hypocrisy, about the games that United States have been playing with China, Russia, India, Pakistan. We say it out loud, right?

We are focusing on our economy, we are focusing on our citizens interests. We are focusing on just us at this point. And that’s why we’re friends with everyone and we want to just trade. So today’s India is different, right? And we already spoke about RAW and CIA before, right? So it’s we are in a much better position. How would you explain India to America’s president right now?

India: The Panther in the Global Jungle

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: If I was director of CIA and I had a meeting with the President, I would say, you know, there’s all these countries in the world that are making noise to get attention. Russia’s making noise, Ukraine’s making noise, France is making noise, China’s making noise, North Korea is making noise.

All of the noisemaking countries are not who we should be focused on. We need to focus on the quietest countries that yield the most power. And the top of that list is India.

India is a quiet country. You don’t create conflict. You don’t argue just to argue. You are correct. You are more confident and more politically verbose than you’ve ever been. But only when asked. You’re not out there waving a flag and making noise just to make noise. You’re not trying to get everybody to notice.

India is saying, “We’re focused on India.” And when something else intersects with us, we stand our ground and we’ll make the headlines that day, but we don’t make the headlines the next day. Whereas in the United States, we literally do whatever we can to make the headlines every day.

So I would warn the US President, “Hey, if you think of a jungle, if the world is a jungle, India is the panther. It’s deadly, but it’s black, it hides in the night. If you don’t look for its eyes, you won’t even know it’s there. And it doesn’t hunt everything, but it hunts when it needs to hunt. And if you’re going to hunt the panther, you need to be ready for a fight.”

That’s very different than China, which is like the rhinoceros. It’s very different than Canada, which is like the hippo. There’s all these North Korea is the snake. You’ve got all these countries that kind of represent these different categories in the jungle, but there’s only one that has the teeth and the claws to do real damage. But it selects when it fights, and that is India.

RAJ SHAMANI: Interesting way to describe India. What do you think is the biggest strength of India right now? And what’s the biggest weakness?

India’s Greatest Strength: Education and Cultural Identity

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Two great questions. So I think one of the biggest trends in India is education. I think India understands that it has a large population that it has to educate. And it’s constantly trying to find ways to expand that education through food programs, through social programs, government programs.

I mean, there are so many children that are so far in rural India that are so underserved that the government understands that a big part of what makes them successful is they can take very successful Indians out of India just for four years for university, two years for a job, three years on a visa, and then they come back and they bring all that knowledge back to India.

Because one thing I will say is fascinating about Indians, they are Indian first. Even if they are what do you call them? ABCD?

RAJ SHAMANI: American Born Confused Desis. Yes. Even if they’re American born Indians.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: They’re still Indian first.

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Right. And there’s a that cultural identity is very powerful. And I think the government of India understands that that cultural identity is going to continue to mean that all of your successful Indians bring that success back to India.

You yourself are successful worldwide. You bring that success back to India. Right? You bring that reputation, you bring that wealth, you bring the currency, the tax base, you bring the business, whatever, you bring it back to India.

So India is correct to be thinking that education is important. Educate more Indians, find more talent, create more talent that can go out in the world and come back and be successful again.

India’s Critical Weakness: The Manufacturing Trap

I think one of the weaknesses in India is that they are still trying to replace existing processes. They’re trying to step in and be the new manufacturing base. But wealth doesn’t come from manufacturing. Wealth comes from creating high tech, high ticket price, high value solutions.

The United States created their empire following World War II by being the epicenter for technological development. The reason China stole so much from the west was because China knew that if they were ever going to stop being the world’s manufacturing base and all the pollution and the water structure and the infrastructure challenges that come with being a manufacturing base, if they were going to get past that, they had to focus on technology.

So they focused on telecom and they focused on electric vehicles and they focused on Internet and AI and robotics. Well, India is now seeing an opportunity to become the new manufacturer. But that’s not going to be what makes them very wealthy. That’s not going to be what makes them truly independent.

India has an opportunity to essentially create another competitor to China because India has the kind of relationships with the United States where the United States will gladly give intellectual property to India that they would never give to the Chinese.

They would let, they would give India the opportunity to create semiconductors so that we wouldn’t have to be so dependent on Taiwan. They would give India the opportunity to manufacture fighter weapons, tanks, airplanes, trucks, avionics, drones. We would give that to India.

These are technologies that come at a very high price versus trinkets, toys, clothes that come at a very low price. China grew on trinkets and clothes. India was at the same time a competitor to China in terms of basic manufacturing. But India hasn’t yet realized that it can skip a level.

It can skip right to high tech development by stealing from China, by bartering with the United States, simply by being an alternative. Because the United States, above all things, doesn’t want China to succeed. That’s what America wants more than anything. So don’t let China succeed. So we’ll help India succeed if it keeps China from succeeding.

I think China knows that and that’s part of why they have increased their offensive position against India. And I think India understands it’s in the crosshairs of China. So they’re trying to maintain friendships with everybody, like you said.

But that’s a vulnerability for India. If India doesn’t take a chance soon, then it’s going to be stuck as the manufacturing hub of the world for the next 30 years. The air quality is going to get worse, the water quality is going to get worse, poverty is going to get worse. You’re going to keep having more children than you can educate because you simply don’t make enough GDP for everybody.

RAJ SHAMANI: You keep saying that China steals from America. In what ways?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: China steals from America in every way.

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you think TikTok is a way to steal certain things?

TikTok: China’s Tool for Influence and Intelligence

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I do. I absolutely do. I think TikTok is more of a tool for influence than it is for theft. The way that TikTok is used for theft is that the algorithm and the mass data collection is owned by the Chinese.

So now they know what age groups are watching, what content, what genders are being influenced by, what messages, what gets the most likes, what gets the most dislikes, what geographic region logs in the most, what Internet provider is used the most, how much time people on average spend on TikTok, which can be expanded to how much time they spend online.

Imagine if you wanted to do harm to a country. How useful is that information? How useful is it to know that there are more people using more hours of TikTok on a Verizon based Internet provider in Chicago than anywhere else in the country?

Who, how are you going to prioritize which Internet provider you shut down first? Well, it’s like, “Oh, this is easy. Let’s learn how to shut down the Verizon Internet server because if we can kill that one server in Chicago, we’re going to shut down Chicago, but it’s probably also going to shut down other parts of the country.” That’s what they get to learn.

Oh, we can see that there are a lot of everybody talks about children like 10 to 15 is what we all think of when we think about the influence that TikTok has. My concern is all the adults that are on TikTok.

You know, how many people recognize me from TikTok and I don’t even have a TikTok account. People recognize me from TikTok because I’m on somebody else’s TikTok feed. But the average person who uses TikTok, they don’t realize that the content they’re watching isn’t always controlled by the personality that they’re seeing. And they don’t bother to look in the lower left corner to see who’s actually creating the content.

So how much influence do you have? Not over 15 year olds who have very little impact, but influence over 40 year olds, 60 year olds, 30 year olds, 20 year olds. How much of the challenge that America is going through right now, culturally, because of the social media age has been cultivated in part by TikTok, but in part by Meta, in part by all the social media companies?

We already know that 2016 elections were tampered with by the Russians through Facebook and through what was then Twitter. They know this. So what are we doing about it? That’s my answer to how is China stealing? Do I think TikTok is a tool? They steal the metadata, but then they use that metadata to create influence on the right networks.

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you also feel it can be a great spy tool? Because probably it’s listening to your conversations, tracking your location.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It’s not a problem. All of social media are phenomenal spy tools. Here’s a major difference. People remember the 1960s and 70s when CIA would create its own technology.

We would create the SR-71, we would create drone aircraft, we would create Stuxnet and blow up centrifuges in Iran. We would create technologies from scratch. So now some of the best technology that we use out there isn’t developed by CIA. It’s developed in the open market. It’s developed by innovators and engineers.

One of the biggest tools that the United States uses to create new technology isn’t engineering, it’s industrial investment. We can invest in a new technology and part of that investment means they’re not allowed to share it with anybody else. So that’s how we can stay one step ahead of everything, because the United States has become the tech innovative sector of the world.

RAJ SHAMANI: Explain me how you see RAW and CIA. Like, what are the differences? What do they do? How are they different in approach?

RAW vs CIA: Structure, Funding, and Operational Differences

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: That’s a good question. And I would love to be smarter on RAW. We call them RAW.

Yeah, the Research Analysis Wing. If I’m happy to use the word RAW, if that’s what they’re called in India.

