How The CIA Actually Works | Authorized Account | Insider

My name is Andrew Bustamante and I am a former CIA intelligence officer. I spent seven years living and working for the CIA and this is all I am

authorized

to tell you. The CIA always asks itself: is it worth killing foreign lives to protect American lives? And the answer is always yes. There are two types of murders we really need to talk about here. There are intimate murders and then there are non-intimate murders. And when I say intimate murder, I mean looking into the eyes of the person whose life you are taking. Most of the CIA is equipped to allow non-intimate assassinations, which is when you have a drone or you have a missile or you have a rocket of some kind, or you set up some kind of sabotage designed to kill people.

My operational history includes enabling non-intimate kinetic attacks specifically against terrorist targets. And many of us participated in the global war on terrorism between 2000 and 2022. There were kinetic attacks on terrorist targets around the world, sometimes many times a week. While Obama was one of the best presidential diplomats the United States has ever seen, he was also very tough in terms of covert action, and he was very, very decisive in his decisions to use non-intimate assassination as a way of pursuing high-priority targets. in the terrorist world. I have become almost harshly and ruthlessly pragmatic about the fact that I want the United States to remain the world's only superpower, because as soon as our superpower status diminishes and someone else rises up to meet our challenge, we all become much less secure. and protected. .

The CIA, as a bureaucracy, evolves very slowly, but its mission remains very clear. It is there to ensure American primacy through national security and the theft of foreign secrets. When you consider the intelligence community as a whole, there are many pieces, many actors, many different agencies that are included. I think there are currently 36 or 37 different members of the intelligence community, of which the CIA is just one member, along with the DIA, the NSA and the NRO, the DOD, the army, the air force and the navy. However, what the CIA is in charge of is being the center, the "central" intelligence agency, which means that all other intelligence gathering activities must be channeled through the CIA to be created, to be transformed. in what we call a final product, a final analysis. or final intelligence product that is then sent to the executive in the president's daily briefing.

To understand what the CIA is today, you have to recognize that 9/11 was a huge turning point in the way the CIA operates. The pre-9/11 CIA is very different from the post-9/11 CIA. 9/11 was a massive intelligence failure, the largest in American history. But after the 9/11 Commission, the findings about the CIA and the requirement that the CIA have strong oversight completely transformed the nature of the spy business not only for Central Intelligence, but for all intelligence partners in the CI. What I understand of the CIA before 9/11 was the Wild West. The CIA was, first, a gigantic experimental laboratory and, second, a responsible organization.

Since 2001, they have become an

account

ability organization first and are much, much less experimental. Whatever your opponent was doing was fair game for you to experiment with, and it's not hard to understand why. Because if your adversary finds an unfair advantage using human trafficking or drug smuggling and that puts your national security at risk, then you have lost that game, you have lost that chess game. So if you want to keep up with your opponent, if you want to keep up with your opponent, you have to be willing to work outside the moral and ethical boundaries within which your citizenship must lie.

Because you are charged with protecting them from outside threats, you are not charged with enforcing ethics and morality within the country's borders. Espionage is illegal everywhere. However, when you take an oath as an undercover intelligence officer in support of an intelligence agency, you

actually

fall under a very strict exception in US law that allows you to commit espionage against foreign targets in support of national security when requested by an

authorized

person. It is illegal for a CIA officer to pursue a U.S. citizen without revealing their CIA affiliation, but the FBI, Homeland Security, and Border Security can

actually

conduct operations against U.S. citizens under their authorities, which are different from those of the CIA. .

The way the government spies on the American people is not the way you think it is through television and the media. The government doesn't have to devote almost any resources to spying on American citizens because American citizens basically hand over all of their raw data to corporations. So all the CIA, the FBI, or the Department of Defense really have to do is become commercial customers of a big data company and they can get whatever information they need. So why would you try to break the law and listen to an American's phone call when you could just buy their phone records from Verizon, Sprint, or T-Mobile?

