Transcript: Ex-CIA Spies Andrew and Jihi Bustamante on DOAC Podcast

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Andrew, you’ve never told me this story before, have you?

Breaking CIA’s Lifetime Secrecy Agreement

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: No, I have never told the story of my own operational background. It’s been something that CIA has forbidden for a long time.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what’s written in this book has taken you a long time to get approved by the CIA.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Correct. So all CIA officers sign a lifetime secrecy agreement, and that secrecy agreement gives CIA the right to approve or disapprove any operational elements of our background that are still classified and that fit under this very narrow rubric of sources and methods, sources and methods of active intelligence collection. Because of my time at CIA, my work at CIA, and the sensitivity of that work, I just assumed I would never be able to talk about it. And then all that changed with the first Trump administration.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What was the CIA’s response when you said that you wanted to talk about what you’re going to talk about today?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Well, that’s what’s interesting. They had two different responses. When I first submitted the request in 2019 to CIA to write about my operational background, we went through some normal bureaucratic back and forth. And they ultimately said, “Yes, you can write about it in detail.”

And then in 2021, when we submitted the manuscript and it was complete, the world started to change. In 2022, multiple major issues erupted between major adversaries of the United States, and CIA came back and removed their previous permission. They basically said that in light of current geopolitics, everything in the book was now reclassified.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How did you get the CIA to change their mind so that you could release this book and talk about what you’re going to talk about today?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: We engaged with an attorney, one of the top attorneys in the space of classified information and publishing information. So the attorney believed that because of the effort that my wife and I had put into the book, CIA would back off. And ultimately, that is what they did. When we threatened them with a First Amendment lawsuit, they came back and said, “We don’t want to go down that road. We think we can collaborate on this, will approve your book, and you can move forward.”

Why the CIA Didn’t Want This Story Public

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why do you think they didn’t want you to publish this book and this story to get out?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: When this story hits the airwaves, it’s going to transform people’s opinion about CIA in two big ways. First, they’ll understand that CIA is not what the movies portray it to be. It’s not superhuman spies who go out there like James Bond or Jason Bourne, who are one man against the world. That’s not how espionage works. Espionage is a team sport. You have wins, you have losses.

The second thing is they’ll actually start to understand the depths to which CIA will dive to collect intelligence that protects Americans. Inside this book, we talk about a mole that actually penetrated CIA that CIA has never acknowledged. Inside this book, we talk about new tactics that CIA learned from terrorism and then used against our own most strategic adversaries. I don’t think people recognize that CIA is morally ambivalent to how it executes espionage operations. The goal is to keep Americans safe.

The Mole Within the CIA

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you say in this book, you disclose that there was a mole within the CIA, what does that mean for someone that doesn’t know what a mole in the CIA is?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: One of the worst things that can happen to an intelligence service is that one of its own officers becomes a spy for a foreign adversary. That is what I’m referring to when I talk about a mole.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you were involved in that operation to find the mole within the CIA.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Correct. More specifically, my wife and I were included in an operation to ferret out the mole, to bait and tempt the mole to make a mistake so that the mole could be found and disclosed.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And your wife is here today.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Correct.

Andrew’s Journey to the CIA

STEVEN BARTLETT: And we’re going to bring her in and talk to her as well. But for anyone that doesn’t know your backstory, which would be pretty remarkable, seeing as you’ve been on this channel now a few times. Could you give me a whistle stop tour of your professional background up until the point that you met Jihi?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m from a rural place in Pennsylvania. Was the only brown kid in a white high school, but I ended up going to a military academy. I went to the Air Force Academy, and from the Air Force Academy, I go into the Air Force. The Air Force teaches me how to fly. They teach me a foreign language, and then they teach me about nuclear weapons and nuclear missiles, and I serve as a nuclear missile officer in the Air Force.

So CIA picked me up. And in my first day on the job in CIA, the day that I met my wife, she was sitting in the back of the classroom. I, of course, worked my way to the front of the classroom, and from there our training just overlapped and we became close.

Dating Within the CIA

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, Jihi is here, so I’d like to hear her version of events. Was there any inconsistency in the story he told? What was your perspective? There’s always another perspective. And are you allowed to date in the CIA?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Oh, yeah, it’s encouraged. Because it’s really hard when you’re keeping so many secrets to date somebody outside of the CIA and not be able to tell that because we had friends who did that. You have to keep your whole life secret. So you’re lying to them about where you’re going and what you do day to day, every single day. So you’re building a relationship and lying all the time, and it’s really difficult.

So if you date within the CIA, if you’re in different divisions or whatever, maybe you can’t talk about everything in detail, but you at least know what’s going on, you know why somebody’s going TDY or where they’re going for a training session.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Or we can explain to each other, “Hey, I’m going to go work with the Spanish, I’m going to go work with the Canadians.” But when you’re dating somebody on the outside, you can’t say those things. So it becomes, “I’m going on a business meeting, I’m going on a trip.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Crazy.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: And we’ve had many friends who have had relationships explode or meltdown because the partner starts to ask very logical questions. We had one good friend of ours who was an outsider who was dating one of our good friends who was an insider. And she pulled me aside one day and she was like, “You know, he goes on all these business trips, but he never takes any suits.” She’s like, “I think he’s cheating on me.” And I was like, “No, he’s actually going to a tactical training course where you don’t need to wear anything except BDUs. But I can see your concerns.”

So you have to walk people off a cliff because they start to come to the wrong conclusion about what their actual partner is doing.

Jihi’s Unexpected Path to the CIA

STEVEN BARTLETT: Jihi, what’s your journey into the CIA?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Mine was an unexpected journey because I went into social work, working with survivors of torture from other countries, with refugees, with asylees. But before I got that job, I’d actually spent my entire last year of grad school going to job fairs. And I wanted what I really wanted was to work for the federal government for the larger mission for the United States, for the people of the United States.

But then nobody was calling me back, and I was like, “Okay, I’ll just submit an application, an online application to CIA,” which I thought was funny. And then a few months later, I got a call back. She was like, “Come to the information session.” So I went in a random hotel with these nondescript signs outside. And you walk in, and you’re like, “I don’t know if I’m in the right place.” And then they close the door, and they’re like, “Welcome to the CIA recruiting session.” And you’re like, “This is so bizarre.”

The Role of a CIA Targeter

STEVEN BARTLETT: And did they tell you what your role is? Because I know there’s several different roles in the CIA.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Targeters began during the war on terror. And because what they initially did was target individuals for capture or kill for the military.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so what does that mean? They targeted people for capture or kill for the military. So you would find the person to capture or kill in a foreign country.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yes. And so because everybody else is doing their job of logistics or weapons or fighting or strategy, so the targeter position was really important because it takes time to go through all this data to piece together this puzzle of who is important, who is important to capture, who’s important to kill, and how do you get to them?

The “how do you get to them” is the piece that everybody else wants to know, but they don’t really have time to do that and their other job. So they carved out this targeter role so one person can do all this research and identify. And terrorists were really fascinating because they had how their organizations were structured. And so you really needed somebody who could look. I mean, it’s like targeting the mafia, right? Everybody has a role. There’s a big organization, everybody has a role.

It is in your favor if you’re going after them to find out who’s who, who’s connected to who, how can you get to different people? Because you’re never going to be able to just get the top person right away. So how do you get there?

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you became a targeter.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yes.

The Operations Officer Role

STEVEN BARTLETT: So your job was to figure out who to capture and kill, or capture or kill. And what was your role in the CIA? How is your role different? Can you explain it for a layman?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Yeah. So where Jihi was trying to find the individuals that were of interest, my job was to learn what to do after a targeter identified those individuals. How do you actually meet the person? How do you befriend the person? How do you win their trust? How do you collect their secrets? What’s known as a field officer, an operations officer, a case officer. Those are the different terminologies that we use internally.

But you essentially have every case is handed over from person to person. So raw information, sometimes open source information, is handed to a targeter who creates a profile, a dossier, a targeting package, who hands it to an operations officer who goes out and actually makes that first contact. And then when first contact is made, we pass all the information back and it goes back to all the same people to build the next package for the next target.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So Jihi would identify the individual, and then your job was to fly overseas, go undercover, and make first contact with that individual to extract intelligence from them.

The Tandem Couple Operation

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: And not at first. By the time that CIA started utilizing us as a tandem couple. A tandem couple is a term that means a married, truly married, CIA trained couple. When we started becoming a tandem couple, that’s how we were a one, two punch for operations. Prior to that, we were in separate offices, in separate divisions, doing separate work.

So we got along. And we were complimentary because I understood the challenges of her job and she understood the challenges of my job, which made both of us better working with our counterparts in our different offices.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So where does the story begin? Andy, you wrote this book to tell a story, so I’m asking you the question. Usually I’d hazard a guess where to start. But where does this story begin?

The Falcon House Meeting

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: From my perspective, the story really starts on, I think it was a winter day when we were both called in to a counterintelligence office. That was a massive oak table. It was a senior executive leadership type of room. But there were only three people there. It was she, it was me. And it was the leader of what’s known as Falcon House, which is this group of specialists inside of CIA focused on one particular adversary, an adversary that we’ve had to code name Falcon to maintain confidentiality with CIA.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And so Falcon is a country, basically.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Falcon is a country. Correct. And that leader revealed to us that they believed there was a penetration, a mole that was inside of Falcon House, inside of CIA, and that they needed us to agree to do an operation so that the mole will make a mistake here. Because if the mole makes a mistake here, we’ll find them. But we can’t have you be here because if you’re here, the mole will find you. And then we don’t know what happens if the mole finds you.

So we’re going to send you across the world to go work in this other country, Falcon being the country, while we here, as the experts in Washington D.C. try to find the mole. And that was privileged information that neither of us as junior officers ever thought we would hear. And I think that. I know for me, I was kind of giddy with excitement and Jihi was a little bit more apprehensive with “this can’t be real.” But that was, for me, that’s where the story starts, is when these two people, her with her anxiety disorder and me with my kind of lackluster CIA career, when we got pulled into this office that was clearly outside of our league and invited to do this operation, without that first meeting, shadow cell would have never happened.

The Mission Objectives

STEVEN BARTLETT: So from that moment onwards, how long was it before you flew to the foreign country in question? And what was your objective when you got to that foreign country? So I guess it’s like a sub objective to find the mole. And there was another main objective which was going to help find the mole.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: You got it. I mean, you’re using great terminology. There were primary objectives and secondary objectives. And the primary objective was to build a new set of reporting assets, a new source of intelligence, several new sources of intelligence in Falcon, the actual country.

And to help you frame what Falcon is, there’s only a handful of countries that are true stark adversaries to the United States. Every one of those countries has limited to no diplomatic relationship with the United States. That’s how hostile they are. Any one of those countries could be Falcon. The reason that we have to code name the country is because CIA in today’s geopolitical world has demanded we don’t disclose the name of the country. So we call it Falcon.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are United States adversaries where we don’t have any relationship with them? There’s also like North Korea, there’s Russia, there’s Iran we know of. Are there any others?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Cuba.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Cuba, yeah.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: And those are. There’s a mix there of countries that we do have a relationship with, but it’s not a warm relationship versus countries we have no relationship with. So we have no relationship with North Korea. We have a cold relationship with Russia. Right. We have a cold relationship with China. We have no relationship with Iran. So they’re all considered hard targets, but of various levels.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So the objective is, the primary objective is to build a new team in this country. But the sub objective is in building the team, you’re going to find out hopefully who the mole is because the mole is going to make a mistake.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The mole is going to try to find us. Because the mole’s job is to prevent CIA from collecting secrets about Falcon. Because the mole is working for Falcon Intelligence.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The mole is working for that country.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The mole is part of the CIA but working for the adversarial country.

Famous Moles in History

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Bingo. Which is the worst combination you can have. So some of the most famous moles in history are Aldrich Ames. Aldrich Ames was a CIA penetration that worked for the Russians. Robert Hanssen. Robert Hanssen was an FBI penetration that worked for the Russians. So these are famous moles in history.

We were essentially being told that these earth shattering 1990s era moles were still relevant. But now in 2010ish, there was a new one that had made its way into CIA and that’s a big deal. So it was a very exciting reveal for me because it meant that we were not just doing something that was relevant and interesting inside of CIA, we’re doing something that is quite possibly the most important work that can be done inside CIA at this moment in time.

How the CIA Discovered the Mole

STEVEN BARTLETT: How did the CIA know there was a mole?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: There’s a lot of complexity there. That is part of why they didn’t want us to write this book. But what they have allowed us to disclose is that a foreign ally contacted CIA and said, “we have collected intelligence that suggests you have a mole. You have somebody inside your organization who’s a turncoat, a spy for somebody else.” So a foreign ally warned CIA, otherwise CIA would have had no idea.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And foreign allies are people like the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: So you can imagine the disruption that that would make. Not only did CIA proper not know they had a mole, it took an ally to tell us. And then when the ally told us we have to assume that the ally is sharing as much biographical detail as possible. So they’re telling you the name, “hey, Bob is a spy in your organization.”

But now that CIA officer is an American citizen protected by American rights and privileges, and CIA obviously has no information to show that that person’s a spy, except for the word of some foreign ally, which is still in the eyes of the US Government. A foreigner is a foreigner, ally or not.

So even if it is the UK or Canadians telling us so and so is a spy, until we have our own body of evidence, we can’t prosecute. That person can’t be fired, that person can’t be discharged, that person can’t be sued, that person can’t be arrested. So now CIA has this mess where they are actively losing information, actively losing intel because of this mole. Because of the mole. But they can’t take any action because they have to now build a legal case against the mole to prove that that person’s actually breaking the law.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So the ally that calls the CIA and says you’ve got a mole in your ranks, they named the person.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Most likely. Most likely, they would have never made the notification without also sharing the name, which is a courtesy we do to the others as well. If we come across information that we know an MI6 officer has been compromised, or a Canadian CSIS officer has been compromised, or an ASIS officer in Australia, we will share as many biographical details as possible.