But CIA is largely a human intelligence centralized intelligence aggregator. So what that means is CIA is the primary intelligence service in the United States for collecting human intelligence, for going out and meeting with people and getting secrets from people and turning those secrets into intel reports that get condensed into analysis reports that get shared with the President.

But it’s only really for human Intelligence. NSA does signals intelligence. DoD or DIA does defense military intelligence. And we have all these different intelligence groups that do all sorts of different things inside India.

RAW doesn’t really only serve one purpose. It serves multiple purposes. It has paramilitary activities. CIA also has paramilitary activities. But CIA’s paramilitary activity is small. RAW’s paramilitary are comparatively much larger.

RAW also handles more than just humans. They handle sigint, they handle open source intelligence. They don’t serve as the only aggregator of intelligence around all of India, whereas the United States CIA is the central aggregator for all intelligence.

CIA is what produces a daily report for the President. I don’t know if RAW creates a central intel, a central daily report for the Prime Minister. I don’t think they do, but I don’t know.

So those are kind of some of the differences. CIA is very well funded, one of the best, highest funded intelligence organizations, government agencies in the United States. RAW is not one of the highest funded government organizations inside India. So there’s a number of differences in those ways.

Also, RAW’s focus is on analysis. CIA’s focus is on intelligence. And what I mean by that is RAW’s focus is on producing something useful from multiple sources of intelligence. CIA is not necessarily focused on analysis. They’re focused on the multiple sources of intelligence.

They centralize the intelligence and then from there they try to create useful analytics or useful analysis of the intel, where for RAW, it’s in the name, analysis is critical to them.

And then of course, the number of enemies. CIA is focused on the whole world, but the Research Analysis Wing, RAW, is primarily focused on Pakistan.

Another fantastic difference between CIA and RAW: CIA, everybody knows about CIA. There’s Wikipedia pages about CIA. You can find it in movies and television shows. But nobody talks about RAW. Right?

It’s still either a secret because they’ve kept the secret, or it’s a secret because India doesn’t make noise. They don’t want the world to think that they’re good at intelligence. They want the world to think that they’re bad at intelligence. So then they’re constantly underestimated. CIA is the opposite.

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you think they’re bad at intelligence?

India’s Intelligence Capabilities: Silent Professionals

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: No, I don’t think so at all. I think that India is one of the best countries at intelligence worldwide. Maybe they’re not in the top three. They’re not like the Mossad, which always makes a big splash. They’re not like CIA, which always makes a big splash.

But they’re very similar to the British MI6. British MI6 is very, very good, but nobody talks about them. You never know what they’re doing. Right? Well, India is a former colony of Great Britain. Where do you think RAW was trained? By MI6.

So they’re both what we call silent or quiet professionals. They’re very good at what they do. They don’t even leave a trace. They’re more like Russia.

When Russia carries out spy operations, by and large, you don’t know they’re happening. Yes, sometimes they kill somebody in public with a cyanide pill or with a poison umbrella, but not often.

How many times does the SVR, the Russian intelligence service, how many times does SVR make the newspaper? Almost never. Neither does MI6, neither does RAW. Who makes the newspaper all the time? F*ing CIA and Mossad.

RAJ SHAMANI: But that can also be a technique or a strategy, 100%, to just make so much noise so that people don’t know what really is going on behind the noise.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: They don’t know what you’re actually capable of. They become afraid of you. We call this information warfare, right? Not covert influence, because it’s not covert. It’s very overt.

But it still creates this information landscape where you’re intimidating the world into thinking, well, if they can do that, what else can they do? Right?

RAJ SHAMANI: RAW operates at a much, much lower budget than CIA. Does that, as a former CIA spy, does that bother you or does that impress you?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It’s impressive more than anything. Anytime people have effective national security on a small budget, that’s impressive considering what the United States spends on national security.

But I also go back to the fact that India is really focused on one enemy. One enemy means that you only have to have enough budget to cover protecting you against one enemy. The United States has every enemy. Like every country in the world is in some way, shape, or form an enemy. So we have to have a budget that covers every country in the world.

India’s Biggest Threats: Pakistan and China

RAJ SHAMANI: Which is the biggest threat to India?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Pakistan, without a doubt.

RAJ SHAMANI: Pakistan. What is some threat that we are not aware of? I would imagine some level of intelligence.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: No. Yeah, yeah. So I think the biggest threat to India is similar to the threat to the United States: China.

Strategically wants to keep India minimized, just like China strategically wants the United States to be on decline. Because not only does China not want the United States to improve, it doesn’t want any other new superpower to rise to compete with China.

Because China knows what it’s doing to the United States and it doesn’t want to let anybody else do that to it. So it will partner with Russia to keep Russia down. It will partner with Iran to keep Iran down. It can suppress these economies.

India is still independent, so it’s figuring out what to do with India, which is why almost every quarter the relationship between China and India changes. Because China will overstep and show that it’s trying to suppress India and India will take back its claim and China will back off.

And you have this very contentious relationship between the Chinese and the Indians. But that’s not a threat that you’re not aware of, I would say. It’s a threat that can be very difficult to identify because it’s multifaceted.

It has to do with your military and their military, your economy and their economy, your technology and their technology. Every time an Indian company uses a Chinese technology, that Chinese technology is capturing Indian data and it’s saving that Indian data and it’s preparing to use that Indian data against India.

The United States isn’t that different, which is why India should be investing in its own organic, its own native infrastructure.

Operation Snatch 400: RAW’s Counterterrorism Success

RAJ SHAMANI: Have you heard about Snatch 400?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: No.

RAJ SHAMANI: There’s an operation, according to reports, that India was able to snatch about 400 people in Nepal, Bangladesh and all around the world with just that kind of budget.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Wow. So snatch meaning render, like capture.

RAJ SHAMANI: In just one decade, they were able to identify these people who are national enemies who have done different kinds of terrorist activities. They’ve been able to either bring them back to a country from Nepal, Bangladesh, Colombo, or they’ve been able to terminate them, destroy them, neutralize them.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: We like neutralize more than terminate.

RAJ SHAMANI: Or kill them in some form, or extradite them legally, illegally somehow. So they’ve been able to do that. That’s like Mossad level precision.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Well, yes, it’s very impressive. But let’s also make sure there’s almost zero chance that RAW did that by itself. It’s almost certain that they did that in concert with the United States or with the UK because they were going after terrorist targets.

That’s one of the big benefits for countries that are allied with the United States. One of the reasons so many countries, even though they don’t like our President and they don’t like our policies, they still cooperate with us because they know the United States helps other countries with their own national security issues.

So you can, instead of spending your own money, you can spend American dollars to capture terrorists that are a threat to India. All you have to do is go to the United States and say, “Hey, we have a target. Here’s where they are, here’s what they’re doing. They’re an Islamic extremist. And we know that you want to capture Islamic extremists. It just so happens that this Islamic extremist is planning an attack in Mumbai.”

Well, now you get the benefit of still neutralizing the terrorists. The United States gets the benefit of capturing another terrorist. And you don’t have to spend as much money or as many resources because the United States will come in and provide Navy SEALs, airplanes, helicopters, planning, satellite imagery, intelligence, infill plans, exfil plans, night vision goggles, everything.

They’ll pay for it all to take down the terrorist, even though the terrorist was planning an attack in India.

RAJ SHAMANI: So that’s smarter.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Very smart. Yeah.

RAJ SHAMANI: Make Americans pay for the stuff that we want to get done.

The Rabinder Singh Defection Case

RAJ SHAMANI: So CIA and RAW work together on a lot of different missions, right? There are reports. I don’t know how true that is or how false that is, because to validate the truthfulness in this whole matter is way above my intelligence and pay rate.

So I’m just going to ask you, do you think, do you know about it, or do you think it’s true? So I’m going to read it as it is because I don’t want to get it wrong.

So it’s like, in 2004, there was a guy named Rabinder Singh, a RAW Joint Secretary, defected to the United States with classified files. He’s reportedly living in New Jersey now with CIA asylum.

So now the question is, when a CIA asset defects from a partner intelligence service with classified files, what does that do to the relationship between two countries?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It’s very difficult. It creates an incredible amount of tension. That said, what you just read is by no means impossible. I wouldn’t even say it’s unlikely, because the relationship between the United States and India is strong. But it’s not close.

RAJ SHAMANI: Right.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The United States knows that India is going to do its own thing. It helps with China. It helps with Russia. It skirts sanctions. So it’s not like they’re so close to India, like they’re so close to, say, Germany.