We are not a police state, we are a commercial state, which means that the federal government, as long as they have a national security requirement, there will be a commercial company that will rise to the occasion to meet that requirement and do it all. legally. Edward Snowden's denunciation of the operation that the NSA was carrying out, in many ways, what he was exposing was the illegal use of legally collected data. So you have this very small, very narrow cut that allows you to commit crimes all over the world and be protected by the status that you have as a sworn officer in an intelligence agency.

My path to the CIA was not traditional, but it was still quite common. I was actually trying to get into the Peace Corps, believe it or not. He was leaving the army. I was a nuclear missile officer, I wore a key around my neck that would destroy the world, and after doing that for two years, living underground, I wanted to do the exact opposite. Imagine the last time you had a bad breakup with a girlfriend or boyfriend. You leave the only relationship and what are you looking for? Something that is quite the opposite. But in the process of that online application, a red screen appeared that said, "You may be qualified for other opportunities in the federal government.

Will you put your application on hold for 72 hours while a recruiter contacts you?" Because of what the Peace Corps is looking for, it's looking for people with a high risk tolerance, it's looking for people who embrace discomfort, it's looking for people who are essentially open to the idea of ​​trying to do the impossible, trying to do the impossible. . a broken part of the world again, and that type of person is also very suitable for covert intelligence work, because all the odds are against you, you have to accept the discomfort and the risks are enormous. So when you look at them side by side, you can really see that people who give their lives in pursuit of one ideology are actually pretty much the same, even though their ideology may be different.

Once you work for the Peace Corps, you are forever banned from working in intelligence. And once you've worked in intelligence, you'll be forever banned from working in the Peace Corps. It's something the federal government does to make sure that our Peace Corps representatives, our real Peace Corps representatives, are never accused of espionage abroad. So, like any 27-year-old single man, he was always looking for the best things. 24 hours later I received a phone call from an unlisted 703 number and that started my entire CIA application process. The training at the CIA is better than in the movies. In the movies, it makes it seem like everything is sophisticated, high-tech, and cutting-edge, but it's not.

It is much more austere. It's much more challenging and old school than that. But it's actually a lot of fun and you go through all that training with other people. The specific length of training at the CIA is also one of those topics that is still classified. The details of the farm are still classified, and the total length of the farm is still classified as well, but I will tell you that it is a lot of months and not a lot of years to get up to speed as a field officer. What the CIA wants is people who can handle a lot of external stimuli with very little emotional response, which turns people prone to anxiety, autism or pathological liars into sociopaths, it makes them very attractive, because when you have an antisocial personality disorder or when you have a diagnosable form of autism, you are already protected against massive changes in your emotional state, which makes you more effective in training, but it also makes you more effective in the operational field.

There are different ways the CIA pressure tests its students to gauge an emotional response. One of the main things they do is oversaturate you, which is called task saturation. You are given more tasks than you could ever complete, whether in an hour, a day, a mission, a simulation, or even a classroom. That's a very basic example, a very simple example of one of the things that can happen in the first few days of training. As the training progresses, you're put through other types of more intense efforts to see what your emotional response might be, whether it's physically exposing you to very cold temperatures, whether it's sleep deprivation, whether it's simulated capture, simulated interrogation.

When you enlist in the CIA, many people are surprised to discover that they have to go through very intensive training in order to understand how to resist torture, how to survive or sustain themselves through torture, and how to handle captivity. Torture is a sensitive topic in the CIA and in many parts of the world, and it's no surprise that it is, right? Because the reality is that torture is inhumane, but the other reality is that torture is widely used by the enemies of the United States. We prioritize the need to escape above all other priorities, even above the priority of protecting cover, protecting secrets, and anything else.

When you watch a TV show or a movie and see someone resist torture by simply stating their Social Security number and saying they're a soldier, that's not really how it

works

when you're an intelligence agent. Rather, it is a continuation of the cat and mouse game. You are always trying to compete with the person holding you captive because you need to retain enough resources to effectively escape and be able to return with the intelligence you have collected as a captive. And if you think about it, a captive has a lot of information. You understand how they captured you, you understand how they hold you, you understand the guard rotation, you understand the interrogation.