Need to Know Basis

STEVEN BARTLETT: And did you share the name when you were called into the room that day, did they share the name with you?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: No. It’s hard for people to wrap their minds around the culture at CIA. And I get it, because how do you wrap your mind around an organization? You don’t know. And the only insight is from movies. So culturally, CIA is a group of people who value secrets. And that need to know is very important. Inside those walls, it’s just something we toss around like movie jargon outside. But inside, CIA needs to know is very, very real. And you are only briefed to the minimum that you need to know.

So inside of this tiny group of spy hunters, which is known as the counter espionage group CEG, inside this very small group, they have the need to know basically everything. And then as you go out in rings from that group, they reduce the information they share. So they might know the name. But then when they share it to the next ring, they just say, “hey, there’s an officer who’s in this office.” And then it goes to the next ring. “There’s an officer in this division,” and then it goes to the next ring.

So the people talking to us as senior leaders, the people talking to us knew the minimum we needed to know was that we were going to build new operations, but we were also going to be most likely targeted by a known threat inside CIA. That was why it mattered to us.

Interestingly, that decision is why we had a first amendment case with this book at all. Because CIA was knowingly putting our lives in danger of a foreign adversary by intentionally creating operations that would tempt that mole to disclose our identities.

The Life-Threatening Reality

STEVEN BARTLETT: That was one of the things I was thinking when I was reading the book, is you knew that you were being sent to an adversarial country, and you also had the knowledge that working amongst you was a mole who was revealing secrets about the CIA and potentially yourselves to that foreign country.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Correct.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So that foreign country could have popped, could have killed you.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Absolutely. And that’s the second kind of cultural element that people don’t understand about CIA. Right. You don’t really turn down an operation. If you’re invited to take part in an operation, you have the right to say no, but if you say no, you’re committing career suicide.

Jihi, and anybody who reads the book will find this out, Jihi was a stellar officer on a phenomenal trajectory, doing incredible things, kind of really charting the course for what targeters have become today. For me, I proved to be a not very good case officer. And if there was anything I was really hoping for, it was a second chance.

So when we were pulled into this meeting and they said, “hey, here’s this exciting opportunity. Here’s an operation that we’re literally inviting you into this executive suite to invite you to this operation, and we’re going to put you together, and we need you to do this.” That’s not a situation that I was going to say no to. I think you considered saying no. But for me, they knew me well enough to know I was not going to turn that down.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yeah, I mean, I think when you have anxiety, you consider saying no to everything. You’re always thinking about the risk. But I think that what was the.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Risk that you were thinking about?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: It is very real that you can be disappeared by a foreign adversary, that you can be killed by them with no explanation, that you can be just put in jail, and then you never get out because the government’s not necessarily going to come to your aid. And if they do, it might be, still might be 20 years before you’re out of their prison.

Plausible Deniability

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Every sworn officer has plausible deniability meaning the President can plausibly deny that you don’t belong to whatever organization you are claiming to belong to. So a CIA officer arrested in a Russian prison can avoid all questioning and say, “hold on guys, I’m actually CIA. You caught me, good job. Now please send me home. Don’t have a diplomatic incident.”

The President has the right to say that person is not CIA. That person has never worked for me. I don’t know who that person is. That their American passport might be verified, but they are legally in your possession of legal requirements. So we don’t really know who they are.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So just to clarify then, you were being told you were going to be flown, both of you, to a foreign country, an adversarial foreign country, and you were told that there was a mole amongst your ranks that was feeding information to the foreign country that you were being flown to.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: So we, they actually stationed us in a neighboring country that was friendly, but we knew that Andy and anybody we worked with would have to go into. So they flew us to a country.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Falcon being the adversarial country.

Building Operations in Enemy Territory

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: The adversarial country. So we actually lived in a third country called Wolf, but we were operating in both Wolf and in Falcon, so the danger was still there.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: And then that’s when Jihi’s targeter mindset kicked in. And that’s when she started thinking through, well, how could our operation be reverse engineered by Falcon and actually find us? And if we can think like the enemy, we can stay one step ahead of the enemy.

So the whole idea of going to Wolf and building our team from the very beginning, Jihi started to architect how we could do that in a way that would foil our aggressors from being able to even discover our existence.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what was the objective when you… So you’ve got this sub objective, which I understand, which is to find the mole, but the main objective is just to spy as usual and collect information on this adversarial country.

A New Kind of Espionage

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Yes and no. The main objective was to collect information, but the “spying as usual” is the part that was a no. CIA specifically told us they didn’t want us to do the standard spy operations.

Spying has really been the same since the days of ancient Egypt, right. You find somebody who gives you information about something that they have access to and that’s it, and that’s spying. Then you turn it into a report and you pass it up to somebody who reads it and they make a decision.

They wanted a new kind of approach. They wanted a new way of doing espionage. And when they deployed us to the friendly country, that was their only request: whatever you do there, coordinate it with the local leadership and then don’t tell us because we have to make sure that the mole doesn’t learn what you’re doing.

That’s going to be how we tempt the mole to start probing around and asking questions that are outside of the norm. That’s how we’re going to reverse engineer this and find the mole. So we need you to go do something, and we need it not to be standard and don’t tell us, but tell your leadership in the friendly country.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Your CIA leadership in the friendly country.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Correct.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And they’re going to tell them.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: No. So it’s completely compartmentalized.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Need to know, right?

The Power of Compartmentalization

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Because if we kept all of our operations centered in Wolf than in our friendly country, then the mole would never know what we were doing. So we would be gathering intelligence, which would then be further compartmentalized to maybe a specific office where one or two people at headquarters might know about one particular operation, and then one or two people might know about another operation.

But because not all of Falcon House would know, the mole would not have access to any of these new intelligence sources. And that’s what was really important. That’s why they wanted us to rebuild, because he currently had access to all of the legacy intelligence sources.

So if he wanted to pass any information to Falcon from all of our legacy sources, he could. But if he doesn’t have access to our new sources, he can’t pass any of that new information on. And now here we are, we’re able to gather more intelligence, and then hopefully, if we’re lucky, we strike gold on finding out who he is or who he’s working with or other things.

But yeah, compartmentalization is the key. So we were really very siloed in Wolf.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m trying to understand how what you were doing was going to help the CIA discover who the mole was.

The Double Agent Trap

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: One of the things in double agent operations, which is what you’re talking about when you talk about a mole or a penetration… A double agent, meaning I’m a sworn officer of CIA, but then I’ve also agreed to work with the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Cubans, whatever. That’s a double agent.

Double agent operations are very difficult to maintain long term, because if my information isn’t relevant to my foreign adversary anymore… If I’m collecting secrets on Cuba, but I’m being paid by the Russians, the Russians may not care that I keep collecting secrets on Cuba, so they might cut me off.

And then all of a sudden, I’m a double agent, culpable of crime, but without protection from another country. So when you think of your Edward Snowdens, when you think of some of your famous turncoats from the United States, they flee to the country that they were working for ultimately. So if you don’t have that escape path, then it becomes very stressful and scary for a double agent.

So what CIA was counting on is the mole who was reporting our secrets to Falcon. If we could create new operations and that mole didn’t have access to those new operations, then the mole would start to stretch. They would start to make mistakes, ask questions they shouldn’t ask, steal information, try to hack onto systems they shouldn’t get onto.

And that’s all stuff that CIA can use to build a legal case to arrest that person. But without having something that that person has to stretch to collect, they’re not going to make a mistake. So our job was to create something new so that the mole would make a mistake that CIA could track, and that would build a legal case that would allow CIA to arrest an American citizen for espionage.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did the CIA have access to the information the mole was sending back to the enemy country?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: No. That’s one of the most dangerous parts about double agent operations. We often have a lot of nicknames, a lot of inside terminology, but we usually call it “the keys to the kingdom.”

When you have a foreign penetration, you have the keys to everything in that foreign country’s intelligence – all of their secrets, because you have access to an intelligence officer who can pull anything. So our double agent, our mole, had access to essentially everything related to Falcon that CIA had.

So CIA didn’t know what he was sharing, what he wasn’t sharing, how much he had been sharing, or even how long he had been sharing it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But they suspected he was sharing something.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Because there was something that our ally picked up on, something that allowed them to identify the person and communicate it back.

Creating New Identities

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you land in this friendly country next to the enemy country, and do you have to adopt new aliases, new names, new stories? Do you have to pretend that you’re normal people living a normal life?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: You do. There’s different ways that you can craft it. So Jihi’s job as the targeter was to find our targets in Falcon. A big part of what we had to do when we got to Wolf, our friendly country, was do whatever the leadership there told us to do.

So CIA crafted everything for us to land in the friendly country. Once we were in the friendly country, then we had to start crafting new identities, new aliases, so that we could travel out of the friendly country and into Falcon, into the enemy country.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: But while living in Wolf, we were Jihi and Andrew Bustamante, newlywed couple. Where we worked was covered.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Where did you work?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It’s undercover. We still can’t disclose it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Like, when you were in the enemy country working, were you running like a coffee shop, or…

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: When going into Falcon, there were different… You had to have a different cover and a different cutout.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: And we would use what you’re referring to is called commercial cover or commercial activity, meaning we would act as if we were part of commercial business going into and out of the country.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But you’d use your normal names.

The Art of Dry Cleaning

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: No, no. This is one of the other things that’s really fascinating about the book, and one of the reasons that CIA pushed back is we get to disclose whole new levels of tradecraft that have never been talked about in previous books.

So the tradecraft that we use here is something that the Brits actually call “dry cleaning.” And what that means is we would clear our path before we would go into Falcon. So we’re in a friendly country, and we need to go into a hostile country.

In order to go from the friendly country to the hostile country, you can’t go directly because if you go directly, the hostile country can track you back to your friendly country, and then they can send the team to hurt you if they need to in the friendly country.

So instead, what you do is you create a cleansing route. So you travel from the friendly country to a neutral country, and in that neutral country, you’ll change identities and then travel into your target country. So now if the hostile country tracks you, they track you back to a neutral country, and they have no idea that you originated from a friendly country.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But if you go from a friendly country to a neutral country, when you get to the neutral country, do you need like a new passport and stuff? Because that neutral country, presumably they don’t know that you’re spies.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Correct.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So do you have to have a new passport to then get on a plane to fly into the…

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Yes. And it’s what we would call a passport swap. And there’s different ways of doing a swap. You can carry your own swap, you can have somebody meet you to do a swap, you can have a cache where you hide a swap.

But that’s the benefit of always using a consistent cleansing route, because you can always go back to the same neutral country. And from the hostile country’s point of view, every time they track you, you always go back to the same place. So they start to build a pattern of life, what we call a “pattern of life,” where they believe you’re originating from this country, when in fact you’re not.

Building the Operation

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you land in this friendly country, you’re making your way into the hostile country. What was your objective? What were you trying to do in that hostile country?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The first thing we were trying to do was find targets. And then we knew that as we found targets and built targets, we would also need to support the operations against those targets.

And there’s a logistical element to espionage where you need to have encrypted phones, you need to have satellite phones or SIM cards, you need to have money, you need to have specialized gifts. There’s a logistical supply chain that needs to be built.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Specialized gifts.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: So things that are appealing to a target that they may not be able to get themselves: gold bullion, high end liquors, child pornography, foreign currency, whatever they need, your job is to make sure they have a way of getting it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Child pornography.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Some targets, especially in the world of drugs and terrorism and weapons, they feed off of the strangest things.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So the CIA would supply that pornography.

The Moral Complexity of Intelligence Work

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: We would more like facilitate the transfer. Some other friendly country might actually be who acquires it. So for example, Germany might actually have a raid where they carry out a raid against a pornographer and they have terabytes of porn, right?

And then the UK might have a case where they need porn to pay an Iranian. So now they can trade with BND, so that BND can use this cache of porn and they can give it to the Brits who give it to the Iranians. And that can be a currency of types.

Again, morally ambivalent. The goal is to protect your people at the end of the day, right? So when it comes down to it, that’s the same way CIA works. If we’re giving gold, if we’re giving minted American gold coins to an evil person in North Korea, do we really care if it’s keeping Americans safe?

There are some people who would say yes, and there are other people who would say whatever the price is, let’s keep Americans safe.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So tell me about what you did then. What did you accomplish while you were there? And you talk in the book about using terrorist tactics to build your operation there. Can you run me through what it is you accomplished there and the role that both of you played?

The Shadow Cell Model

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: So I’ll start it and I’ll let you take it over. But the book’s title, “Shadow Cell,” is really about the cell model and the terrorist cell model that we recreated in our friendly country so that we could execute operations against our hostile country that mirrored tactics and techniques that terrorists had used to foil Americans for the last 20 years in the global war on terror.

So what Jihi and I learned is that CIA was not very good at beating terrorists. America was not very good at beating terrorists. That’s why after 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan, we left and we gave it back to the same terrorist group that we went in there to fight.

We had learned a lot from fighting that adversary. But we were the only country in the world fighting the global war on terror. The Russians, the Iranians, the Chinese, the Cubans, the North Koreans, none of them engaged in the war on terror. So everything we had learned from Al Qaeda, we were the only ones that learned it. So we found that to be kind of a competitive advantage.

So we started building our operations, modeling our operations off of the way the terrorists structured their cells. And we called our cell in Wolf, the shadow cell. And we had to find the people, recruit the people, and train the people inside our cell, our actual CIA peers. We had to get them to learn how to run the same model. That’s really what the book explains, is how we built that and what those people did. Because espionage is not about one superhero overseas. It’s about a team of people doing incredible things.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And were those people on the ground in the friendly country next to the hostile country?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And so did you, when you recruited these people to build this team, did you recruit them from America or were you recruiting them within that friendly country?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Inside of Wolf. Everybody who was in the cell was already working in Wolf.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the word cell basically means team.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Right, team.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you built this team in the friendly country next door to the enemy country, and this team consisted of how many people?

Building the Team

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Right. So James was our senior most case officer. Tasha, Luke and Beverly were our second tour case officers. So they were more junior. That’s why they were hungry but still kind of flexible. Whereas James was in. James was at a place in his career where if this didn’t work, his career would be tanked.