And it is absolutely a standard kind of intelligence operation to have one country have an individual defect with classified information that they bring to another country, and then they basically trade asylum for their classified information.

So all of that makes sense. And if the information is important enough, the United States would say, “You can stay here.” If the information wasn’t that important, they would send them right back to India because it’s about the information.

Is the information worth the geopolitical blowback of pissing off India? Or is the information silly? And we don’t want the geopolitical blowback so we’re going to send it back.

So everything that you just laid out made sense according to that standard process. What I don’t know, what I’d be very curious about is what intel that officer gave. What do you think would be so valuable that you would give them asylum?

I wonder if it’s 2004. I wonder if it had something to do with Osama bin Laden. If RAW knew something about Pakistan granting asylum or granting terrorists safe haven, that RAW wasn’t telling CIA and then this person defected and told CIA that. Because that would be juicy enough to piss off India.

It could also have to do with Indian weapons development, Indian nuclear development. That’s another secret that India would never tell the United States. But a RAW officer might know.

It could have to do with Pakistani nuclear development. If Pakistan’s close to having or weaponizing or generating a new nuclear weapon, India might not want to share that. India might not want to share that because they don’t want the Pakistanis to know that they have a spy in Pakistan.

Well, that would be information that the United States would be willing to create a geopolitical divide over.

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you think it’s possible this whole thing?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The whole thing is very possible. I’m trying to say I don’t think it’s not. It’s not even low probability. It’s very possible and it’s very probable.

RAJ SHAMANI: And it’s crazy what these guys do.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Well, don’t forget. I believe it was India that was recently accused of killing a high, high value target in Canada. Yeah, not that long ago. Talk about capability. Right? That’s India able to assassinate in Canada. That’s impressive. That’s Mossad level stuff.

The Canada Assassination Allegation and Five Eyes Intelligence

RAJ SHAMANI: There’s assumption or maybe let’s say Canada at that time. Trudeau, he accused India of killing. How true or false that is. But according to the Five Eyes intelligence. Right? These are like five countries who share their intelligence report. They don’t do intelligence operations on each other. That’s what they say.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Correct.

CIA Under Different Administrations

RAJ SHAMANI: Right. UK admitted that they heard something and they had the information about this conversation. So probably if UK heard, US also knew this. Right? Then why didn’t they share it with Canada? Why didn’t they talk about it?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Chances are Canada also knew it then.

RAJ SHAMANI: Why are they now creating a fuss about it? To talk to, say, as if India did something wrong? Because if India did it, let’s just—we are assuming that. We don’t know that yet.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: If anybody was planning an assassination in your country, if it’s not against your citizen, then you handle it differently, right? If somebody’s going to—if there’s a threat of killing a Canadian citizen in Canada, then the Canadian government is going to reach out to the citizen who’s in danger. But they’re also going to try to apprehend the person who intends to do harm to their own.

If you’re not a Canadian citizen, it’s a whole different level of effort. Because think about how much time and how much money, how many Canadian tax dollars would be spent protecting a non-Canadian inside Canada. That’s how the intelligence world works.

It’s so sad, but it’s so true. If you are the target of an intelligence operation, you can do nothing to stop it. You’re done. If they want to kill you, if they want to arrest you, if they want to shut down your business, if they want to take your money, you have no chance because they have every power, every resource, every gun pointed at you, every satellite pointed at you.

There is nothing you can do to stop an intelligence service that’s targeting you. Any intelligence service. I don’t care if it’s the Nigerians, they’ll do it.

RAJ SHAMANI: Who do you think they’re spying on?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: India?

RAJ SHAMANI: Who are, like, intelligent services? Who are the kind of people they spy on?

Who Intelligence Services Target

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The primary kind of rubric for intelligence is people who have access to sensitive information. So if you don’t have access to sensitive information, you’re already off the list. So all the waiters and the waitresses and the veterinarians and all the dentists of the world, they’re all off the list because they don’t have access to sensitive information.

Then inside of sensitive information, what intelligence services are really focused on is sensitive information of a national security element, meaning how do you maintain your national security? Or how do you degrade another country’s national security?

So now when you look at that rubric, it gets even smaller. Accountants are probably not on that list. Neurosurgeons are probably not on that list. They both have access to sensitive information, right? Bankers are probably not on that list. Engineers are probably not on that list. Computer programmers are probably not on that list.

Even though they all have access to sensitive information, their sensitive information is not of a national security concern. So what intelligence services want are the people who can reach into the way that a country defends itself or the way that a country attacks another country.

That is still pretty significant. That’s broad because there’s cybercrime, there’s military conflict, there’s intelligence conflict. You’ve got financial crime and financial activity, organized crime, cooperation between countries. Trading of science, trading of medicine, biological chemical weapons of mass destruction, nuclear capabilities, energy infrastructure, economic espionage, industrial espionage.

There’s lots of ways that one country protects itself and degrades another country. Even someone like you, you influence 13 million people on YouTube alone.

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you think I’ll be—I can be the one on their radar?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: You’re absolutely on their radar. You’re for sure. I would be surprised if Indian intelligence doesn’t watch you. I’d be surprised if UK intelligence doesn’t watch you. I’d be surprised if American intelligence doesn’t watch you.

Somebody has your name on some list somewhere, and they’re either collecting and watching your content with a human being, or they’re collecting and watching your content with a bot or an AI so that they can wait and see when something happens that’s out of the ordinary.

This episode, 100%, this episode is being watched by a human being at CIA, guaranteed.

RAJ SHAMANI: Hi.

And what are they going to get out of it?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Hopefully nothing, but they’re probably watching it to make sure that I don’t expose too many secrets. They want to make sure that I don’t cross the line. Especially because you are not an American citizen. They don’t want me sharing outside of my briefing, outside of what I’m allowed to share with another.

RAJ SHAMANI: How do they know that you have not shared something with me offline?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Well, that’s because they also would—well, they don’t trust me. They know that there’s a legal obligation.

RAJ SHAMANI: They would never know.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: No, they would know.

RAJ SHAMANI: So, like, if you share something with me offline when the cameras are off, how would they ever get to know? They’ll never.

Surveillance Capabilities

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: That’s a—don’t ever think that an intelligence service can’t know. I just went through this with you. If an intelligence service wants something, they’ll get it. They’ll get it. My cell phone is sitting right over there. Where’s your cell phone sitting?

RAJ SHAMANI: It’s off somewhere.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: That means there’s a satellite right now that can place your cell phone and my cell phone within the same geographic footprint. And we have both accepted software on our cell phone, probably from Facebook or from Instagram or from Twitter, that lets them put that software on there.

So now, your phone, my phone, his phone, her phone, her phone, all of them are geographically in the same place. And if they can all be geographically in the same place, they can be hacked into any one of these phone numbers. And as the phone numbers are hacked into, they can turn on the microphone in any one of those phones.

They can pull the contacts list, they can pull the recent messages, they can pull the history. They can pull up anything that’s on the buffer system between uploads. So all of that, if they wanted, it could be pulled. Maybe not in a moment, but they could pull it all.

And then they could track where your cell phone goes after today and where my cell phone goes after today. And his cell phone and his cell phone, and her cell phone. So even though we might all go in 10 different directions, they can track us all.

So now, if there’s an email, if there’s a recording, if there’s a picture, if there’s a snippet, if you ask him a question, “Hey, remember when Andrew said that thing about Pakistan?” That might be all it takes for them to be like, “Oh, we know that they had some conversation off camera or off screen.”

And that’s assuming that they don’t put in a warrant to pull all of your footage before you edit it, because it’s being recorded on American soil using American power coming out of that American outlet right there. So they could pull all of it with a warrant. Right.

They could also just pull you aside at secondary and say, “Raj, what did Andy say? We’re not letting you go back to Indiana until you tell us or back to India until you tell us what he said.”

RAJ SHAMANI: Thanks for scaring me.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It’s not as hard as people think.

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you think they’re capable of character building as well?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Meaning building a false character?

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah, building someone in my life, planting it so that they just want to have—

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I don’t know.

RAJ SHAMANI: They’re different ways.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: That’s what human intelligence is.

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah, like building friends in my life, building mentors in my life.

Human Intelligence Operations

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Sexpionage, all of that. It is planting people into your life that gain your trust. That’s all human intelligence is. CIA doesn’t use sexpionage, not like China does or Russia does or North Korea does. But the United States will absolutely leverage other avenues of human intelligence.