So being able to recover someone who's been captured is something incredibly valuable from an intelligence standpoint to the CIA, which is why they're more focused on that than whether or not you reveal parts of your secret identity or parts of your identity. . their operation along the way to obtain resources for a proper escape. Lying is a critical skill when you are a field officer, but it is largely a learned skill. In the process of being recruited by the CIA, you go through many different psychological batteries, personal interviews, real tests, interviews in which you talk to experienced psychologists and officers.

And during that time, what they're really doing is evaluating your natural ability to lie and your natural ability to fabricate according to a specific story that they give you, which is a whole different level of lying. They're just going to sharpen that sword, refine that skill even further. I always wondered if there was something wrong with how much I enjoyed lying until I met some of my colleagues at the CIA. There is a person who became a very good friend of mine in the CIA, he is still undercover, he has a very deep coverup capacity. A fantastic guy, a fantastic friend.

He was such an effective liar that he could have been making the whole thing up. I could have convinced myself that he was a good friend when he really wasn't, because he was, by all indications, a pathological liar. He was someone who lied simply because he felt a dopamine rush, a personal satisfaction in lying to anyone around him. This individual who became someone I truly count as a friend, it's disturbing, even now, to think that it could all have been made up. It could have been just one of his exercises in the pathology of him for lying.

When you've spent enough time inside the CIA, you start to see how everyone is using you. It's there to manipulate people. Somehow, when you come in, when you go through the recruiting process and the training process and you're a young officer, you think they're there to support you. You think you areoutside of manipulation. But then as you become more experienced, as the years go by, you start to see the same thing, the internal promotion process, the internal personal and professional development process, the way some missions are assigned to some people. and to others. Missions are not, they are just an example, a microcosm, of the way the larger organization runs operations.

And you start to see that the upper levels of the CIA are manipulating the lower levels of the CIA because that is the school of thought that we were all trained in. We were not trained in leadership development, motivation and encouragement, we were trained in manipulation. and deception and invention, so is it any surprise that the culture within the building is just a representation of the exact same skills we teach every junior officer? The CIA has a concept called the three lives and it talks about the three different types of lives that all people live. There is our public life, our private life and our secret life.

Public life is the public personality that you adopt every morning, every day you leave your house, your apartment or your office. It's when you act like you're paying attention when you're not. It's when you laugh at your boss's jokes even though they are idiots. It's not about who you really are, but rather who you have to be to forge the life you are trying to build. Behind that public life there is a private life. That private life is a life that only you and your closest associates know about, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your wife, your mom, your dad, right?

In this private life, they know that you are really very kind, even if you are rude in public. They know that you are sensitive and creative, even if you seem distant in public. What most people think is that a relationship, a true and meaningful relationship, happens in your private life. What the CIA knows is that there is a third life, and that third life is your secret life. In your secret life, that is the place where you keep your deepest, darkest secrets. And for it to be a dark secret, it usually has a very dark element to it.

It's where you put your shame, it's where you put your guilt, it's where you put the questions you can't stop asking before you fall asleep at night but that you don't want to burden anyone else with. That's all what happens in your secret life. And the cognitive reality is that everyone has a secret life. Think about it. When you let someone into that life, that's when you build a truly forged relationship. Trust for life, equality for life. Because in your entire life, you'll only let half a dozen people into your secret life. And once someone enters your secret life, they never leave.

That is the power of the secret life. The CIA teaches a system for how to traverse a target's public life to their private life and from their private life to their secret life. They teach us that system because to turn someone who was a patriot of his country, who is now a traitor against his country, into a true journalistic asset, the only way to gain a person's loyalty to that extent is to reveal his secret. life and convert them from being loyal to their country to being loyal to you. The process of recruiting human intelligence assets is a process called SADRAT, S-A-D-R-A-T, and that process is a very well documented process cognitively, clinically and then also in the intelligence sector, military intelligence, FBI, CIA.