And then Jihi and I were not case officers. We were kind of the. I was the mission planner, if you will, and Jihi was the targeter. And then Diana was our linguist. Will was our tech support. And we had. That was our cell. That was our little group of people that would sit in the bullpen.

Now, it’s important to note that none of them. And this was their primary mission. It was our primary mission. For all of them, helping us was just something they were doing because they believed that if we were successful, it would be good for them. They had primary missions to do all sorts of other things.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, okay. And were these people locals?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: They’re all Americans. And they’re all Americans assigned to Wolf. So they’re all American CIA officers, all sworn officers that are assigned to our friendly country in various different covers to do various different primary missions.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, and how did you guys communicate? Did you meet up for dinner? How does it work?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yeah, I mean, all of our communication and hangouts were in the office because we couldn’t really be seen outside together.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: We had what’s known as a SCIF, a specialized compartmented information facility. So it was a hardened, soundproof office that we could have meetings in.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Couldn’t the adversarial country watch you walking in there in the morning?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The adversarial country arguably didn’t even know we were in Wolf, because every time they tracked anybody’s travel, it would take them to a different country.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, so you were just people going to an office.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you could be doing anything in there.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Correct.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: And it’s an office in a large office building, so we could really be going anywhere.

The First Mission

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, fine. It’s hard to charge. So what was your first mission together as a team? What were you doing in the enemy country? What was your objective? You were finding. You were working as a targeter to find interesting individuals. And then, Andrew, you were predominantly trying to make contact with those individuals.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Sort of, because I couldn’t. As the node of the cell. The node is a term that we’re using to say I was the piece that was exposed to CIA. So the mole. If the mole went hunting, the mole would find me. I was the one that was exposed.

So for me, it was important that I actually didn’t meet with any of the targets that we had in Falcon. My job was to go to Falcon to start sourcing the information that she would use to identify those individuals.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that mean?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: So whether it’s something stupid like a phone book or a thumb drive whether you’re picking up a dead drop from somebody else. So consider in Falcon, we would have already had other case officers carrying out operations.

So we may have a case officer who was able to extract information from a military database. And that military database has all the weapons engineers for Falcon’s air force. That case officer, that spy can collect a thumb drive.

And then they can put that thumb drive in what’s known as a dead drop. A dead drop would be something that you hide anywhere in the country, in a city, wherever else.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Like in a bush.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Yeah, like in a bush. I would then go into Falcon and I would go to that dead drop site, the bush.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you go into the enemy country.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’d go to the bush and take the thumb drive and bring it back by our cleansing route to Wolf, where I could give it to Jihi. Jihi could then extract the information from the thumb drive. And now she has a list of all the engineers who are part of the enemy country’s air force. And then from there, she has a starting point for her information to start finding targets.

Now, as she finds targets, that’s when we tap on our case officers. James, Tasha, Luke, Beverly. And we say, “Here’s somebody that we think would be susceptible to you because you’re a middle aged woman, you’re an older man, you’re a younger man, you’re a younger woman.” We think that these people might be susceptible to your interests, your backgrounds, your voice, who knows what. And we need you to target them. And then we would send those spies into Falcon to meet the targets that Jihi found.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay? Okay, Got you.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The game of espionage is not an easy game. It’s a fun game, but it’s a chess game, not a checkers game. So there’s a lot of moving pieces and a lot of moving parts. And for me, it was always very exciting. But I also understand that it can be very difficult to express it.

The Moment of Greatest Risk

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, was there ever a time when you felt most at risk when you were in that hostile country?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: At some point, my presence in Falcon, in the enemy country, became known to the local government in the enemy country, and they dispatched a surveillance team to track me. It was a major turning point in our operation. We kind of went from a place where we felt like we were winning to a place where we wondered if we were losing.

We went from a place where I felt very safe to a place where I felt like I could immediately be apprehended. And then all the worst thoughts start to creep in. Not necessarily about being shot. Oftentimes a CIA officer being shot in a foreign country is a welcome experience because being shot at least means everything ends.

The worst is being captured and being interrogated and being used for diplomatic leverage and being used for policy leverage and being forced to do, into brainwashing and propaganda videos. That’s a much worse experience than a clean death.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You said earlier that it would have been the mole that was exposed to your presence and that knew that you were in this enemy country. So was it the mole that told the enemy country?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: That’s what we believe. We don’t have the evidence to prove it. But what CIA’s conclusion, as well as the conclusion inside of our own shadow cell, is that our operations had reached the place where they were significant enough that the mole took a risk to find out that I was the exposed member of the cell. And then the mole reported my name to the hostile country’s police force.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’re now inside that hostile country, the enemy country, and they know that you’re a U.S. spy? Was there a day when you realized that they knew that you were a spy?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Yes. Well, there wasn’t a day that I realized that they knew I was CIA. There was a day that I realized they were surveilling me as if I was a threat.

When you travel, when any business person travels to a hostile country, they’re almost always surveilled. Their hotel rooms can be rifled through. There’s people called bumbling surveillance or watchers, who will usually follow you. I’m not sure what your travel looks like, but I can almost assure you that if you traveled to Russia, if you traveled to China, if you traveled to Cuba, you had a watcher, you had a surveillance team that was watching you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Me? Yeah. Why?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Because you’re wealthy, you’re successful, you’re an influencer, you’re of significance. At the very least, they want to make sure that some petty criminal doesn’t hurt you in their country, because that could be a big deal.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you, but please continue to surveil me.

Digital Surveillance and Data Collection

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: But at worst, they could also be scraping your cell phone to pull all of your contacts off the cell phone so that they could then reach out to any of the contacts that you have on your cell phone. They could scan and duplicate your hard drive as you go through secondary or go through immigration in a foreign country.

STEVEN BARTLETT: They can scan my hard drive as I go through immigration?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Absolutely. We can do that here in the United States, too.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What? So if I land in the United States. How would they do that?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: So there’s different authorities that exist for different agencies. So here inside the United States, one of the authorities that we give to our border patrol is the authority to essentially scrape data off of all of your electronic devices.

So if you’re deemed a target of interest and if you’re moved into what’s known as a secondary screening, they will separate you from your bags. They’ll actually open your bags. They might even tell you to unlock your cell phone or unlock your laptop. And then from there, with technology that’s proprietary and technology that’s also commercially available, they can scrape and scan your hard drive.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because I’ve been through security before in various countries, and sometimes when I get to the other end, there’s a letter in my suitcase. And the letter in my suitcase says, “Hey, we had to go through your bags for some reason.”

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: If you had a technical device in your bag along with that letter, there’s a good chance that it was cloned.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But I didn’t give them my password.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Sometimes they don’t need your password.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Really?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Oh, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How are they going to get into my laptop without my password?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: There’s ways.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: So, yeah, there’s password generators. There’s password cracking codes. Your password is the. I mean, I have somebody I could call right now, and within about 30 minutes, we would probably have all of your passwords that you use for all of your devices in your personal home.

Device Security and Surveillance

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s the end of the podcast. Angie, good luck with the book. And this is a bit of a tangent, but it’s an important one. So what devices do you guys use? If you have that knowledge that it’s really easy to break into devices, do you use the same devices that I use?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Yeah. I mean, for me, I assume that once you become a target of interest, there’s nothing you can do to protect yourself. So I use devices that are actually easy to crack and clone because I don’t want my device to get broken.

So that when the Chinese or the Russians choose to go through some backdoor on my Android system, my Android doesn’t shut down. Whereas there are more complex systems like a glacier phone, where if somebody penetrates your glacier phone, the whole phone will shut down and you’ll be without a phone.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there any phone or device that’s safe?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I would argue the answer is no.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: No.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I would say no also, because anything that you create that claims to be safe becomes priority number one for all the adversaries out there. Because they know if they can be the first ones to crack that phone or crack that hard drive or crack that operating system, then they have the competitive advantage over everybody else.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yeah, it’s impossible for something to be safe for a short period of time, but eventually it’s going to get cracked. They’ll find the back door, they’ll figure out how to open it.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: And it’s not just foreign intelligence that wants to do that. It’s also all of your criminal syndicates, it’s all of your dark web syndicates. Everybody wants to do it. So whenever I see anybody come out and promise that they got the new hardest device, I just don’t believe it. It might be hard, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yeah, there are levels of security, but nothing is 100% secure, at least when it comes to technology. And so we just assume that it’s not secure. And so you just treat your device in that way, you know, with whatever liberal security is convenient and makes you feel secure.

But knowing that at any point somebody could just hack in remotely, they could scrape your drive when you’re going through immigration or if you’re in a hotel room, somebody comes in. I mean, it’s always possible they can steal your encryption key from somebody else that you’re having an encrypted chat with. They don’t even have to target you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you use like cold storage that is, do you use like a hard drive that’s not connected to the Internet or something?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: We will air gap. Air gapping is cold storage, like what you’re talking about, where you take something off the actual cloud, take something off the Internet and it just lives in a standalone server. Whether that’s drives that we save our information to that are air gapped, they’re not connected to the Internet, not connected to a cloud. They’re only connected whenever we choose to transfer information.

So we’ll do things like that to keep our information safe. But I think the most important thing is that if you make yourself easy to be hacked, then you’ll actually get hacked less because you’re not a risk. They can see what you have, they understand that you’re not important, and they move on to the next target that’s more clandestine or trying to hide.

Discovering Surveillance

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so you figure out, going back to the story, you figure out that you’re being surveilled how?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Just like the whole idea of a cleansing route through a third country, that’s a piece of tradecraft that has never been exposed before. I actually get to teach a number of people. I get to teach in the story how we do what’s known as a surveillance detection route.

So the core of surveillance detection is understanding something that we call multiple sites, multiple sightings over a period of time. So I need to see the same person, the same vehicle, the same face, the same profile. Profile meaning, you know, tall Caucasian male, mid-50s. I need to see the same profile several times over a period of time where I’m changing locations.

So what happens inside Shadow Cell is I identify one car that follows me through multiple turns and then falls off, only to come back on later on. That’s kind of my first indicator that there might be something going on. So then I go through this route, a predetermined, preplanned route through a city. And the only reason I’m doing that route is so that I can drag people along with me to see if they’re going to behave like surveillance.

And from that route, I find that it’s not just one car, it’s actually two other cars. And when I get out of my own vehicle to walk on foot, there are very specific people who then follow me on foot. And then in the third part of the surveillance detection route, I find that the same people who are following me on foot are also the people driving the cars that are following me inside vehicles.

So most surveillance detection routes are executed in this very prescribed, very specific process so that you can see who’s actually following you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you did that. You discover that there’s multiple people following you in multiple vehicles.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: And when you discover that, it’s terrifying. Yeah, I was going to say it’s absolutely terrifying. But it’s comforting because you know they’re following you, but they don’t know that you know that yet. So they still think that they are discreet. They still think that you’re operationally active.

Meaning they’re following you because they expect you to commit espionage. They’re following you because they expect you to meet with a source, do a dead drop, acquire some kind of equipment that you shouldn’t have. Right. They’re waiting for that. If they don’t see that, then they don’t get the evidence that they need. They don’t win.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you go straight to a strip club or something.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Exactly right. You go to a strip club. You go to a library. I went to an arcade in this book. And you go somewhere to just waste their time. Because as long as I’m collecting their information, when I come back to my friendly country and I meet with my Shadow Cell teammates, I can now tell them this license plate is a surveillance vehicle. This profile is a surveillance vehicle. If you see a woman or a man wearing these types of clothing, this is a surveillance.

Right. And we can now build a database back in Wolf that shares the surveillance team members in Falcon.

The Fear of Being Caught

STEVEN BARTLETT: Were you scared when you figured out that you were being followed?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I was terrified. I was terrified because I had so many thoughts going through my head from “How did I mess up?” to “What if I don’t go home?” I’m trying to think about what they’re going to do as their next step. How long are they going to follow me before they just say “forget it” and just wrap me up? Are they even going to wrap me up?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Wrap me up meaning?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Meaning apprehend me, capture me. Do they already have evidence that shows that I’m committing espionage? Right. I haven’t committed espionage on this trip yet, but have they seen me on a previous trip doing a dead drop? Retrieving a dead drop, dropping a cell phone, taking a battery. Like what? What do they know? I don’t know what they know. And then you’ve got all this panic.

And at the same time, you have to recall three and a half hours of very specific activity across a city to run an SDR. An SDR, a surveillance detection route, you have to recall, “I turn left on Front street, I go two blocks, I turn right on 22nd north, and then I turn left on an alley.” You have to recall this thing that you memorized, that you worked through at the same time that you have this spike of adrenaline, panic, and you were on your own. I was on my own for that operation.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you go through this route through the city that is predetermined for you to go down. And presumably this particular route is designed in such a way where it gives you opportunities to expose them. You realize that you are being followed. What do you do? In that exact moment, the first moment.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: That I realized it was true, I had this realization, this moment of fear and vulnerability where I just had a moment of self loathing where you realize that you’re not as good as you think you are. And you realize that however this happened, you’re the only one to blame for what comes next.

In that kind of moment of humility, I actually called Jihi. In our alias identities that we had built for these operations, we had what’s known as a throwaway phone or a disposable telecommunications. And I called her and I gave her a coded message to let her know that something was wrong. Because I wanted her to know that something was wrong so that she could take it back to the cell so that they could start their systems on their end to protect me if I did get arrested, if I did get wrapped up, if I did get shot.

The Coded Message

STEVEN BARTLETT: You gave her a coded message via cell phone. What is that coded message?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I think I just called you and said, “I’m coming home early.”