They’ll create business opportunities. They’ll create shared networks. They’ll have somebody who is a friend of yours already introduce them, because the friend doesn’t know that they’re CIA. Anything that you can do to gain access to a person, they’ll reach out to you on LinkedIn. They’ll meet you at your favorite coffee shop, they’ll follow you from home and go to your favorite massage parlor.

Whatever it is, if they want you, they’ll find a way to connect with you. Now, just because they connect with you in person doesn’t mean that you’re going to like talking to them. Doesn’t mean that you’re going to know they’re CIA. Doesn’t mean they’re going to win.

It just means that they were able to—they were able to start the conversation. But then it’s the skill of the officer that makes it so that you feel like you want to talk to them again, talk to them more, travel with them, be friends with them, share secrets with them. That’s all based on the officer.

RAJ SHAMANI: How was CIA under Obama versus how CIA under Trump?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Totally different.

RAJ SHAMANI: What are the differences?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Totally different. CIA under Barack Obama was working the way it was always built to work. Meaning the president is the head of the executive branch. CIA is under the executive branch.

Remember, the US Government has three branches. The legislative branch, which is all of our representatives, our congress people, the House, the Senate, etc. The executive branch, which is the president and the White House, and then everybody who directly reports to the president, like Department of Defense, like CIA.

And then you have the judicial branch, which is everything that has to do with the law of the land. So the FBI is part of the judicial branch. The juries, the judges, our judicial system, all of that falls under the judicial branch of government.

CIA falls under the executive branch of government, which means the president does whatever they want to do with CIA. That’s how it was built. So under President Obama, the CIA did whatever President Obama wanted them to do.

And President Obama is one of the most lethal presidents in history. He used CIA for covert action worldwide. He waged a war on terror. He hunted down Bin Laden. That was exactly how CIA was built to be used by a president.

But in 2016, with the election of Donald Trump for his first term, CIA turned against their president.

RAJ SHAMANI: Why?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: They started saying that he was a Russian, he was guilty of Russian collusion. There were senior leaders who were signing petitions against the president, like CIA. Whether they were right or wrong about Donald Trump is irrelevant. The point is, they were never supposed to have an opinion about the president.

So when they worked against their president, Donald Trump just shut down CIA. He stopped giving them missions. He stopped giving them funding, he stopped using them. And he basically ruined every career inside CIA. Not because he was, but because CIA didn’t do what they were supposed to do.

So the President punished them and he was like, “I’m not going to use you.” So for four years, all CIA did was lose people. People were quitting, they were resigning, they were being fired, they were retiring early because they had no job anymore. They had no meaningful work.

The President wasn’t asking them for intelligence. He was buying his intelligence from private intelligence networks. He was collaborating with his international peers, the countries that he still trusted, but he wasn’t using CIA.

So then when Donald Trump left office in 2020 and Biden came back in, Biden tried to re-engage CIA the same way that Obama had. But Biden’s administrative policies were focused on Covid and domestic issues.

So he started hiring people back into CIA, but he was hiring them based on their gender identity and whether or not they were gay or straight. He wasn’t hiring people back into CIA who were there for the mission. He was hiring people into CIA who were there because they were in line with the domestic policies he was trying to promote.

And that only lasted four years before Donald Trump took over again. And then you had all these people in government who had only been two or three years at CIA, and now they have another four years under Donald Trump and they all left again.

But this time, Donald Trump got very, very smart with CIA. He didn’t give CIA a chance to make their own decision. He appointed Director Ratcliffe in charge of CIA. He appointed a DNI who he already knew was going to be in line with his policies.

So now he stacked the deck so that every leadership position in the entire stack of CIA understands that they have to take their orders from Donald Trump.

RAJ SHAMANI: But today, do you think CIA is weaker than how it used to be under President Obama?

The Weakening of CIA Under Trump

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Yes, without a doubt, CIA will tell you it’s weaker than how it used to be under President Obama. At the very least, the amount of talent that has left has weakened it.

Second to the amount of talent, the trust that the executive branch has is not in CIA. CIA is supposed to be an agency of last resort, meaning everybody else has tried and when they all fail, it goes to CIA. So how do you know who to trust? How do you know what intelligence is real?

I was talking to a peer recently who estimated that CIA, the amount of information in the PDB that’s coming from CIA is less than 40%. That more than 60% of the intelligence that’s being shared in the PDB is actually coming from other countries that have partnered with the United States.

That’s crazy. That means the President is being briefed. And the intelligence infrastructure of the United States doesn’t even know if it’s real. They just know that it’s what they were told by RAW or ISI or the Nigerians or the Filipinos or the Australians. It’s not even ours.

RAJ SHAMANI: These are the signs that you get weaker.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: These are the signs that you get weaker. It’s why it’s a very real thing. We’ve been talking about it however long we’ve been talking, Raj. The United States is not growing. It’s not increasing in size and scale and power. It’s on a decline that it’s trying to fix. But the problem is the whole world knows we’re on the decline. And guess how much the world wants to help us get better?

RAJ SHAMANI: Zero. Bingo. You’ve said that. Mossad, they’re reckless. Why? What are they willing to do, which other countries are not?

Why Mossad Is Called Reckless

RAJ SHAMANI: So Israel is just like a very small country and very focused, very effective, very focused. And the Mossad is one of the best in the world, one of the…

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Best in the world at what they do, which is very high risk, very targeted operations against threats to the homeland. That’s what Mossad does. They don’t do anything broader.

RAJ SHAMANI: But why are they reckless?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: So the term reckless is because they take risks. I use the term reckless because they take risks. And the risks are not always commensurate with the risk that needs to be taken. Sometimes they move fast or they move in contrast, or they do something that seems important to them but costs them exponentially in comparison.

Just look at the attacks that Netanyahu had on the Gaza Strip. Those were reckless. He turned the whole world against Israel because of a reckless series of attacks. He could have measured his attacks. He could have reduced them. He could have found a different way to handle it, but he didn’t. And that’s the president of the country or the prime minister of the country. The organization that does the prime minister’s bidding isn’t that much different.

When Israel went across Iranian state boundaries to launch an incursion from drones, why did they do that? Did they do that because they had to? Did they do it because it was the least risky option? No, they did it because they wanted to send a secondary message. They could have had a much safer operation had they launched from an allied country like Jordan or had they launched even from their own country. They didn’t have to cross into Iranian boundaries.

Ranking Global Intelligence Agencies

RAJ SHAMANI: But they did rank the agencies for me. Oh, let’s just be specific, not just go around the world. Rank these five for me. Mossad, MSS, RAW, ISI.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Do you want them ranked on intelligence collection? Do you want them ranked on… Is the most powerful based on intelligence collection, or is it based off of assassination? Or is it based off of being secret? What do you want to know? Because they’re a different rank for different skills.

RAJ SHAMANI: Okay, let’s make assassination as a thing. Then most powerful in all the aspects. And then third would be just purely when it comes to country protection. Nothing else. Nothing to do with the world, in the country.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: So when it comes to protecting their own, CIA is at the top. Mossad is second. RAW is third. MSS is fourth. ISI is last. Protecting their own.

RAJ SHAMANI: ISI doesn’t care about protecting their own.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: They can’t. Even if they cared about it, they can’t because there’s too many dangers inside Pakistan. Pakistanis are killed all the time by criminals, by terrorists, by angry neighbors. It’s a rough place. Not like India.

When it comes to power, and I’m going to define power as projecting power, I think China is first because the MSS projects power worldwide. The only other population that identifies as their own country before where they live is the Chinese. Indians are like that. The Chinese are like that. So they have people and eyes and spies everywhere.

Second to them, I would say it’s the United States. And then I would say Mossad. Then I would say RAW. Then I would say ISI. Again, so projecting power.

RAJ SHAMANI: MSS.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Yeah, MSS, because they have incredible power when it comes to assassinations. Mossad is the top of the list. I would say ISI is the second on the list. I would say RAW is the third on the list. MSS is the fourth on the list. CIA is the fifth on the list.

And that’s because CIA has so many challenges killing political figures, which is the definition of assassination. CIA, just by, it’s so difficult that we just tell ourselves, don’t even try. Kill a military officer, kill a terrorist, kill somebody lower down. Because trying to kill a politician is a very difficult thing to do because it violates so many laws.

That’s why the whole Trump hunting Maduro thing is so unlikely. We all talk about it, but we already know. Donald Trump already knows it violates a dozen laws to try to kill Maduro. So if he’s going to do it, he’s going to have to find a way around all those laws.