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Mm.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You called her and said, “I’m coming home early”?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yeah, which is a bad sign because you would never come home early from an operation ever. So as soon as I heard he was coming home early, I knew that something was wrong.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Take me into your world. At that time, the phone rings.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: I get the call on my burner phone, which was unusual anyways. I mean, I always had it, because that was part of our communication plan, was for us to do that when we were apart.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So a burner phone is a secondary phone that you just use for these kind of things?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yeah, just for this. It’s never used for anything else. It’s not connected to a name, and that’s what keeps it anonymous for us. And so he calls and he says, “Hey, I’m coming home early.” And I’m like, “Okay,” because you can’t be like, “Oh, my God. What’s going on? Are you okay?” Because somebody’s listening to it. It has to sound like we knew that his alias had a fiancé. I was the fiancé.

So, you know, it was totally natural for anybody listening in to hear him say, “Hey, I’m coming home early.” So then I had to be like, “Oh, that’s really exciting. That’s great. I can’t wait to see you.” And he’s like, “Okay, I love you.” And then that’s the end of the conversation. And that’s all I get.

And so after that’s all I get from Andy, I go back to the office. I’m starting to scour all of our cables. I go talk to James. “Have you heard anything? Is anything happening?”

STEVEN BARTLETT: You started to scour all of your cables?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yeah. So, you know, we have all of our databases, all the CIA databases. So there’s reporting that comes in all the time that you’re privy to, especially regional reporting. And so I talked to James because he had more access than I did to all things Falcon. And so I was like, “Have you heard anything? Is there anything weird going on?” And he said no.

And so I started just looking through all of my stuff to see was there any reporting that was of somebody being captured or somebody, something going wrong. And there was nothing.

And so Andy and I have created on our own just a communication plan where if anything ever happens, whether natural disaster or espionage faux pas, we had a system of communication where I wait eight hours and check this fake email that we share that’s not attributable. And then he gives me a sign of life. And then we have these timings, 8 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours, where all I need from him is a sign of life to know that he’s okay.

And then that also gives us the opportunity, if it were a natural disaster, for example, to put “meet me at this location.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: So that’s an email address that Andy emails.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yes, close. It’s an email address that we both have a login to. And you create a draft email inside of it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, okay.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Also learns from terrorism.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Also learn from terrorism.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, is that what terrorists do?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yeah.

The Draft Email Communication Method

STEVEN BARTLETT: So they create a draft email, they just leave it there?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Correct.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Someone else logs in and looks at it.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yes. So there’s a… It’s never sent. So it never goes over the Internet.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Really?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yeah. So we had this communication plan in place. So even though I was concerned and I couldn’t find anything to discover what was happening, I knew we had this communication plan in place. So I knew that at some point he was going to give me a sign of life. And I couldn’t do anything until that point.

Planning the Escape

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’ve discovered that you’ve been discovered by this adversarial country. You called Jihi, you let her know that you’re coming home early.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Then what you do, then I have to plan my escape. So another thing that people that movies don’t show you is that when the first effort to escape is always self rescue, it’s always on the part of the field officer alone to try to escape.

There’s no Navy SEAL team, there’s no evacuation helicopter, there’s no high speed boat or classy yacht just waiting for you, you have to get yourself across the country’s border yourself before you can hope for any kind of evac from there or what we call an exfil.

So I knew that it was on me to come up with some evacuation plan and I had to come up with an evacuation plan that wasn’t going to let the surveillance team know that I knew I was under surveillance.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you still in the car at this point?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I’m in between the car and on foot, depending on where I am in the surveillance detection route. Right. It was… Surveillance detection routes generally break into three phases. It’s in the first phase that you suspect that you’re under surveillance. It’s in the second phase that you confirm it.

So it’s in the second phase when I confirm I am absolutely under surveillance, that’s when I contact Jihi and that’s when I start coming up with my own self rescue plan.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And in the third phase, the third…

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Phase is a collection phase. You know, you know that you’re under surveillance. You know that you’ve communicated to somebody that you’re under surveillance. And now the mission becomes collect as much information as you can about the surveillance team before they realize that they’re being collected against.

Memory Techniques for Surveillance Detection

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you, you see this car behind you, multiple cars behind you, and the same people following you on foot. Are you writing this down or are you just trying to memorize it?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: At first it’s all memory and we have a methodology for trying to memorize this stuff. We actually talk about this in the book as well. You start to come up with short codes to describe the people, and the codes that you come up with mean something to you, but they wouldn’t mean anything if they were, if they came out in an interrogation, if they came out in writing.

So for you, I might call you “black T shirt.” A black T shirt means something to me. So if I see black T shirt behind me three times in the next 45 minutes in three different parts of the city, I know that I have an image for what black T shirt means. But when I write down black T shirt, nobody else knows what that means.

So when I see a woman, it was cold the season that I was carrying out these operations. I saw a woman in earmuffs, so I would call her “Earmuffs.” I saw a guy in a bomber jacket, so I called him “bomber jacket.” And you just recall these people. You, “blue sedan,” “yellow SUV,” right? “White taxi cab.” You start to come up with these nicknames that mean something to you but don’t mean anything to anybody else.

And then when you get back to a place where you can document your notes in detail, you have a reference point to document in detail. So I start by memorizing. When I got towards the end of my third phase of surveillance detection, I actually wrote down my notes in the book, it explains, I went into a clothing store, and then I started making notes in the clothing store.

Presumably, if somebody came in and arrested me at that moment, what they would see is a bunch of notes about clothing, earmuffs and black T shirts inside of a clothing store. That’s not espionage. But then when I was able to actually get back to Wolf with my cell, then I was able to deconstruct what black T shirt meant. Black T shirt meant black Male with a goatee, approximately 165 pounds, 5 foot, 11 inches, 38 years old.

The Arcade Incident

STEVEN BARTLETT: So how did you get from phase two of your process of figuring out if you’re being followed to the arcade? What was the… Why did you get to the arcade?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: So I went to the arcade because I was trying in a surveillance detection route. One of the things that you’re actually trying to do is called bore or lull your surveillance. You never want to in movies. It makes it look like you’re trying to ditch your surveillance team. You’re trying to lose your tail. That’s not what professionals do.

What professionals do is we drag the tail. We keep the tail with us for as long as possible. And one of the things you do is you make yourself very predictable. You move very slowly. You hang out in public places, which makes it very easy for them to observe you.

I was actually going to the arcade to try to collect more information about my surveillance team, but I was trying to give them time and space so they could observe me in a public setting. It backfired, because what actually ended up happening is that when I went into the arcade, they lost. They lost sight of me, which put them into a position where they started panicking to try to find me, even though I was just sitting inside the arcade.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, it doesn’t sound like it backfired if they lost you.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It’s a terrible thing when they lose you, because when they lose you, they start to panic and they start to assume either they made a mistake or you’re a trained officer. If you’re a trained officer, if that’s the conclusion that they make, they can come in and arrest you.

If they lose you, then they start to make mistakes. And when a surveillance team starts to make mistakes, it means that they might stumble across you. They might have two different surveillance people find you at the same time. And for them, that’s a scary thing, because for them, they’re trying not to be identified. They’re trying to be discreet. They’re trying to not be seen.

So when they in this case, in the story that we share in Shadow Cell, when the surveillance team broke into a Starburst, a starburst means they went. They broke ranks to try to find me in the arcade. When they broke ranks to try to find me, they presented themselves to me in the arcade face to face. And it was in that moment that I realized they know that I see them and I know that they see me. And this is bad.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You locked eyes with them, which you’re…

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Never supposed to do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re never supposed to do.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: You’re never supposed to lock eyes with your surveillance. You’re never supposed to lock eyes with anybody who’s a threat ever, because that’s threatening behavior, right? That’s one of the reasons that people share strong eye contact with peers is a show of trust. Well, whenever you’re locking eyes with somebody who’s a threat, it’s a sign of aggression or dominance.

So whenever you’re being surveilled, you never want to make eye contact with your surveillance team, because your surveillance team will see that eye contact as a threat.

The Face-to-Face Encounter

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you say you sort of bumped into them in that arcade, what’s the distance?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Three feet.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Three feet. And how long did you lock eyes with each other?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It felt like an eternity. In reality, it was probably two and a half seconds.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, two and a half seconds is a long time, especially when you’re…

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Trying not to be seen.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So recreate that moment for me. You’re in the arcade pretending you’re playing with games. You turn a corner.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It’s horrible, man. It’s a horrible story. I’m in the arcade again. I think I’m doing everything right. I’m like, “Oh, I’m in the arcade. They watched me come in. They’re probably taking a smoke break outside. They’ve got nothing to worry about.”

And I’m going from game to game and spending whatever credits that I bought in the arcade. And I go to this dinosaur hunting shooting game, right? Almost like Big Buck Hunter or Jurassic park. And I pick up a rifle and I’m shooting at dinosaurs and I’m just killing time.

And then the fucking surveillant comes around the back of the machine looking for me. He comes around the back of the machine and he sees me and I’m holding a fucking gun. And I look at him and he looks at me and that’s… That’s when our two and a half seconds happened.

And I’m sitting there and I’m like, “What just happened? Why did I just see Bomber Jacket come around my video game console and stare at me in the face?” And that’s when I realized, “Oh, my gosh, the team is in panic. I can see multiple people on the team. They lost me. They’re trying to find me. Bomberjacket just found me.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: What did Bomberjacket do when he looked at you?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: His jaw dropped. He went slack. He looked at me, and he knew that he had fucked up, too. And I looked at him, and in my mind’s eye, I was just hoping that I didn’t look as stupid as he looked in that moment.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is it true to say that you should have just looked back at the dinosaur game as fast as you possibly could?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: What I should have done is I should have seen a person come around the corner and just stayed in the game. That’s what anybody else would have done. Anybody else would have just stayed in the game. They’re focused on the game. They don’t even realize there are people walking around. Right.

But the fact that I identified, I saw him and then looked at him, and the fact that he saw me and looked at me, as two professionals on opposite sides of the playing field, we both made the same mistake. We both made the mistake of showing our recognition to our intended target.

The Cover Identity

STEVEN BARTLETT: And before we continue, as far as your alias was in that country, you were called Alex Hernandez, right?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Correct.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you were running a business called Acme Commercial.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Correct.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What was Acme Commercial supposed to be doing as a company?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Acme Commercial was a company that was built to source new disposable goods from foreign countries for transport and distribution across Western countries.

CIA Commercial Operations

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the intelligence services build a lot of fake businesses, you said?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Yes, it’s a… The easier it is to build a business, the easier it is to collect information. So what we’ve discovered is that just as anybody with $127 in their pocket can create an LLC, that’s about how much money it takes to start an intelligence operation.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Says that the CIA operates numerous fake companies.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The CIA also operates numerous real companies.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Too, not just the CIA. I mean, every intel organization has commercial fronts.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Every intel organization, the CIA operates real companies. What does that mean?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: There are real companies out there owned and operated by CIA. In-Q-Tel is one of those companies. It’s an investment vehicle where CIA invests money and invest in new technology. And all the technology that goes through In-Q-Tel knows that it’s going through the CIA.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. That’s public, though, right?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Correct.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But the ones that aren’t public. So the CIA will create a company and then they will use that company to pretend to be doing something in a foreign land, basically.

The Black Budget and CIA Business Operations

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: But the primary mission is intelligence. This is one of the most fascinating things, not only about CIA, but about all of your first world intelligence organization. You’ve heard of what’s known as the black budget. The black budget is the budget of discretionary money that can be spent on military and intelligence operations that isn’t tied to the taxpayer. So it’s a giant pot of money that isn’t tied to tax money.

So where does that money come from? Part of that money comes from anytime law enforcement or intelligence agencies seize assets, we seize cryptocurrency, we seize drugs, we seize child pornography. When we seize that money and we use it for other operations, that’s part of the black budget.

The other part of the black budget is when an intelligence organization creates a business and that business turns a profit. When that business turns a profit, where does the profit go? It can’t go to the case officer. That person’s being paid on the US payroll. So all that profit goes into the black budget.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think the CIA has some big profitable businesses that it set up as fronts that just like went really, really well?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I know it does. I know it does. The CIA has businesses that it’s set up that have gone wildly profitable. CIA also has officers that built these businesses that then were like, “Why the hell am I at CIA?” And then they leave CIA and they go on to run businesses instead.

TikTok and Social Media Intelligence

STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, a couple of things popped into my head as you said that. The first was there’s obviously a huge conversation at the moment around TikTok because TikTok was started in China. It’s become this massive sort of global success. And I can’t think of a better company to have started than a platform like TikTok where everybody’s putting their information and data in and it’s tracking your location. So what is your perspective on something like TikTok? Do you think TikTok was started as a tool to spy?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I don’t believe TikTok individually was started as a tool to spy. I believe that what happened is TikTok became wildly popular and the government in China realized, “Hey, everything in China belongs to the government anyways. We can step in and take advantage of this.” That is also a way that CIA and MI6 do business as well. When a company does very well and there’s an intelligence benefit, they will approach the company in a democracy. They can’t force the company to cooperate, but in a country like China, they can.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So do you think the social networks, a lot of the big social networks have been approached by the CIA or the MI6 and asked to give information to them?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I would go a step further and say that they’ve all been approached and that the vast majority of them cooperate.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that a concern for the average person?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Not for the average person. That’s a benefit.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: The average person is not being targeted. I promise you. There’s zero interest. And for the federal government and for the intelligence community, there’s absolutely zero interest in the average person.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The person who’s cheating on their spouse or avoiding five thousand dollars in taxes or who isn’t paying their parking bills. Nobody cares. The federal government doesn’t care about that.

FISA Requests and Data Collection

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, you were doing some of that targeting, right?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So did you ever work with any existing company to give you information?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: So all of my data, depending on what country I was working on, had different sources, and some countries had more sources than others, but they’re all sources I can’t disclose. But there’s tons and tons of data that would come in to me. And then I worked on a number of cases where I had to get FISA requests.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s a FISA request?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: A FISA request is when you want to collect information or take information from somebody who is an American citizen. And I just want to remind people that American citizen. Most people who complain about, “Oh, they’re targeting American citizens” are thinking about themselves. They’re looking at themselves in the mirror and thinking, “Oh, they’re targeting American citizens.”