Foreign Influence in Government Overthrows

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you think what happened recently in Nepal or Bangladesh? You know what happened in Bangladesh when they threw the entire government. And the youth was on the road making government officials run for their life and they overturned the entire government. Do you think stuff like that is done by other countries?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I think stuff like that is influenced by other countries. And that’s part of what I’m saying with why it’s so much more effective to create chaos. Even if you think about what happened in France with the parliament being dismantled. The parliament was reset.

There are certain countries in the world who benefit from chaos in your country. There are certain countries that benefit from chaos in France and certain countries that benefit from chaos in Bangladesh. So it’s worth it to them to invest and create that chaos. It’s worth it for them to feed both sides. Hey, here’s one existing conflict, whatever that issue is, human rights, labor, women’s rights, you name it.

We’re going to fund the side that says pro human rights and we’re going to fund that side that says anti human rights. We’re going to fund the side that says pro gender identity and we’re going to fund the side that says anti gender identity. Because as long as we’re putting more fuel on an existing fire, the fire burns bigger and hotter and it’s more likely to do greater damage.

It’s hard to create a government collapse. It’s easy to create enough government chaos that the people themselves make their own government collapse.

France’s DGSE: A Hidden Threat to America

RAJ SHAMANI: You used France right now and what happened there, and you’ve said somewhere before that DGSE of France is way more dangerous for America than China or Russia or anyone.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Correct. DGSE is an ally. We’ve already covered this. Nobody is an ally. Everybody’s an enemy to the United States.

The reason DGSE is so dangerous is because unlike many intelligence services, DGSE decades ago consolidated their intelligence efforts to make them very technical. So very technical intelligence and very well funded. They aren’t broad like CIA is very broad. They’re more focused. Kind of like RAW is very focused. Only RAW is focused on a country, Pakistan. DGSE is focused on a specific type of intelligence collection, technical.

And then from that intelligence collection, they are actually stealing American technologies, American capabilities, American IP, American plans and intentions that are based on commercial business engineering, computer development and infrastructure, that sort of thing.

So it’s not that they’re a capable service like Mossad, they can go out and kill anybody, but they’ve consolidated their efforts, consolidated their talent, consolidated their money in a way where they steal from America, where the whole world thinks that we’re allies. And they do it so well and so quietly that nobody realizes it’s happening.

It’s actually really funny because even as we’re having this conversation, you know, people listening to us are going to say France, like France, aren’t they? The people who just put their hands up whenever somebody tries to invade France. They’re burning their own cars in Paris right now or last week or whatever. France isn’t a threat.

But when you talk to an intelligence professional from the United States, we all say the same thing. F* France. Every one of us. We all hate France because we know this is what they do. We know that they put on a smile when they show up and they shake your hand at an event and you already know they’re trying to plant a bug in your car, they’re trying to plant a listening device, they’re trying to strip the memory off of your computer and your laptop there.

We call it a “smile f.” They smile from the front and they f you from behind.

Why Chinese Citizens Help Their Government

RAJ SHAMANI: You said Chinese government, they don’t care about Chinese people as much as Indians, right? So they are ready to eliminate, terminate, neutralize, whatever word you want to use. And they’re okay with shrinking population but becoming the best. Then why would a Chinese go help them? Because they know that the government is not in any way supporting them or is in favor to help them become more powerful.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Because the government may not have a long term plan to help you, but they certainly have a short term plan to hurt you if they want to. That’s why.

RAJ SHAMANI: So it’s fear.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It’s absolutely fear.

RAJ SHAMANI: It’s not like more toward my love towards the nation or patriotism or national interests. It’s just fear I’ll be killed if I say no.

China’s Global Influence and Control

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Exactly. Why do you think a Chinese person has built a life outside of China? Because they had nationalism and they were proud of their country and they thought that they would have success there. No, they went to Canada to get away from that shit. They went to France, they went to Botswana, they went to Argentina to get away from that.

So when it comes all the way back to you and it tells you what you have to do, you will cooperate because you tried to get away. You or your parents or your grandparents tried to get away, and you succeeded. And that’s why you honor your parents and why you honor your grandparents and why you honor your Chinese heritage, your ethnicity that’s been there for 5,000 years.

But that doesn’t make it any easier to say no to the person who’s sitting across from you, who’s telling you you will do this. Not to mention the fact that many Chinese businesses survive off of serving other Chinese people in their community. And it’s very easy for the Chinese to turn the whole community against you for the same reason.

They can just go around and say, “Hey, you know what? I’m from the mainland, and we don’t really like Chief Fung’s restaurant anymore, and you shouldn’t go there anymore.” Do you understand? And then all of a sudden be like, “Chief Fung, who’s Chief Fung? I don’t even know who Chief Fung is. I don’t even like Chinese food. I’m just going to go down the street to the Indian place.”

You remember the Cold War? They talked about the Iron Curtain. China has the same thing going on. It’s so hard for anybody in the world to know what China is actually doing, because even inside China, their own leadership is fighting with each other and arresting each other anytime there’s any suspicion of espionage.

They don’t even give somebody a trial, they just lock them up. “You might be a spy. We’re not going to take the chance. You’re locked up.” And if you don’t cooperate, we’re just going to go ahead and lock up your kids and lock up your parents, and we’re going to erase your family name. So then of course, everybody who’s arrested cooperates because they don’t want their family to be penalized.

RAJ SHAMANI: And there’s no human rights, no consequences, no democracy, no government to be challenged. So they can do whatever they want to do.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: And that is their current strategy.

RAJ SHAMANI: Does that scare you?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It doesn’t scare me as CIA because it won’t work forever. It will change or it will fall apart at some point. And I’m not CIA anymore, so it’s not my problem.

When I was, China was my number one threat. But that’s not just because of my opinion. That’s because the Director of National Intelligence, the DNI, every year puts out an estimate of who the biggest threats are to the United States. And since 2013, China has been the number one threat to the United States.

We are only just now talking about it, if we talk about it at all. But the DNI has been watching that for a long time.

RAJ SHAMANI: What are the top three threats for US?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: We would have to pull it up. It’s somewhere online. It’s probably, I would say China plans and intentions is first. Counterterrorism is most likely up there. Fundamental Islam. Because the DNI is controlled by the White House right now, I’m guessing that narco trafficking or fentanyl is probably also on that list.

There will be other things, possibly Russia, possibly WMD, but without a doubt, China is number one. And I don’t know exactly how they would rank the others.

The President’s Daily Brief

RAJ SHAMANI: You also said that every day there’s a report of intelligence which gets submitted to the President. What is that report?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: That report is called the President’s Daily Brief, the PDB. And the President’s Daily Brief is a literal binder that’s built every day. People, analysts and briefers, White House PDB briefers show up to work between 3:00 and 4:00 o’clock every morning.

And then they consolidate intel from the previous day and overnight. And they rank and stack and prioritize it based off of the President’s interests and priorities. And then they print these actual intelligence reports out and they put them in a document called the PDB.

And it’s a beautiful document with a leather bound notebook and spiral bind. It’s like the most fancy college or legal binder you can imagine. And then somebody literally takes it to the White House and gives it to the President.

And then when they give that to the President, they usually have a team of four or ten other analysts who are all professional briefers. And their job is if the President has a question about one of the reports, they will brief the President on additional information related to that report. And they do this every day, seven days a week. And they categorize and tailor the PDB to whatever the President is interested in.

Leaving the CIA and American Rights

RAJ SHAMANI: CIA, can you actually leave?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: You can actually leave.

RAJ SHAMANI: Can you say no to something that you’ve been assigned?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Absolutely.

RAJ SHAMANI: If President assigns you something, you can’t say no to it, right?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: You can always say no. You can, but you will have consequences.

RAJ SHAMANI: What consequences?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: You’ll be fired. Your career will be over. You won’t get promoted. You’ll be passed up for the next assignment.

Because this is such a great point. And this is what the movies don’t understand. CIA officers are American citizens. American citizens are protected by American laws. That comes first. Right?

So all of the American rights, free speech, you know, even the implied rights like the right to privacy, these all exist for CIA officers. So this idea that CIA is going to kill one of its own because they step out of line, that’s a movie thing. That’s not how CIA actually works.

Because CIA falls under the executive branch of government, which is held in checks and balance by the judicial branch of government. That’s why people can sue the CIA if they want to sue the CIA. And you won’t get hurt if you’re an American citizen, because American citizens are protected by rights.

So when you work for CIA, it’s very much like working in any other corporate environment. Yes, you sign a contract and a secrecy agreement, and yes, you have a civil contract in addition to your government contract. So there are areas that you are exposed to more risk.