They’re not thinking about the Chinese person who just came over and naturalized. They’re not thinking about the Iranian who’s been here for a long time and naturalized. All of those, they’re not thinking about…

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The Al Qaeda member.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yeah.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Who claimed to be a refugee to get here, to get some sort of green card.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Right. So American citizenship. A lot of people have that. And some of those people are doing bad things. And some of those people are our adversaries who have infiltrated the United States and are here to gather intelligence, to give to our adversaries, or are here to do bad things within the country. And so we have to get FISA requests to get the data on them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what does that mean in reality, a FISA request? Does that mean that you can go into their phone?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: It means that you have proven a link from that person to something bad. You’ve given the court enough evidence to say, “Hey, look, this person’s doing something bad and we need to gather more data on them.” So it just opens the kind of data that you can get on that person.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What kind of data is that?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: You can get on their phone, you can get into their computer, you can get into their private Google accounts, you can get in their private Apple accounts.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: You can get data you can get access to. You can now use it to target them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you could get access to their private Google accounts, their private Apple accounts, without their passwords.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: You would hack their passwords or steal their passwords or Google retains their passwords.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And Google would give you the password.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: For most cases, if it comes down to national security, American companies will share details. And that’s what a FISA request does is. It’s a judicial claim. It’s a judicial warrant essentially to say you will let this service onto that person’s account.

The Reality of Privacy

STEVEN BARTLETT: You guys must think that people like me live in a certain state of naivety and ignorance as to what’s actually going on.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I wouldn’t say it’s ignorance or naivety. I would say that it’s conditioned into you. You’re conditioned to believe that you have privacy.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So the reality that we should realize is that we don’t have privacy.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: It’s not real.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Privacy’s not real.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: No.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: I mean, there’s a level in your…

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: When you get undressed in a dark room that’s yours, usually no one’s watching. There’s a good chance that you’re not being watched by the federal government. If you’re getting…

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s a good chance.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: If you’re sending dirty emails to your girlfriend, that’s essentially, I mean, it’s private on the surface, but not really forever private. Somebody could access those. If you write her dirty notes, that’s way more private.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Especially if she throws them away.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: People just, I think people put too much confidence in technology and feel too confident in the privacy of technology, because technology, there’s really nothing private about it. To an extent, yes. But if you think that nobody can ever look at your stuff, that’s wrong.

CIA Surveillance and Monitoring

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think the CIA knew you were coming here today?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I think the CIA knew we were coming on Diary of a CEO, and I think they knew that we were going to talk to you about our book.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do you think they knew that?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Because we know that CIA as well as other intelligence services, as an example, the United Arab Emirates, we know that they have a dedicated person that sits in their office that watches us.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So how would they know you were coming here today?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Our emails, I mean, our emails, our publishers emails, our own text messages back and forth, listening in on phone calls. Any number of things could have happened.

We’ve tried to have a very collaborative relationship with CIA about this book because we know how scared they are, we know how nervous this book makes them. So we’re trying to be extra collaborative to give them peace of mind. Like, “Hey, we’re not about to go out there and tell the world that you’re a bunch of animals and terrible anything.”

They’ve actually read the book multiple times and still they’re afraid that we’re going to somehow make them look bad because so many of their officers have come out to become authors who make CIA look bad.

Edward Snowden Case Analysis

STEVEN BARTLETT: There was a couple of other things that we are going to get back to the arcade and what happened next. But there’s a couple of things that sprung to mind when you talked about how people can make real businesses fake. Businesses have various different covers. The next one was you mentioned Edward Snowden earlier. And in mentioning Edward Snowden, you used him as an example of someone who returns to the country that they were working for the whole time.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: So with Snowden in the Snowden case in specific. Whenever somebody flees their own home country.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Nobody gives them protection for free. Even in the United States, we don’t give anybody protection for free. You have to earn it. You have to share some sort of currency. And that currency may not be cash dollars. That currency might be information.

So when Snowden leaked to the Guardian, the operations at NSA that were collecting against American citizens, the same American citizens that Jihi was just talking about. Nobody cares about Joe Bob. Everybody cares about the person who’s pretending to be an American citizen but is in fact a terrorist threat.

When Snowden made his escape, when he fled the United States, he was essentially trading classified information. Not just the details of the NSA case that he whistleblew, but other confidential information that he collected specifically as currency to help him basically pay his way through Hong Kong and into China or into Russia.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And so he lives in Russia now.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: He’s a Russian citizen. I’m pretty sure he’s also received a Russian award for heroism.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you think he gave secrets to Russia about the United States to get that?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I can almost guarantee you, yeah. What he gave, I don’t know. But Russia wouldn’t give him that status unless he had given them something in return.

The Jeffrey Epstein Case

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the other one who sprung to mind as real business, fake, real business become successful. Is the man on everyone’s lips at the moment Jeffrey Epstein.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: So Epstein’s a fascinating case because Epstein fits all of the primary pillars of a foreign intelligence asset collecting information on American citizens, not an American spy working for someone else. It’s funny because people keep thinking, “CIA killed him,” or people keep thinking that he somehow worked for CIA or maybe even worked for Mossad.

What I see is the opposite, that he, if anything, was working independently, maybe even working for several companies or several countries, but collecting information on US people.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that what you believe?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I think that he could have been that. I don’t know that I necessarily believe that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s true because he was a very successful business person. He had lots of successful friends. Actually, I was interviewing someone the other day, and they said that they met Jeffrey Epstein. And Jeffrey Epstein was really, really interested in their physics and science discoveries and wasn’t interested at all in the financier stuff that he was pretending to or he was purporting to be involved in.

And this person said to me, “It was just really bizarre because he was only interested in the physics and science discoveries we had at Harvard. He wasn’t particularly interested in finance to me.” And that person was really shocked by that.

The Psychology of Wealth and Power

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: What I’ve learned working with wealthy people and successful people is that they’re often very intelligent and they’re often misunderstood. Part of the reason that they have grown as successful as they’ve grown is because they don’t really fit in anywhere else. If they would have fit in somewhere else, they would have been distracted by the area where they fit in. Instead, they had to carve their own interests, their own passions, their own drive.

In many ways, when I look at Epstein, that’s what I see. I’ve also worked with many wealthy people who have gone to jail. When wealthy people go to jail, their whole identity crumbles and they start to doubt themselves and they start to have these irrational thoughts that sound totally rational to them.

I had a client who was very wealthy who was going to jail after being found guilty of a crime that arguably couldn’t be proven. But this court system was set up in such a way that he was found guilty. He literally thought that it would be better if he cut off all ties to his kids and just went to jail, and then even when he got out of jail, never talked to his kids again because that would be better than shaming his children for the rest of their life with a father who went to jail.

When I think about the Epstein case, I think about a wealthy, powerful man who was having parties with the world’s elite and then he goes to jail and he kills himself. To me, that’s not an unbelievable series of events.

The Epstein Mystery

STEVEN BARTLETT: The whole thing with the island and the underage sex and all this stuff. People just can’t seem to shake the idea that he wasn’t extracting information. Then the fact that they won’t release the flight logs or a list of the names of people that were frequenting his island or interacting with him also raises another question mark about why wouldn’t the US Government release that? Why isn’t Trump very quick to release that information?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: There are lots of secrets that are kept for lots of reasons. When we talk about need to know, the need part is the driving part. What is the need to know? There’s plenty of secrets the government has that it tells the American people it doesn’t know. It’s just lying. Of course it knows, but it’s working the common good to say, “If you knew what we knew, it could cause panic, it could cause chaos, it could cause any number of things.” In the United States, that is one of the rights and privileges that the federal government has.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what do you both think happened with the Jeffrey Epstein situation? Because it smells fishy to everybody. The fact that Trump and Kash Patel and various other White House officials were saying “we’re going to release it the minute we get in there.” Then they get in there and they say there’s nothing to release. You must see fingerprints of what you think is actually going on there or the real reasons they wouldn’t release it.

The Most Probable Scenario

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: When I look at it through a lens of probabilities, the most probable outcome is that somebody in the prison was hired to hurt Jeffrey Epstein. That’s the most probable outcome. That somebody outside was watching the Epstein case and knew that Epstein may or may not have compromising information on them. That wealthy, well connected person paid to have a hit inside the prison. That’s just the most probable result of things happening.

That explains the missing evidence, that explains the videotapes, that explains the stories inside a prison where nobody can see what’s going on. Also, that’s the most vulnerable place for Epstein to have been neutralized. That’s how we would have run an operation.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But why wouldn’t the government release that? Why wouldn’t they say a prisoner killed him?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The government may not know that because if a prisoner was paid to do it, they may have covered their tracks well enough, or they may have paid a prisoner and the guards to also cover the thing up. Jail is a nasty place. People forget how nasty a place jail is. Jails are commercial. They’re not federal for the most part. So it’s a commercial business that has all sorts of plausible deniability that a federal business or a federal organization, federal building doesn’t have.

That’s the most probable series of events. There’s still a chance that any number of the other conspiracies are true. But when I think of what I’ve seen, what my clients have seen, what I would do if I was in the shoes of a foreign adversary or a foreign intelligence collection operation dealing with a Jeffrey Epstein type of situation, that’s how we would clean it up.

Government Denials and Intelligence Operations

STEVEN BARTLETT: There was a press conference the other day where the reporters asked the Trump administration, “Does the Department of Justice have any indication that Jeffrey Epstein was working with the US or a foreign intelligence agency, or was he a spy of some kind?” Pam Bondi, who works in the Trump administration, said to him, “Being an agent, I have no knowledge about that. We can get back to you on that.”

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Two really important things here. If they did have information on that in an active investigation, she would say, “I have no knowledge on that.” She would lie to the American public. That’s what you have to do if you’re trying to build a current case. Because if they acknowledge “we actually have some reason to believe that he might have been an agent,” now all of a sudden, everybody else out there would start destroying evidence and start hiding evidence and start making the case much more difficult. So if they knew, they would say they don’t know.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think he was an agent?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I think he could have been. I think he fits the model of a very good reporting asset. But I don’t have enough evidence to say that it was actually one.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think he was?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: I don’t know that it matters is what I think. Even if he was, that doesn’t mean that it’s connected, because he was a lot of things. I think people are focused on it because it’s interesting. It would be interesting if he was, and it would be interesting if there was this conspiracy. I think that’s why people are focused on it. But I don’t know that it really matters because in the grand scheme of things, it could be a lot of things that led to it.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Why are we talking about a dead guy who’s not reporting when there’s…

STEVEN BARTLETT: Just a lure, right? People want answers. Once the curiosity gap’s open, people need to fill it with something.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: What the intelligence community believes is that in any given moment there are two penetrations of every intelligence service. So why are we talking about the dead guy that we don’t know about, when we’re not talking about the dozens of arrests and cases that are made every year of active moles, active penetrations that are inside of our intelligence community.

Back to the Arcade Incident

STEVEN BARTLETT: So take me back to the arcade. You lock eyes with this guy, the guy wearing the… What was he wearing?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The bomber jacket.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The bomber jacket. What happens next?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Once I realized that we had both made the same mistake, he darted off in one direction and I felt burned. Burned is the term that we use whenever we are spotted identified as trained intelligence officers. But I didn’t want to act on being burned right away because our training says that just because you believe something to be true, you can’t act on that truth. If you act on that truth, then you’re verifying to anybody observing that you already know you screwed up.

So I kind of ambled around the arcade and played another couple of games, kind of half handed, half hearted, just to kill some time before I left and finished my SDR route and finished my collection and went back to my hotel for the night. The whole process that I go through during the surveillance detection route, the whole process that I go through to evacuate the country safely is all part of the details that we put inside Shadow Cell.

But the feeling that predominated, that dominated my thought process was just this feeling of failure, this feeling like I was a bad spy. I’m bad at what I do, bad at what I collect. When I think I’m good, I’m not good. It was just this humiliating and humbling experience. It wasn’t helped as I went through the process of writing the book, because when you write a book, it’s cathartic in a way, because it gets all this stuff out, but it’s also this black and white kind of stark reminder of all the things that you’ve done wrong.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What did you do wrong?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Whatever I did that got caught was wrong. If they caught me on my own behaviors, if the mole was the one that identified me to them, then I lost the ability to operate inside of Falcon on that day. I could no longer support the rest of the shadow cell. I could no longer support my team. I had a role to play, and I couldn’t play that role anymore.

I think that’s especially powerful to me because I’m not a case officer. I was supposed to be a case officer, but I’m not. Because when CIA assessed me for that job, they determined that I wouldn’t be good enough.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so you already had an insecurity there.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: That was the first year at CIA. So even though I built this career and I had a chance to carry out this operation, I got to do these amazing things, all that plays in the back of my head is, “I wasn’t good enough then, I’m not good enough now.”

Dealing with Head Trash

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things that the CIA does is they teach you how to deal with head trash. What is head trash?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Head trash is all the terrible things that you say about yourself in your head. That’s the colloquial term that we use, is head trash. “I’m not good enough. I’m ugly. I’m fat. I wish my smile was better. I lost my true love when I was 14.” Whatever, right? “My parents didn’t love me because I wasn’t a good enough kid.” Whatever it was. All those things are head trash. They’re subjective thoughts that you have because of your experience that don’t have any basis in objective reality.

CIA teaches us how to deal with that to a point. They teach us how to counter that when we are operationally active so that we don’t get distracted by the head trash going on. This is what happened whenever I first knew I was under surveillance. They teach you how to handle stress, mitigate cortisol levels in your bloodstream, lower your heart rate so that you can get back to the task at hand.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do they do that?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Techniques like box breathing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s that?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Box breathing is a process that’s common in anxiety as well.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Breathe in, four counts. Hold four counts. Breathe out, four counts. Just breathing. The various breathing techniques where you breathe in for a certain amount of time, you hold it for a certain amount of time, you release it for a certain amount of time.

Dealing with Operational Stress

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: And the goal there is to reduce your heart rate, to reduce your blood flow, to reduce the speed at which the cortisol that’s being released from your brain gets spread to the rest of your body. So you can start to take back your physiological movements and actions in a hope that it also brings back your cognitive functions and capabilities.

So the visualization process, just like when you’re meditating and you visualize a victory if you’re a professional athlete, or you visualize a beach if you’re stressing out at work. Like, you can visualize your way through an operation, an operational sequence, to get yourself back to a place where you’re in control. So they teach us how to deal with that head trash.

But what’s really interesting is CIA relies on loyalty in its people to keep them at CIA. Because the worst thing for CIA is for a CIA officer to realize how capable they actually are. Because when that officer realizes how smart, how capable, how resilient, how resourceful they really are, that person can leave CIA and go do amazing things.

So a big part of what CIA does is they train you to be operationally useful, but then they still condition you to be loyal and needy of outside validation, specifically from them. So it’s a very strange flywheel that exists.

STEVEN BARTLETT: A lot of businesses are like that as well.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It’s not a healthy relationship, but it’s a very effective relationship.

The Escape Plan

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you get back to your hotel. Are you not at that point when you’re back at your hotel thinking, “I’m going to find, like, how to get through, like, the restaurant kitchen door and, like, out the back, and I’ll cycle back to friendly,” because I’d be up all night thinking about going through that bloody, like, restaurant kitchen.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: A big part of that is what you do in the second phase of your SDR. And I had those thoughts. I thought about, “I could get on a motorcycle, I could ride to a local airfield, I could pay in cash for that airfield person, like a little private pilot to just fly me on a puddle hopper, puddle jumper somewhere where I walk across on foot and then I can make a phone call from another plate.” Like, I thought about all that, all that shit, right?

The problem is if you actually act on that and you’re being watched, what sense does that make? The only person who would do that kind of crazy shit is somebody who’s trying to escape the country.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what did you do?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I went back to the hotel. My plan was to literally just leave, was to walk across the border like any other law abiding citizen and just evacuate. Walk across the border, fly to leave like anybody else would leave and just gamble that they’re not going to take me down. Just gamble that I’m going to be more boring than they will be confident.

And that before they arrest Alex Hernandez and make some sort of public international incident, they’re going to think twice and they’re going to let me just leave.

The Airport Interrogation

STEVEN BARTLETT: What actually happened?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: So what actually happened is I get back to the hotel, I don’t really sleep at all. I try to use sleep techniques to get me to sleep because I am certain that at any given time someone’s going to burst through the door and just take me down. Because they already know I’m changing my flight. They already know I’m updating my itinerary. I’ve made all the phone calls, I’ve worked it through my company, my cover company, to get me home early.

So I’m just waiting for them to break in. They never break in. I go to the airport the next day. And on the path to the airport, I’m looking for surveillance and I’m surveillance free. And I get to the airport first thing in the morning and I’m waiting. And like every step I’m waiting for someone to jump out of the dark shadows and take me down and drag me off to prison.

And it just doesn’t happen until I get to the first entry point for the airport. I show my passport, I show my ticket, and then they move me into secondary. Secondary meaning where you try to leave a country and the border patrol says that you can’t leave through the main gate. You have to go through a second round of interview.

So they pull me off into a secondary room and I go through a light interrogation with two local Falcon officers at like 7 o’clock in the morning, first flight out. And they’re testing my story and they’re interrogating me to understand what have I been doing in the country, why did I change my flight. They’re going through my cover story. They’re going through my meetings from the day before. They’re going through everything two and three times, which is an interrogation technique to see if somebody’s lying.

And I’m sitting there going through this whole process, watching what almost feels like two untrained border patrol agents trying to crack me. And it was a funny feeling because they were so bad at their job that it made me feel confident in myself again.

Interrogation Training and Techniques

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you trained on how to deal with those situations in terms of body language and how you speak?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Absolutely. CIA trains us on how to deal with interviews, how to deal with interrogations, interactions, even how to deal with actual capture and strategic, almost like enhanced interrogation, like what you would call what we do call torture here in the United States.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And so from your training, what were you implementing at that moment in time?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Mirroring is a big piece of what you’re supposed to do in an interrogation. So you want to reflect back to the interrogator what they expect to see in a person of innocence. So you try to keep yourself from jittering, you calm your nerves. You try to match their curiosity. So if they lean forward, you actually want to lean forward too. And if they lean back, you want to lean back. And if they’re using their hands to talk, you want to use your hands to talk because you want to show them that you and them are the same, that you’re not better or worse or guilty or anything else. So mirroring is one of the techniques that we’re using.

I also used minimum information. There’s a process called elicitation. And you use different elicitation techniques to get individuals to share more information than they’re supposed to share. One of those elicitation techniques is silence. So oftentimes, if you want someone to speak, all you have to do is sit there and be quiet because it will force them to talk. This is something that many interviewers use, especially when they’re border patrol agents or when they’re like law enforcement or local law enforcement, they’ll just let somebody kind of admit their guilt.

So for me, they ask a question, I answer their question, and then we sit there in silence for as long as we need to sit there until they ask their next question. And then we sit there and I answer their question, we sit there in silence again. And that’s combating elicitation. It’s a technique that we call counter elicitation. And that’s just one of several elicitation techniques that interviewers can use.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that’s useful in everyday life, I guess as well.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Absolutely.

STEVEN BARTLETT: In what context?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: When you’re dealing with a negotiation, when you’re dealing with a hostile employee, when you’re dealing with a hard conversation, when you’re trying to find information in another person who you think is holding information back. Elicitation techniques are incredibly valuable. You can ask them a question, you can ask them the same question twice. That will help you identify whether or not they’re lying, if there’s a gap in their two answers, or if they answer two different ways.

And I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen it as one of the things that makes you such an effective host in your own house here is that you use elicitation techniques all the time. You ask feeling based questions. “How did you feel about this situation? Take me back to that moment. How would, if you could, if you could be king for a day, what would you do?” Right. These are all very advanced solicitation techniques because it gets people to express more than they thought they would share.

The Release

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’re in that room in that airport, these two very poorly trained guards are trying to get something out of you. They don’t get it out of you.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Correct.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So at some point they just let you go.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Correct. So what ends up happening is they’re arguing with each other. And I don’t know why they’re arguing. It seems like from the pigeon words that I can pick up, one of them is talking about being busy and not having enough time. And this doesn’t make sense. And the other person’s talking about, “We have to do this, this is required,” et cetera, et cetera. I don’t actually know what they’re saying to each other, but I see that their aggression with each other just keeps going up. Almost like two colleagues who are fighting. Right.

But at the end of the day, they couldn’t hold me without either releasing me back to my plane or moving me into a place where they were going to retain me long term. So when faced with that kind of decision, they released me back to my plane. And then the biggest stress that I had was not running to my plane because as soon as they let me out of the secondary interview, all I wanted to do was haul ass to my plane. Get on my plane and feel safe. But I had to continue to show that I was not a trained officer.

Jihi’s Perspective

STEVEN BARTLETT: And at this point, Jihi, are you. How are you feeling back in the friendly country?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: So at this point, I still have no idea what’s happening. By the time I hear from him, he is in the cutout country, on his way back. So I know he’s left me a voicemail, and I know he’s out of Falcon, the enemy country, which is great, but I know he’s in that third country, so I’m like, “Okay, he should be on his way home.”

But until then, I mean, all of this that he was going through, I didn’t find out until he actually returned home. And then I hear this story, and I’m like, “What the hell? This is absolutely our worst nightmare.” Like, what we did not want to happen.

And so immediately we were like, you know, we go into action. Like, first it’s like, “I’m so happy you’re home.” And then the next thing is, “How did this happen?” And we just start taking action into, you know, investigating. Like, did we do something wrong? Like, is there any mistake that we could have made? And we have to research and go back through all of our own stuff, and then we have to make the assessment of, can Andy ever go back in? You know, was this really what we think it was? Or, you know, is he safe to. Like, is his alias safe? You know, and then we have to make sure.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what was your assessment? Did you think he could go back in?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: No, it was too risky.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Yeah, we assessed that Alex Hernandez was burned.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Was burned. Yeah.

The Burned Identity

STEVEN BARTLETT: And we assume Alex Hernandez being your undercover spy name, correct?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The operating alias that we used. And we assume that the cutout country, the third country, that Alex was traveling through. So anytime Falcon wanted to track Alex, they would track him back to that third country. Alex would even use the Falcon airline to fly back and forth between the third country and Falcon specifically, so that if Falcon intelligence ever suspected Alex, they would feel that much more comfortable knowing that they had flight manifests on him going back to a third country.

So we just assumed from our study that Alex was fully burned, that the mole had come across either Alex’s operational history or the mole had come across my true name, operational history, and tied me to Alex. Whichever one it was, Alex was burned. But we also assessed that everybody else who had been traveling to Falcon through the cell was still safe.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you assessed that your shadow cell, which was your team in the friendly country, were all fine, but Alex Hernandez, which was your alias, could no longer be used.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Correct. And that was how the cell was built. The cell was built where Alex Hernandez was the tripwire, where the first person to be compromised would be Alex. And that would be the forewarning to everybody else so they could start to turn up their operational security.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So does that mean it’s game over for you?

The Compromise and Its Consequences

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: For me, in Falcon, it’s game over. I can never go back. I can never go back in my true name. I can never go back in an alias name. All of my biometrics, meaning my fingerprints, my eye prints, like all of that is most likely compromised.

All of Alex Hernandez, everything that I carried on me, all the digital platforms that I carried on me, which were all air gapped and isolated to just Alex. All of those things, we have to assume have been collected and synthesized and reverse engineered.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you were running a real fake business, right?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Well, yeah, I was a middle manager. I was a middle manager in the very fake business.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, you’re a middle manager. And that was a business set up by the CIA. Okay, so is that, in part, why you both decided to leave the CIA? Did the shadow cell operation end at that moment?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: After. Shortly after Andy was compromised, we found out that we were pregnant. And we were hoping to be able to stay on at Wolf to continue, because I could have kept doing everything exactly the same.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Wolf being the friendly country.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Exactly. And be in the friendly country. I could have, you know, done all my targeting from there, no problem. And then we could have, you know, Andy still could have helped. He just couldn’t travel into the enemy country anymore.

But headquarters decided that we had been so successful, and we were continuing to be successful by spreading the cell model to these, to the other locations that they wanted us to come home to. Washington, D.C. and train officers, train newer officers back at headquarters on how the cell model worked and the new techniques we had come up with.

Choosing Between CIA and Family

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The worst part is we had a conversation about what meant more to us, CIA or family. And without saying it, we were both landing on CIA. And we started thinking, how do we not give up CIA to have a family?

So we approach the Agency and we tell them, you know, that we have this idea, if you’ll put us on light duty, just give us some cush job for, like, four years. We’ll pump out our second baby. We’ll get our first one old enough to go to school. We’ll get our second one old enough for a nanny, and then you can throw us back into the fray.

They do that for other officers when they’re not successful officers, but when you’re a successful officer, they have different plans and they try to just push you and push you and push you. So they rejected our offer and they said no to soft duty.

And they put us back and they told us, you know, Jihi, he’s going to go to this office and do this very sensitive thing, and you’re going to go do this other very sensitive thing. And we don’t. Your family’s not our problem.

And it was at that moment, I think, that we both realized CIA is never going to let us focus on a family. We’re always going to be focused on the mission. That’s what their job is. That’s their number one purpose, where if our number one purpose is to be parents, we need to make a change.

The Shadow Cell’s Accomplishments

STEVEN BARTLETT: What did the shadow cell accomplish in terms of the information or strategic objectives that it accomplished?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: So the shadow cell really did do what we started out, you know, with the mission, really did complete the mission that we started out to do, and that was to find new intelligence sources. And we were really successful in doing that.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: And it accomplished its secondary goal. We didn’t know the effectiveness that the shadow cell had in ferreting out the mole until after we had left CIA. We found out that the mole that we had been plagued by was actually arrested by FBI in, I think it was 2019. It was later, so. But the case file that had identified that mole started all the way back with our operations.

So it was successful in ferreting out the mole. It was successful in building new intelligence sources inside of Falcon. It was successful in maintaining the United States intelligence advantage against this adversary at a time when all of our other operations were compromised by the mole.

I think what Jihi’s talking about is a completely unexpected benefit in that our model seems to have become the foundation for a massive restructuring at CIA in 2014, just two years after our cell model. When I escaped Falcon two years after that, John Brennan, then director of CIA, rolled out an entire reorganization of CIA that was based off of the same cell model that we had built.

The Mole Investigation

STEVEN BARTLETT: Was this the mole?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: We cannot confirm or deny anything about the mole.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I will say this, that if you research the time that that man was arrested, you’ll find two other people who were also CIA moles at the same period of time.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Period of time.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So the work that you did overseas, you believe helped lead to the capture of this mole.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The work that we did overseas, we believe helped capture the mole that Falcon House was out to capture.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And do you believe that the mole leaked secrets to the enemy country. That ended up being the reason why they knew that you were a spy.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: That was the assessment that we reached inside our own cell, as well as what the counterintelligence center, which is the counterespionage group that Jihi was talking about earlier. Their conclusion of the facts was the same, that we did not make any error in our operations.

There was no compromise in my behavior, no compromise in my operations, no compromise of our systems or our communication methods, that the only way that Falcon could have found out about me was through a leak from the mole.

How the Mole Was Caught

STEVEN BARTLETT: How did the mole get caught in the end? What did they do wrong?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: That’s a great question. So FBI created a sting operation based off of the intelligence that we were able to collect through our operations that brought the mole out. So FBI created a series of sting operations where they baited the mole into coming back onto American territory. And when the mole stepped foot on American territory, they had enough of a legal case that they could arrest him at the airport and then prosecute him in a court of law.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what was discovered about the mole and the work that they were doing and how long they were doing it for and what they were being paid or given to do to snitch on the United States.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: So the details that I know we can share. They were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were not paid into the millions, but they were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide information on operations officers, assets, locations.

They were witting, meaning they knew that they were working with a foreign intelligence agency. They didn’t believe they were working with a company. They didn’t believe they were working for a research institute. They knew they were working with a known foreign intelligence organization and that the original ally who gave us the information about the mole, that original ally actually also retained incriminating data on the behaviors of that person that were shared with the Department of Justice.