That’s why I won’t get into specifics with you because I can be held criminally liable and civilly liable if I expose, if I share documented secrets from CIA related to sources and methods. So I can’t share that with you. But my American citizenship protects me from everything else.

In the rest of the world that doesn’t exist. Just even in the UK. In the UK, there is no freedom of speech. That only exists in the United States. So in the UK, if you’re an MI6 officer, you actually sign a contract that says that MI6, the UK government is going to take 50% of everything you own that you earn related to your time at MI6. I think it’s 50%. It might even be more.

So that’s why you don’t see a bunch of MI6 officers on podcasts and you don’t see MI6 officers writing books and you don’t see MI6 officers out there celebrating their career because any money they earn would be taken by the government. It’s even worse in a place like Russia.

Internal vs External Intelligence Collection

RAJ SHAMANI: Like, are they spying on their own inside their own country, or are they trying to collect information, intelligence inside the country as well? Like, because we were talking about RAW and CIA, what I understand what’s there in the public. India has IB, which works inside the country, and RAW works outside the country. So they try to collect all the intelligence from the external world and IB does that inside the country.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Right.

RAJ SHAMANI: What does CIA do? Do they have two different wings or just one collecting from everywhere?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It’s a great point. Both CIA and RAW, RAW learned from MI6. The British were there first. And MI6 is an external intelligence collection agency. MI5 is an internal intelligence collection agency. So MI6 collects worldwide. MI5 collects inside the UK.

CIA was built the same way. CIA collects foreign intelligence, FBI collects internal intelligence. FBI is your MI5, CIA is your MI6, which when you compare that to India, FBI is your IB collecting intelligence inside the country because citizens have rights, they have laws.

And law enforcement like FBI, law enforcement like IB has to follow those individual rights. CIA is allowed to break law internationally, but not inside the United States. And the same thing sounds like it’s true for RAW.

RAW can break international laws to protect the Indian continent, the Indian population, but they can’t collect on their own internally. What they probably have to do is partner with the IB to collect on any internal threats that might have a foreign connection.

The BRICS Alliance and Global Power Shifts

RAJ SHAMANI: Did you see that picture where Chinese head, Indian head and Russian head, they’re all together standing hand in hand. Did you see that? You didn’t see that iconic picture? Like after this whole tariff thing was going on and President Trump was trying to technically bully certain nations in some sort of ways. What it looked like, Putin, PM Modi and Xi Jinping, all three of them together hand, like holding the hand. India, Russia, China.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I mean, I probably saw it in a news article, but I haven’t, it’s not something that’s temporarily…

RAJ SHAMANI: If these three countries come together and align, US is in trouble.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The US is already in trouble with the alignment that those countries have had and have established already. If China can learn to grow India and Russia and grow their capability independently without seeing them as a threat, then the BRICS nations will become even more dangerous to the Western nations than they are now.

If you just compare the BRICS against the G7, the G7 is all declining and the BRICS are all increasing. The problem is China has to determine how strong it wants to let its allies become. Because China does not do things original. China copies.

And right now it’s copying a model from the United States after World War II. After World War II, the United States did not let any allies get strong. They made everybody reliant on the United States. They consolidated to make sure that countries were forced to trade with the United States, that countries were forced to accept the US dollar, that countries were forced to take American loans.

China is going to try to do the same thing. They’re trying to do the same thing in a different time. So if China can learn to do it better than we did it, we’re in trouble. But right now, as long as China is just trying to copy what we did, Russia and India know the game. They know how to avoid that.

Nuclear Weapons: The Real Threat

RAJ SHAMANI: What is that one conspiracy that you believe is true?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: That’s such a good question. I don’t believe in conspiracies.

RAJ SHAMANI: I don’t have one. If I have to reframe it, what’s one thing that the world doesn’t believe as much which you know is true?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I think the world doesn’t believe that we’re going to use nuclear weapons. I think the world believes that we’re not going to use them.

RAJ SHAMANI: I think we’re going to use them.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I think we are going to use them. I just don’t think we’re going to use them the way that people assume from history that they’ve been used.

Most people, when they think of nuclear weapons, they think of a giant missile or a giant bomb that’s going to get dropped from a plane on a major city center and it’s going to be Hiroshima all over again, Nagasaki all over again. That’s not what’s going to happen. But that’s what people, when they think about nuclear war, they still think about that. They still think 1980s, 1990s, Cold War, mutual assured destruction.

I think it’s much more likely that we’re going to see either a dirty nuke, something that a terrorist uses, or something that a criminal organization uses, or we’re going to use a tactical nuke. A tactical nuke being a small nuclear warhead on a rocket. A small nuclear device that’s delivered by the military. Something strategic and something tactical and small, but still nuclear.

And when that happens, we’re not going to know what the f* to do. Think about the United States right now. The United States has consolidated many nuclear naval resources in the Caribbean.

The Nuclear Threat Scenario

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Imagine if there’s a nuclear capable shoulder rocket that’s in Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, right? You name it. Jamaica. Just one nuclear capable, just maybe something that weighs 15 pounds, right? But has an explosive potential of five kilotons. Something small.

If that’s launched into the ocean, it’s international waters. If it explodes, it will destroy the entire carrier fleet, all the planes, the carriers, three or four supply boats, every person that’s there. But it happened in international waters and it was a nuclear explosion. That’s why it was so big.

What do we do then? Who do we hold accountable? Do we blame the country that the missile was launched from? Do we blame the transnational group, whether it was a cartel group or a terrorist group that launched it? And do we respond in kind? Do we launch a nuclear Tomahawk into Jamaica? What do we do? I think we’re very, very close to that moment.

RAJ SHAMANI: Which country is probably going to do it?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I don’t think it’s going to be a country at all. I think it’s going to be a transnational threat. It’ll be a cartel. It’ll be some sort of rogue element from Ukraine or a rogue element from Russia or somebody who’s smuggling weapons through Belarus.

But it’s not going to be a clear cut national threat. Even if it was, even if it was China launching a small tactical nuke from its shoreline against the Taiwanese military vessel that’s going through the straits, what are we going to do? Is that nuclear war? Is that not nuclear war? Do we engage our nukes? Do we let Taiwan and China just trade tactical nuclear weapons in the Straits of Taiwan?

The Safest Countries in a World at War

RAJ SHAMANI: Which country is going to be the safest? If the world comes down to a position where so many small wars are breaking? Like, you know, we see what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine, we saw what’s happening with Israel.

There was problem between India and Pakistan where India destroyed their entire military bases, which was sort of giving birth to terrorism. Then it’s happening like in different parts of the world. There are soft protests going on, there are hard protests going on. The government’s changing, there’s a bunch of chaos.

And if this accelerates resulting to, let’s say, nuclear or other things, which country do you feel is the safest?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: There’s a few. New Zealand I think is the safest. If you can make your way to New Zealand, you’re so far off the radar.

RAJ SHAMANI: Is there ever going to be after 2027?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Possibly. I’m not ruling it out. But New Zealand is a great location. Madagascar is another great location. Switzerland, if you’re going to stay in the European landmass, Switzerland is a very good location.

I would also argue that a place like southern Argentina. Argentina is going to get involved, but it’s not. The southern part of it is going to stay relatively safe. But then there’s also island chains, right? Like there’s islands in the…

Even the Hawaiian islands will be safer than say mainland USA. Bali will be safer than other parts of Indonesia. So there will be places that you can go where you can have food, stability, physical security, modern medicine, modern capabilities.

Why Andrew Is Leaving America by 2027

RAJ SHAMANI: And why do you want to leave US by 2027?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: There’s a few different reasons. The biggest reason is that my priority is my family. I have two children. I have a wonderful wife. We have a business that’s digital. We built our whole life to be mobile.

And my children are at an age now where they are picking up what it means to be American based off of pop culture in America. They’re learning from friends, they’re learning from devices, they’re learning from movies and TV shows. That’s where they’re getting their definition of what it means to be an American.

And that’s not the America that my wife and I served. The America that we are now is a very confused place. It’s heavily polarized. It’s economically depressed. It doesn’t know whether it likes technology or doesn’t like technology. It doesn’t know who its friends are. I mean, our America is killing itself. And that’s a terrible version of America to grow up in.

So if I want to give my children the best, I need to give them an opportunity to go somewhere where their pride in being an American is still present. But they learn to be a global citizen. And there are many countries in the world where they are pro American, where they believe in American ideals, they believe in American values.

The country itself still believes that America is the right world leader. If I move my children to a country like that, they’re accepted and they celebrate their American nationality while still learning to integrate into a global society. That’s incredibly valuable.