The Psychology of Espionage

STEVEN BARTLETT: And so was this. This was an individual who was in the CIA who was approached by this enemy country, and the enemy country said to him, if you give us secrets on what the CIA are doing against us, then we’ll give you hundreds of thousands of dollars.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: We’ll give you something. We’ll give you cash, at least as part of it. We may also give you other things. Here’s the nasty thing about espionage is cash is usually only one of several rewards.

There’s also operations where the cash is there so that when you’re arrested, your country that arrests you believe that that’s what your motivation was. While all of your real money is kept in a separate account that’s saved within the actual currency of the country that you’re serving.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So this person, they were in the CIA as a mole, leaking secrets about the CIA. They then left at some point, and then the FBI set up a trap to get them to come back.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Correct.

STEVEN BARTLETT: When they left, did they go to the adversarial country?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: We can’t confirm those details because to confirm those details starts to give more insight into who the mole was.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. But they managed to. Because I was thinking, I was just wondering if the enemy countries offer them like lifetime protection or something.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: They do. So your enemy countries will offer you lifetime protection. They’ll offer you multiple generations worth of payment. So even if you’re arrested, don’t worry, your kids will be taken care of, and their kids will be taken care of. You’ve got citizenship.

Like the case of Edward Snowden, who has received citizenship, sometimes they offer rewards and accolades in their own home country. There’s a number of very strange and compelling offers that come about from foreign intelligence services.

When you think about a double agent, when you think about a spy who turns on their own country, it’s less about thinking that they’re paid to do it. Spies aren’t motivated usually by money. We weren’t motivated by money. We’re motivated by that. That very unhealthy relationship where you have to be validated by somebody else.

And that same environment that CIA creates where all of its internal officers have to be able to fight their own head trash, but still seek validation from within their organization, that unhealthy relationship is something that can be compromised.

And a foreign intelligence service can find an intelligence officer and fill that void for them and validate for them and say you’re talented and you’ve got promise and you’ve got potential, and we see it. And your own home service doesn’t understand how important you are. And your own home service doesn’t understand how valuable you are.

If you’ll help us with this, we can reward you with money, we can reward you with citizenship, we can reward your children with future residency and with college, and we can make you a very wealthy person and all the things that you worked for that your country would never give you.

The Mole’s Fate

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did the mole admit that they had been a mole?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I do not believe so.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: I don’t believe so.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I also believe that most espionage cases, when they actually go to court, they’re not tried under the Espionage Act. They’re tried under some gentler term, some gentler, lesser offense that is easier to prove, but also helps the government protect its reputation against being penetrated.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So this individual, they left the CIA, flew to this other country, they came back and they tried to rejoin the CIA to get more information.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Well, they tried to rejoin a federal agency and that was how the FBI was able to lure them and how they were also able to.

STEVEN BARTLETT: For an interview.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Yeah, for an interview. And how they were able to get them on American soil.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Interesting.

Protecting Operational Security

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: So I do want to share that your curiosity right now is a major issue with CIA because they already know, they already know that very smart people out there are going to know that there’s a way, there must be a way to reverse engineer the whole story. To find out who is Falcon or to find out where is Falcon. To find out where is Wolf. To find out who is the mole. Right.

And what’s going to be, what’s fascinating is that we, we have put every effort that we can into the story to make sure that it’s not traceable. Because CIA had several penetrations at the same time during our tenure at CIA. And that’s both depressing and encouraging.

Because it’s encouraging in that it shows that what we were doing was parallel to what many other officers were doing. We wrote the book Shadow Cell, but that doesn’t mean we were the only two people that were tapped on the shoulder to carry out experimental new operations. They could have asked 5, 7, 12 other people to go carry out new operations to try to ferret out this multi penetration of CIA at the time.

But it’s also discouraging because it’s one of those areas that keeps these stories from being shared because CIA doesn’t want the world to know that it was penetrated by multiple people. It doesn’t want the world to know who those people were. If it did, it would have disclosed this long ago.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, obviously my research team tried to figure out who it was.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: And the diary of CEO research team is not a team to take lightly. So I’m a little bit afraid to hear their conclusions.

The Mole Investigation

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, based on our own research, we thought that the mole was likely Jerry Chung Sing Lee who spied for China around the time of the book. Jerry began spying for China after leaving the CIA, then tried to rejoin the agency, was allowed to leave the country by the FBI and was then arrested in 2018 at the airport when he returned to the USA. Just like the mole in the book. But it also says here, Andrew will not comment on whether he is actually the mole or not. So there’s no point asking you if.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: That’s if he is the mole.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have you ever been to China?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: We are under legal obligation to neither confirm nor deny the results of your research team, but also the results of anybody else’s research if they reach out to us and ask for confirmation on who the mole may or may not be.

How the CIA Changed Their Worldview

STEVEN BARTLETT: Has being in the CIA changed the way that you view reality and human beings?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Oh, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: In what ways?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Very much so.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I love this question, and I really want you to be honest. Can you please share with Steve how you went from your college beliefs to your post CIA beliefs?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: So when I worked with refugees, that was my first big turning point, that humans can be really nasty. I grew up Buddhist, and so it was always like, humans have the potential to be amazing. And I agree that’s true. But when I worked with refugees, I realized that humans can be horrible.

I worked with Bosnians and I worked with refugees from Rwanda where their neighbors literally turned on them. People who they had grown up with, literally the next day came over with a machete or came over with a gun and killed their family members and chased them through forests or through whatever. And that can happen anywhere.

That was the first time that I realized that anytime somebody says, “that can’t happen here,” that’s a lie. That can happen anywhere. None of those people ever thought, “oh, yeah, that could happen here.” None of those people ever thought that. People always think that can’t happen here. “My neighbor would never do that to me.” And that’s not true.

And then when I worked for CIA, that compounded the sense of the world behind the scenes is a dangerous place, and you can’t fully trust anybody. I sound horrible saying these things. You can’t fully trust anybody. I mean, the reason I’m with Andy is because I trust Andy 100%. He might be the only person that I trust. Everything that comes out of his mouth.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: No, you only trust me 98%.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Well, you know. Yeah, but I know I can get that other 2% out of you. That’s why. So you really have to understand that people are a combination of good and bad. And while I wish, well, I would like to think that people would always try to err to the good, I always have to keep in mind that people have a bad side to them, and there’s any set of circumstances that could trigger that.

Current Global Tensions

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think we’re in one such moment?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: I think we’re always in a moment. I think some part of the world is always in that moment.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about the United States? Because I know Andy said when we had the conversation the other day that he was going to try and leave the United States before 2026.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Well, it’s not just me alone leaving.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Well, maybe we have different motivations. I don’t know.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you staying, Jihi? Because he says he’s leaving.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: I’ve been the one who’s been pushing to leave for years.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why? How would you sort of summarize the situation that the Western world and the United States are in right now from your perspective with what you know, are these good times?

The Venezuela Lesson

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Jihi was born in Venezuela. What was Venezuela like in the 80s?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Oh, it was nice.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It was one of the world’s best economies. It was a thriving democracy. It was an excellent place with a large wealth gap. Jihi’s parents, her father came from a wealthy family, a wealthy Venezuelan family. That’s how they moved to Japan. It’s not easy to pick up and move a family of four to Japan or family of three and then have a child in Japan. All of that wealth that they had in 1980, when Jihi was born, was gone in 1989.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yeah, 80, 85, maybe five years.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: And Venezuela went from being one of the most successful, thriving democracies with a strong economy, it went from that to what it is now. There is no shaking that reality from Jihi or from her family. So if there’s anybody in the United States right now who is acutely aware of how fast everything can go sour, it’s my wife.

And that’s why what I certainly find is this uncompromising commitment to moving, in large part because you can’t wed yourself to any one system unless you want to be available to the detriment of that system.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yeah, I believe in being mobile. We rent, we don’t buy.

CIA Skills for Success

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are there any particular skills that people who are trying to be successful in their average life? Because this is called the Diary of a CEO that you learned through your time at the CIA that you think are most useful for people to be successful, however you define that in their day to day lives.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The first thing I want to say is that our book Shadow Cell talks not necessarily about awesome spies. It talks about how we went back to the basics. We went back to foundational espionage, what we call at CIA sticks and bricks. We gave up all the technology, we gave up all the fancy satellites, we gave up all the drones and we went back to build off of strong foundations.

And we didn’t do that because we’re smart. We did that because the terrorist groups that won the global war on terror were using bricks and stones and sticks and they were winning over an American Department of Defense that had a $900 billion budget every year. We spent $8 trillion in the global war on terror, only to evacuate Afghanistan.

All of that happened because they were using foundational tools that we couldn’t crack. And in the shadow cell, that’s all we did. We used foundational tools that proved to dominate time after time. And there’s so much in everyday life and there’s so much in business, from marketing to sales to budgeting to hiring practices to annual and semi annual reviews. There’s so much that businesses can take from this basic idea of never let go of the foundations, never let go of your sticks and bricks.

Living a Good Life

STEVEN BARTLETT: What advice would you give to the average person generally, just generally in their life? You know about how to live a good life based on what you’ve seen, what you know now, and how you look at the world.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: For me, a good life is a life spent doing the things you want to do. The things that bring you joy when you have the age and the energy to do them. It makes me super sad whenever I meet people who wait until their 60s and they retire to be free to try and travel. And that’s when they focus on learning the guitar and that’s when they focus on art. And their body just can’t keep up with them.

Their body can’t travel like it used to travel. They have a shake in their hand. They can’t paint anymore. But they believed for 30 years that it would be better when they retire instead of acting on it right now. And for me, it’s all about finding joy in the moment.

Today my son is 12. He plays chess. Now he wants to play video games with me. Now he wants to go deep into details about his favorite manga comics right now. All of that could be different in five days. My daughter is seven, doing handstands and doing cartwheels. And all she wants is for daddy to give her a shoulder massage at night and tell embarrassing stories about my childhood to her while she falls asleep. That’s what she wants now. All that could be gone and never come back in six months.

I have to do it now. If I don’t do it now, it’ll never happen. I won’t be able to wait until I’m wealthy. I won’t be able to wait until I sell a company. I won’t be able to wait until I retire and then try to get these moments back now.

So what can I do? I ask myself every day, what can I do right now to maximize the joy that I get right now? Because it’s not just my joy that’s happening. It’s also the joy that I’m giving to the people who want my time and space. My wife, my kids, my peers, my clients. What can I do to bring joy to myself will bring joy to others.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why does that matter so much, Joe? I can see it in your face.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: My life is filled with people who fail to figure that out. My life is filled with a mother who kept waiting to do the things that she wanted to do, and now she still doesn’t get to do it. And grandparents who retired poor and family members who retired poor and people who died early and people who got hurt and can’t walk.

A Mother’s Pride

STEVEN BARTLETT: And, you know, I called your mother. We spoke to your mother.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Did you call my mom?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. And when I asked her this question, I said to your mother, I said, “what’s your relationship like with Andy?” And she burst into tears.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Did she really?

STEVEN BARTLETT: She went on to say how proud she was of you, but it was telling that she burst into tears when she was asked that particular question.

Living in the Present Moment

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: That’s awesome. I’m glad that you called her. I talked to Jihi about this often because I never had a relationship with my father, and my relationship with my stepfather was very bad. I go into some of that in the book as well.

And I, as an adult, only project negative assumptions on what they must have intended because that’s what I was shaped to believe as a child. I can’t confidently project positive expectations on them because as a child, I never believed they were doing anything positively.

I believed my mom was career focused, and I believed that my mom didn’t really want to be a mom. I believed that my mom didn’t really want to be married to the man she was married to. And that’s what I believed as a kid. So now as an adult, that’s my foundation.

Jihi’s foundation with her parents is completely different. Like, it’s incredible now because the disparity between my negative thoughts of my youth and Jihi’s positive memories from her youth are starkly contrasted. And that’s why I want to give my children something like what my wife had.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what’s your answer to that, Jihi, in terms of what you want next?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: So when I was younger, I was brought up with this idea of a destination. So I did everything I was supposed to do. Got good grades in school, went to college, went to grad school, got a career with the federal government. It was really good.

And then we left CIA, and I was like, “But I had made it. Like, I rode that train. I did everything I was supposed to do, and I made it. So what are we doing now?” It was a really hard transition for me, but now that we have the kids and we have our business and I’ve gone through a lot of therapy, I realize that Andy has been right all along.

It really is, you never know what the next moment is going to bring. And so you have to enjoy every moment that you have right now. Don’t put off that trip until next year. Do it as soon as you can. Don’t, you know, like, those dishes don’t need to get washed right now. If your kid wants to read a book with you, you can just put that off for a little bit.

So I’ve, it’s taken me a long time, but Andy and I are now aligned on the “live every moment with as much joy as you can.” Because to my other point, you never know when shit’s going to hit the fan. So enjoy it now because you never know when you might have to flee your house because it catches fire, or flee the country because the war breaks out.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: You know, getting arrested in a foreign country.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yeah, getting arrested in a foreign country. And I’m a big believer of seeing the writing on the wall. I don’t think that, my advice to people is don’t be complacent. Just like Andy said, don’t be complacent in your business, but don’t be complacent in your life either.

Like before World War II kicked off, there was tons of writing on the wall of what was coming. And people just kept thinking to themselves, “That can’t happen here. It can’t get that bad.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you’re trying to tell me something.

The Transition of America

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: So the writing on the wall for Americans is that we are transitioning into something new. We will never go back to what we were. And so you either need to be a part of creating the new America, or you need to start thinking about where else you’re going to go. Because the America we knew before no longer exists, and it will never come back. This is new America now. So you either take part in it or you leave.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so what is old America under your definition?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: So old America, and I’m not that old. So old America in my lifetime has been a series of the government appearing to work together, appearing to do things to improve the lives of people, but also, I think, becoming complacent over time.