Most American children will never integrate into a foreign society. Most American adults will never integrate into a foreign society. Inside the United States, it’s estimated that only one in every four people has a passport at all. And of the people who have a passport, only one in four ever use their passport to go farther than Canada or Mexico.

That’s incredible. That means less than 6% of Americans have ever gone further than Mexico or Canada. I don’t want those to be my children. My children can go somewhere else. We can spend 4, 5, 10, 15 years. They can learn a foreign language. Maybe they marry a foreigner. Maybe they marry an American who’s also living in a foreign country.

Our business grows. We continue to invest ourselves in global citizenry while this chaos and confusion in the United States figures itself out. I served in the military. I did my time there. My wife and I served undercover. We committed our lives in defense of the Nation.

We honestly feel like we’ve done what we can do to help the United States. And now the United States has to figure this out for itself. We can still vote. We’ll still pay our taxes, we’ll still watch American comedy shows, we’ll still watch American movies.

But there’s no reason to make America’s current confusion our children’s problem. Instead, we can raise them to adulthood somewhere else, and then they can come back and be part of the solution, if that’s what they choose.

The Metrics of America’s Decline

RAJ SHAMANI: But how do you feel America is falling?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Why do I feel like it’s falling? It’s impossible to look at the metrics and not see that it’s falling. The divide in how we vote, the participation in elections, the value of the US Dollar, the expense of daily life, the decline of the middle class, the volatility in the market, the contention in the legislation, the fact that we spend as much time where politicians are attacking other politicians rather than trying to help the American people.

There’s… I mean, you can just count the ways, measurable ways that America is declining right now. You can’t ignore it. Everybody’s trying, everybody’s hoping that it will be fixed. But we all recognize to a certain extent that we’re powerless to fix it except in the vote that we cast.

But even with that, you still have a huge population in the United States who believes that their votes don’t count. Yeah, they believe that elections are rigged. Holy shit, man.

I would challenge that the vast majority of parents in the United States hear me and agree with me that if they could take their children somewhere else, they would. That if they could raise their children in a country that was pro American and safe and give their kids opportunities beyond what they would have in the United States, they would.

It’s only the people without children or the people with grown children, or the people who are just too selfish to admit that their children could have a better life. Those are the only people who listen to me and think I’m a coward or I’m trying to escape or I’m not nationalistic or whatever else.

I don’t want America to die, but what I want… America gets to choose what it does for itself.

The Leader America Needs

RAJ SHAMANI: If you had… This is hypothetical situation, if you had to choose a leader, according to you, who can be president and save America, who would it be?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: That’s funny. You know, it’s not well thought out because I feel like your question is kind of a fun question. I would argue that what we need right now is a Winston Churchill. What we need right now really is somebody who is incredibly charismatic, somebody who can motivate both sides, somebody who can explain to us what the threat really is.

Because right now in the United States, honestly, we think that the threat is the other political party. We’re so distracted. We honestly think that the Dems are the problem or the Republicans are the problem. We don’t even see the rest of the world.

Where Churchill was able to take all of Great Britain, all of the United Kingdom, and say, “Here is our enemy. Our enemy is Hitler and the rise of the Nazi party.” That’s it. He was able to isolate the threat. And as the country was burning down, he kept them together. As the country was being bombed, as the United Kingdom was losing the war, he was able to inspire a population to keep going and keep fighting.

That’s a little bit of what we need right now, is somebody who has that kind of glue, that kind of charisma, that kind of power, that kind of presence.

RAJ SHAMANI: Who’s like your choice out of everyone. Even, like, in the worst case scenario, if you choose one.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: If I had to pick one person that fits that description right now, it would be Nikki Haley. Nikki Haley is the closest thing that we have to a politician who could potentially reunite us and move us forward on a shared objective.

And even then, when you talk about Winston Churchill, Nikki Haley is in many ways the modern female version of a Churchill, because she will say it like it is. She will not sugarcoat it. She takes conflict on, head on. She did it in 2024. I’m sure that she would do it in 2028.

She’s female, she’s younger. She’s got all the right hallmarks to be accepted by the Democrats. She’s got all the right accolades to be accepted by the Republicans. So possibly she could do it, but she’s still been groomed. She’s still a groomed Republican from South Carolina, which is a very, very red state.

The Falcon Story: Hunting a Mole

RAJ SHAMANI: What’s that Falcon story? Tell me that there was a code name for the country, Falcons.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: My wife and I were successful independently at CIA. She was very successful. I was moderately successful. But CIA discovered from an allied country that they had a mole, that there was a mole inside CIA, somebody working against CIA from within.

And CIA itself didn’t know who that person was because it was a foreign ally who told us about the mole. So what CIA decided to do was create a team of people or several teams of people who would create new operations, with the idea being that those new operations would bait the mole into showing himself or herself.

My wife and I were two of the people that were chosen to create new operations, but they never told us that we were also supposed to be bait. They only told us that we were supposed to start new operations.

So they deployed us to a country in the world that wasn’t the United States that we call Wolf. And Wolf was a very, very cool place for us because it was developing. It was developing world.

RAJ SHAMANI: It was…

The Shadow Cell Story

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: There weren’t a lot of regulations. There weren’t a lot of rules. It was kind of a fun, exciting… I use the word “dirty,” not because it was actually dirty, but you could get away with dirty stuff.

And from Wolf, we built new operations that were built to target another country called Falcon. The reason we were targeting Falcon was because we were directed against Falcon by CIA. And it turns out that the mole inside CIA was a mole that was working for this country called Falcon.

CIA forced us to use these names for countries like Wolf and Falcon. And there are some other countries in the book that we talk about too, where we do other operations, but it can be a little bit confusing sounding. But if you just think of the United States as one country, Wolf as the country where my wife and I were living, and Falcon was the country that we were operating against, that’s how you have a way of understanding overall the story.

So as we’re building these operations against Falcon, we’re having incredible success and we’re growing. And I start to travel into Falcon myself so that I can start laying the foundation for more officers to do more operations inside Falcon.

And on one of those operations into Falcon, I fall under surveillance. And that’s the first kind of hint to the entire team that I may have been discovered by Falcon Intelligence. And if I was discovered by Falcon Intelligence, then we have to wonder whether or not the mole was the one that told Falcon about me.

So that’s the book. The book is all about how we built these operations in detail, how we carried out the tradecraft, how we built the operations, who we targeted, how we targeted them. It’s meant to be a memoir that is also very instructional in terms of how real world espionage works.

And then, of course, thankfully, even though I was under surveillance, I was able to escape Falcon and come out, be back, be reunited with my wife, live to tell the story, but also share how we reacted when I fell under surveillance, what we did after Falcon discovered me, and how it was that a CIA officer can escape from a hostile country and how it is that the CIA responds when somebody’s been nearly captured in a foreign country.

That is the story of Shadow Cell, and we’re very proud of it. I encourage everybody who’s listening right now to go out and buy it and read it and love it and give us your feedback. It’s just been an amazing blessing and amazing journey to be able to write the story and share it with people like you.

RAJ SHAMANI: Was there any point where you felt scared that you might die?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Absolutely. When I was under surveillance. When you’re under surveillance in a foreign country, in an alias identity, everything’s illegal.

RAJ SHAMANI: It’s not function where you’re absolutely thought like this is it.

Artificial Compliance: The Survival Strategy

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: When the moment that you’re taught to essentially give in, you’re never taught to give up. You’re taught something that’s called artificial compliance. Artificial compliance is what you do when you know that your survivability is increased by cooperation rather than conflict.

So imagine if you’re pulled over by a police officer, you could argue and fight with the police officer, but the chances are you’re not going to go home, you’re going to go to the police station. So we’re taught in a situation like that that you use something called artificial compliance. You don’t want to cooperate with the police officer, but you understand that if you cooperate, they’ll probably let you go home.

So what you really want to do is fight, but what you choose to do artificially is comply. So we’re taught that at the moment where artificial compliance increases your survivability, that’s what you’re supposed to do.

So for us, that example is if you are captured, if you’re outnumbered and you are physically apprehended, meaning you’re outnumbered by people. They have their hands on you, and you have essentially lost control of your own hands. They’ve handcuffed you, they’ve put your hands behind your back, they’ve pinned you down, they put you in some kind of stress position.

If you are in that position, artificial compliance is your fastest road to survivability. You can fight up until that moment. You can try to run up until that moment, but once that happens, you have to comply artificially.

And the reason you do that is to reserve and conserve your resources, your mental capacity. And you’re trying to essentially distract your aggressors so they believe that you’re giving up. If you do that, over time, you’ll find an opportunity to try to escape again.