Like the last several terms, we’ve had a strong executive that has slowly become stronger, which I don’t think is the way that we should be going, but that’s what’s happened. And a Congress who is constantly in deadlock, so nothing is happening.

And so we continue, I mean, the immigration problem. Why is the immigration problem a problem? This could have been fixed decades ago, honestly. Like, decide what you want for immigration, decide what you want your policy to be. And the policy, clearly, I think most people agree, isn’t open doors. So if it’s not open doors, what do you want? And then make that policy happen.

So I think we’ve had a history now of an executive getting stronger. For some reason, the American people want a strong man.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So when you say the executive, you mean the President?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: The President, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The president’s getting more power to do things?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yes.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: For a period of time, it was because Congress didn’t want to make their own decision, so they pushed the power to the president. And then in probably the last 16 years, we’ve seen the President take more power, execute more executive orders. So whether you like it or not, we’re in a period now where there’s a strong executive. When anybody gets power, it’s very unlikely they’re going to let it go.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So do you think Trump’s not going to go anywhere?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I think the executive, Trump is the current executive, whoever the next executive and the executive after that, they will continue to retain their executive powers. Yeah, but this doesn’t benefit them to let go of the office of the executive’s powers.

The Future of American Power

STEVEN BARTLETT: So, Jihi, if that’s the old America, where it got slightly more complacent, there was more power and increasingly more power given to the President. You’re saying we’re in a transitional moment now. What does that new America look like on the end of that transition, in your view?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: So I don’t think we have a good idea of what it’s going to look like. I think the current administration is taking a lot of risks that I find interesting.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Interesting is a very muted word. What is the real word?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: I mean, interesting is the real word because I think that he’s taking a lot of risks that really break down how things have been for a long time. So getting rid of, pulling money from Medicaid and Medicare, getting rid of USAID, transitioning from soft power to hard power.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Hard power being dropping bombs in Iran.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yes. So we’re giving more money to military and we’re taking money away from aid, basically. So we’re making that shift. We’re making various economic shifts, immigration shifts. And I don’t think we, I think there’s a lot of unnecessary panic about all of it.

Because whether I agree with his methods or not, I think that we just have to wait for things to settle out. And if something doesn’t work, I think he’s like type of guy that’s going to take another risk and see if he can fix it or that if it doesn’t work, by the time the next administration comes in, they’ll have to do something with it.

Nothing stops. Everything keeps going. So I don’t know that America is heading for a future that I want to be a part of. I think that’s, for me, I think that’s a true statement. But I think there’s a lot of Americans out there who this is the path that they want to take.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is your perspective on everything Jihi just said?

The Choice Between Self-Reliance and Dependency

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The transition that’s happening right now is a transition where the American people have to decide how much they want to get involved and how much they want to let other people just do it for them. And Donald Trump is a “I’ll do it for you” kind of guy. And Joe Biden was also an “I’ll do it for you” kind of guy. And Obama was an “I’ll do it for you” kind of guy. And we are electing people who will do it for us.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do what for us?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Whatever nasty thing we don’t want to deal with: budgeting, currencies, hard work, foreign trade, foreign relations, wars. We want to be able to just talk about it without having any blood on our hands. So we push that responsibility to our government, when in fact, our founding fathers were the opposite.

Our founding fathers were, “Hey, the blood is on all of your hands. You tell us what you want us to do. Do you want a revolution? Then let’s go fight a revolution together. Do you want to build a new government? Then we’ll build a new government together.” That’s how our country was supposed to be formed.

So when Jihi says that we’re in a transition and she doesn’t know where it’s going, she is accurate. We don’t know what the future holds, except we know the future holds more pain, for sure, because we will either come out of this through a painful transition that makes us better, or we will come out of this through a less painful transition that leaves us in a position that none of us want to be in, and then we’re going to have to put in more pain to fix it all again.

Predicting America’s Future

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how do you think the transition levels out? Where do you think we end up, if you had to guess?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I think that we have a solid 60-40 right now. I think there’s a 60% chance that we don’t like where the transition ends. And then we spend 15 to 25 years fixing it again: fixing our economy, fixing our superpower status, fixing our foreign relations, fixing our trust of our own government.

I think there’s a 40% chance that the decisive action Donald Trump is taking right now is adopted wide scale, and we actually stimulate our economy, get people back on the same page and move forward in a way that keeps us one step ahead of the threats that we see from China, the disaster that we see continuing to unfold in the Middle East, the precipice that we have come up against in terms of geopolitics.

There’s a chance that we come out of that, but I think the dominant chance is that we don’t. And I would say that that’s not just my opinion. That’s the opinion of economists. That’s the opinion of foreign relations experts. There are multiple people out there who are all saying that our budgetary decisions, our foreign policy decisions, our military infrastructure decisions, our economic decisions are risky.

Risky means there’s a chance they’ll work. But it’s a low probability chance, not a high probability chance.

STEVEN BARTLETT: In such a scenario, then the economy would be hurt and then there’d be more wars, presumably. Because if we’re, if the society becomes more individualistic and focused on themselves and nationalistic, then they become more of an island. People get more paranoid. They start building. I know Trump says he’s building like the, he’s calling it the golden dome over the United States so that he can fire any rockets out of the air if anyone attacks. And then you kind of have to unravel that and try and go the other way, potentially. Is that kind of what you’re saying?

The Power of Fear in Nationalism

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I try to do as much reading as I can. I’m sure you’re the same way. And one of my gifts to myself is when I read fiction and I’m reading a book called “The Left Hand of Darkness” by a sci-fi legend named Ursula Le Guin, and it’s a book from the 70s.

And I’m reading this book and in it she has this quote where she talks about nationalism inside the world of the science fiction planet that she’s on, right? And the quote is something like, “Nationalism is not a product of pride, it’s a product of fear. People aren’t nationalistic because they’re proud of what they have. They’re nationalistic because they’re afraid that something might take away what they have.”

And anytime you are driven by fear, you don’t have the chance for true happiness. And what I found in that passage from the sci-fi book was really very insightful to what I see happening across the United States. We’re all nationalistic. Left and right, gay and straight, whether you are old or young. We’re all nationalistic. We all love our country.

But the thing that’s driving so much of our nationalism is this fear of the other side. Not a fear of the collapse of our society, not the fear of some rising power across the ocean. But for some reason, we’re more afraid of our neighborhood than we are afraid of the real threats that are out there.

Because at the end of the day, California and Mississippi have much more in common than the United States and China. But for whatever reason, we get so distracted and so confused with our own infighting that we don’t realize that infighting is exactly what all of our adversaries, from Russia to North Korea to Cuba to even, you know, Bulgaria, which is a NATO country that’s pro-Russia, our infighting just helps them.

The Domino Effect of Political Gridlock

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what’s the potential worst case scenario of that infighting? Because people think, okay, it just means people are going to pop off at each other on X and Twitter and social media and they’re going to scream at each other.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: And then gridlock is the biggest challenge. I don’t believe that we’re going to be going into any kind of civil war in the United States. We’re not going to shoot each other, we’re not going to go machete our neighbors or not now.

But gridlock is going to lead to economic collapse. Economic collapse is going to lead to very real individuals having very real problems, which is going to lead to an increase in criminal activity. People will steal from each other, people will steal from stores, people will lie and hurt each other to try to take care of their own.

And as that society starts to collapse and we become more and more tribal again, all very predictable. All case studies that we’ve seen all over the world, as we become more and more tribal, then we will become fed upon by our adversaries who don’t have the same problem.

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you said gridlock is the first sort of domino that falls there, what is gridlock?

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: I see gridlock as policy gridlock. We don’t know how to move forward with Israel. We don’t know how to move forward with the budget. We don’t know how to move forward with whether or not we ratify these election results. Right.

And in the time that we don’t know how to move forward, it creates an opportunity for somebody else to bypass the democratic process and just dictate the outcome. And that series of dictations makes it so that the outcome is less collaborative, less well thought out, less well defined, less palatable for more people. And then that distrust kind of continues on.

We do live in a moment now where the distrust for government is higher than it’s been in a long time. We see the largest decline in American currency that we’ve seen in decades in the better part of a century. We see a lack of public trust. We see consistent Presidential approval ratings below 50 for every president that comes through.

We are in a place where the people just don’t trust their own government. And I would say that that’s not such a big deal, except that we are the wealthiest country in the world. We are the largest military in the world. We are the largest producer of financial tools and the largest producer of weapons. We are a big deal to not have our shit together. Welcome to the United States.

Behind the Curtain of Intelligence Operations

STEVEN BARTLETT: “Shadow Cell: An Insider’s Account of America’s New Spy War” by Andrew Bustamante and Jihi Bustamante. It is a fascinating book because usually the public doesn’t get to read books like this and for the reasons you said, because they’re so highly scrutinized and then ultimately decided to be confidential by the CIA. But this one managed to get through.

So I highly recommend everybody reads it. We’ve touched on some of the surface level elements of this, but if you want the details of what happened, then this is a good book to read. But it also just gives you a window into a world that most of us live in ignorance to, because we don’t realize these things happen.

It’s actually from doing this podcast that things that I thought were conspiracy theories became not conspiracy theories. You know?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because before I start this podcast and start to speak to people like you and other guests that I’ve had, I thought that while I was watching podcasts and thinking that that’s bullshit. No, that’s bullshit. That doesn’t happen.

There’s these are like, spies that. That’s not going to happen. There’s no way that, like, one country spies on another. There’s no way that, like, you know, people go undercover into countries and get secrets and do all these crazy things. I thought that was movies, but actually that happens. And all countries are doing it to each other.

And I imagine even the United States is doing it to some of their allies. Like, I imagine the United States probably has spies in the UK for example.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: The United States doesn’t claim to spy on the five eyes countries, and the five eyes of all of kinds claimed not to spy on each other. But that’s just a claim.

Life-Changing Mistakes and Their Unexpected Consequences

STEVEN BARTLETT: We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question to the next guest, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question left for both of you to answer individually is how did a mistake you made shift the trajectory of your life in a way you could not have predicted?

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: I would say that the mistake I made that truly shifted the trajectory of my life was staying with my ex-boyfriend for so long because we’d been together a year. And I knew then the relationship was already troubled, and I was applying to the Peace Corps right out of college.

But I also knew that if I joined the Peace Corps and I went overseas, the relationship wouldn’t survive. And for some reason, I chose the relationship over Peace Corps. And because I chose the relationship over the Peace Corps, I ended up going to grad school so I could stay with him.

And then because I went to grad school and the relationship drained me of all of my money, I ended up applying to the CIA. And if I hadn’t been in that relationship, I never would have joined the CIA, ever. I never would have met Andy. I wouldn’t have the kids I have right now. I wouldn’t have the life I have right now.

So arguably a mistake to stay in a bad relationship for seven years. But I wouldn’t be where I am today without that.

The Costly Lesson of Delegation

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: It’s hard for me to answer the question because I keep finding myself coming to the same conclusion that Jihi came to, that all of the mistakes that I think about making all led to a sequence of events that brings me to where I am now. So I’ll actually give a more recent example that is changing the course of my life right now.

In 2023, I hired the first executive into my company, the first kind of equal executive to me as a CEO. And I hired that person because they came well recommended. I hired that person because they had a long track record of success. I hired that person because they seemed to understand a lot of things about business that I didn’t understand. And it was time for me to scale.

And it was an important thing for me as a CEO to lead the charge by hiring the right people. And then in the following 16 months, that person lost the company individually a half a million dollars and then put us into debt almost another $215,000. So a giant $730,000 mistake in one 16 month period of time.

And throughout that whole time, I saw the mistakes, I saw the errors and I kept convincing myself not to take action. I kept thinking this is just what scaling must look like. This person must know what they’re doing. Like, you have to spend money to make money. We have to prepare for the future. Like, I kept rationalizing every step.

Oh, this was just a misunderstanding. Oh, this was just something that will pay off six months from now. And then, you know, that 16 months kind of ended in March of this year. And I’m staring at a healthy company that has $0 in its checking account that’s carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

And I realized I can’t let somebody else try to do this because nobody cares as much as I do. I’m the owner. I’m the CEO. The company was built because of my passion for the lessons and my passion for the people that we serve. We are co-owners of the company together. Jihi believes in me and she trusts me. And I can’t violate that trust by continuing to think that somebody else can do it better.

So I remove that person from their position. I radically change the company, and within three months, we are back into a profitable statement. We are months away from being able to pay off all the debt that we had gathered. We’ll never get back the money that we lost and all the failed investments.

But we are on a trajectory to go in a completely different direction. Because I took hold of my company and made it my company again. Instead of thinking that I wasn’t qualified or wasn’t capable or wasn’t good enough to be the CEO that built the company. Why wouldn’t I be good enough to be the CEO that grows the company?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think a lot of young founders can relate to that. I hear that story so often. I hear that story all the time. I’ve heard it for many, many years of the founder that starts a business and then basically gets gaslighted by, oh, this person’s an executive. They’ve done it for 26 years. So they must know what they’re doing. I’ll give them a massive salary. I’ll give them control.

And then they make a set of decisions which because you, you know, you’ve not walked that path before, you’re unable to have high conviction as to whether those decisions are good. But because they are so expensive and their decisions are so expensive, you kind of have to go with it.

And then eventually you realize at some point that just because someone has worked in some interesting places or had some previous interesting job titles doesn’t equip them for this challenge. And especially when it’s a small business, this is actually the paradox of it as well. Like the mentality of success in like big scale businesses is not the mentality of success in like a high grade startup, you know, where you like penny pinching.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you so much. Super enjoyable hearing the story. It was actually much more captivating reading your book than I assumed it would be. And I think that’s because of the level of detail you go into in the book which you just wouldn’t have come across before. So I really recommend everybody goes and read it.

And thank you again for coming back here. And it’s wonderful to meet you, Jihi, because I’ve heard about you before, but putting a face to the name is always useful. So thank you so much for being here and continue doing what you’re doing because you’re opening our eyes to a world that we would otherwise not be able to see. So thank you both.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Thank you.

JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Thank you.

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