India’s Smart Geopolitical Moves

RAJ SHAMANI: So, last question, because I’m from India and you have talked about how India has made some smart moves, and I want to end it on that note, because I want to know about it. What’s the smartest thing which India has done over the years or is doing right now that you feel is really intelligent?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It was so smart when India kept supporting Russia in the face of sanctions from the West.

RAJ SHAMANI: Explain.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It was just an incredibly smart move because what happened was because the west sanctioned Russia, Russia became isolated. That isolation put stress on Russia as a nation, as an economy, as a future world leader.

India was already in a partnership, a commercial partnership called the BRICS, with Russia before the sanctions hit. So India was forced to decide, do we do what the United States tells us to do and cut off this economic partner that we have committed to, or do we continue to support the economic partner and face the frustration or the anger of the West?

Well, India understands that the long term benefits is most likely in a regional economic cooperative group rather than this continued reliance on the G7 Western powers. So India chose to support Russia in the face of American frustration.

And since then, because if you recall, that happened very early in the war. That happened early in a war that analysts predicted would be fast and short. That happened early on when people were still saying that Putin was going to be undermined from within, that he had brain cancer, that he wasn’t going to survive, he wasn’t going to last, that his own oligarchs would turn against him.

Well, now here we are, four years later, and none of those things happened. And Russia’s economy has rebounded and Ukraine has continued to weaken and the west has distanced itself from Ukraine and a complete change in policy on the US from the House all the way up to the presidency.

So India doubled down on its previous existing economic commitment to the BRICS. And as a result of that, they looked good in the moment, they look good in the long run. And they have continued to grow economically because of that.

Because by showing Russia that they could be relied on, they also sent a message to China and Brazil and Saudi Arabia and everybody else in the BRICS that India is reliable, that India will be here as long as this cooperative exists.

And the reason that’s so smart is because India gets to benefit from everybody else’s isolation. That isolation increases the value of Indian products, it increases the value of Indian goods, it increases the reliance on India.

But also, if India needs to call in a favor in the future, those geographical peers are more likely to say yes. Where if India would have allied itself with the west, they would have all turned India down.

RAJ SHAMANI: But if you look back history, India has always been friends with Russia. Russia supported India, India supported Russia. So I don’t think it was a move against G7 or a temporary movement to just show that we are reliable. We were just standing up for somebody who stood, who has helped us over the years.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Regardless. That doesn’t make it any less of a smart move. There was question what they would do. There was incredible pressure for them not to support Russia. There has continually been pressure for them to abandon Russia which is going on.

Western Hypocrisy and India’s National Interest

RAJ SHAMANI: The case right now. But India has, in this whole thing we have a clear stand and the stand is national interest over anything. If you’re going to get oil from someone at a cheaper price, we will buy. If there’s a friend who has supported us, we’ll support them. We don’t care.

And coming back to this point, because it has been four years and you said initially US put sanctions on everybody and now four years there, it’s not on the priority list to support Ukraine anymore. Don’t you think that’s west hypocrisy?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Absolutely. That’s Western hypocrisy.

RAJ SHAMANI: The US is like absolute hypocrite at this point where they said, “Hey, we will support you.” And now they’re like, “Hey, it has costed us too much. It’s long enough, we don’t care about you anymore. Bye.”

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Yeah, that’s exactly the problem with the United States. And that’s the problem that is also contributing to the decline of the United States. I mean, I told you earlier that we can make a list of all the points that show how we’re on the decline. Hypocrisy is one of those lists.

We said we would do this, we didn’t do it. We said we would do that, we didn’t do it. We said we would protect this, we didn’t protect that. There’s an incredible list.

Think about just the fact that we seized Russian assets in American banks. What does that tell India? How safe is your money in an American bank? Not very safe. We’ll seize it at any time.

A Personal Story: The Indian Community That Changed Everything

I’ve got one story that I want to show you. I don’t know enough about India to know how the different states view each other or how the different subcultures view each other. But here’s something I’ve never told anybody. And I don’t even think the people I’m going to tell you about even know it’s true.

When I first started my speaking appearance podcast career, when I left CIA and I decided to launch my own business, the first group that ever supported me, ever, were Indians.

I was living in Tampa, and I was in a public speaking group called Toastmasters. And there are many Indians in the United States that also participate in Toastmasters. And I gave a speech one day at Toastmasters. It was a disaster. It was totally humiliating. It was a terrible speech.

But there was an Indian man there who approached me and said, “We have to stick together, brother.” And I was confused in the moment. I was like, “I don’t understand.” He’s like, “You and me were the same.” And I was like, “No, I’m Mexican, but I can understand if you think that I’m Indian.”

He’s like, “No, you have black hair, I have black hair. And inside the United States, nobody has black hair. So we will stick together.”

And he became a good friend of mine through multiple Toastmasters events. It turns out he was the head of the Malayali association of Tampa, a group that comes from Kerala. They had a big annual event. And he came to me and he was like, “I would like you to be our speaker for the big annual events.”

It’s just a community group, right? But I had never done anything with the Indian culture, with Indian people. I’d never done anything like that. And here’s this guy who saw me make an idiot of myself on a stage who said, “I think that you would be a great speaker someday, and I would love for you to speak to our group.”

He’s like, “The Malayali association of Tampa is very focused on children and very focused on community.” He gave me an address and I put together a speech, and then I went there and it was one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had.

Children dressed in traditional Indian garb, Indian families dressed in traditional garb. It was hosted on this beautiful campus of a temple. And there were flowers and fresh, and it was just amazing. And they did a whole stage performance of classic Kerala fairy tales or something. It was just amazing.

And I gave my speech, and my speech really just sounded like this was such an amazing experience. Thank you all for believing in me and everything else. And that was how it all started.

Because on that stage, in front of those 300 or 400 Malayalis, I realized how much I loved talking on a stage, because it’s being on a stage in front of 15 people. Everybody can do that. But being on a stage in front of a few hundred people is a very different feeling.

And I’ll try to find the pictures and send them to you. The pictures that I took with the kids and the women and the men, and everybody just treated me just incredible. And it was only because I had black hair.

And I learned so much about unity and community that’s ethnically based, and that’s not something we celebrate here in the United States, but it was a really refreshing feeling.

And then from that moment on, it was the Malayali group in Tampa that kept suggesting me and kept introducing me and connecting me to other people and other opportunities. I had nothing to give them, but they just kept doing it.

And eventually they introduced me to a podcaster, and that podcaster was big enough to introduce me to another podcaster. And now in 2026… That happened in 2018.

RAJ SHAMANI: Wow.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: And now in 2026, I’ve gone viral on the Internet.

The Power of Community and Gratitude

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I run a multimillion dollar company and I know that a huge chunk of my success is tied to a group of Indians from Kerala who moved to Tampa to try to make a better life for themselves and included me in their family.

RAJ SHAMANI: Wow. It’s so good to hear that. I’m so blessed and grateful that I come from that community. I come from the kind of people who we have in India who go out of their way and support people.

It just—I have nothing to do with it, but just the fact that I’m one of them, it makes me so proud of myself right now.

I’m so happy that somebody did that to you because there’s so many of them who did that to me as well. And I’m sure if somebody’s watching this and if they’re thinking of doing it to somebody, please do it.

Because of you and because of your gesture, we get nuggets like you, we get people who are gems like you. Beautiful stories all around the world. Thank you so much. And thank you to you as well.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Thank you, sir. And thank you for everything that you do for having me on here. And I can’t wait to talk to you again.

RAJ SHAMANI: It was pleasure. You’re coming to India and we’re going to do it. We’re going to do round two in my studio where we’ll have even more intense conversations. Thank you for doing this.

Tell me, you said any intelligence can get to you if they want to get to you. And I’m assuming all these tricks and thousand more they would do it and they must be doing it every day with people like who have classified information. Fortunately not me.

Just putting it out there for the record.

Probably you.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: And now us.

RAJ SHAMANI: Not us, okay? None of us.

Closing Remarks

RAJ SHAMANI: Thank you so much for watching this podcast till the end. Please let us know in the comments what all did we do right so that we can improve and keep doing that better and what all did we do wrong so that we never repeat it.

And at the same time please give us suggestions of who’s the next guest that you want to see on the podcast. And don’t forget, share this episode with at least one person who will get some insights because one conversation is enough to give people enough ideas to change their lives.

I’ll see you next time. Until then keep figuring out. And also don’t forget to subscribe the channel.

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