SADRAT means detect, evaluate, develop, recruit, manage and fire. Yes, the identifier starts with an H, but the acronym uses the letter A. This is because it is still an acronym for the federal government - that's how the federal government spells things sometimes. But this SADRAT process is exactly how you take an asset from the stranger, S, all the way to the target controlled by secret life, which is when you handle them. And then it even includes a step where you distance yourself from that person that you control because it's best for you to get away from them or it's best for them to get away from you, and that's where the T at the end comes from. .

But the entire SADRAT model is one of those nested processes that helps dictate how an important relationship is controlled or intentionally developed. When you are required to not appear as your true self, then that requires you to put on some elements of the costume. And there are different levels of costume that you can put on, different levels of costume. The department that oversees the costume is called the costume department. Some are very temporary, others are quite permanent. Some involve body changes, weight gain, weight loss, tattoo removal, or adding tattoos. Some simply involve disposable things, fake wigs, fake mustaches, sunglasses, anything you can imagine.

But the real operational goal is simply to make sure that you don't appear as your true self within a specific distance. So someone 40 feet away has to do very little to not appear as themselves. Someone 4 feet away has to disguise themselves quite a bit to not look like themselves. The CIA wardrobe department is a room, a big room, and it's a lot like walking behind a television. You walk in, the people who work there are very creative people. They smile, they have a lot of energy, they are not the typical CIA officer behind closed doors that you would expect.

Imagine, you know, flamboyant homosexuals, people of all ages and colors, lots of women, lots of bright colors, lots of creative things hanging on the wall, because these people are charged with not only creating a costume that changes their identity, but a costume which has functional practicality as a spy. So, not just a jacket that you would never wear, but a jacket that you would never wear that also has hidden pockets, right, and also has a bulletproof vest and also has a way to take it off and turn it inside out. These are the kind of incredibly creative people who exist not on the top floor of Langley, but in the basements of Langley.

People refer to CIA headquarters as Langley, Virginia, and that's funny because the actual city it's in is Langley, Virginia, but at headquarters, we never call it Langley, we call it headquarters. Even in our written traffic, we refer to it as headquarters or HQ. Technically it's two buildings, what we call an old headquarters building and a new headquarters building. And that's the only open, unclassified building I can reveal. There are several buildings belonging to the CIA that house CIA officers, but they are all still covert in nature and their locations are not something I can reveal. We are truly an autonomous unit, almost like a terrarium, where we do not need any external support.

We can do everything within the confines of the CIA, which is exactly how the CIA wants to operate because they have to be very compartmentalized. The CIA is a huge city on its own. It has its own food, its own water sources. It has its own industry within it. The land on which the headquarters is located is a large piece of land with a huge parking lot surrounding it. In fact, it's the parking lot that most people complain about because it's a huge parking lot, and to get to their office, it's often a 15 or 20 minute walk through this huge, winding parking lot to get to your office.

The size of the parking lot and the way it is laid out is largely based on safety. They don't want the cars to come within a certain distance in case one of the cars or a CIA asset is compromised. Unfortunately, it is not entirely uncommon for a CIA officer to become compromised with some type of adversary or enemy. That's why they keep cars a certain distance from the walls of buildings in case there is a car bomb. We know that there are four fundamental levers, four fundamental motivations that drive people to act. Those four different motivations are reward, ideology, coercion, and ego.

Reward means getting what you want, whether it's money, a free cruise, or a car. Anything you receive in response for doing what you're told is considered a reward. Ideology is a motivator that comes from within. So whether you're Christian or Jewish, whether you're African American and you were raised to remember your African roots or you're Latin American and you were raised to remember your Latin roots, all of those things fall under the idea of ​​ideology. , something that drives you from within. Ego is what makes you the person you want the public to see, right? So people often confuse ego with selfishness or selfishness, meaning you have an inflated sense of self, but in fact, Mother Teresa had an ego.

Gandhi had an ego. They are people who wanted to represent something publicly, so they made decisions and actions in line with the public image they wanted to present. Coercion is the weakest. It is the least predictable. And coercion is when you try to force someone to do what you want them to do using shame or guilt or some other form of overt manipulation. It is much easier and more reliable to get people to act based on the other three: reward, ideology or ego. When you try to force them to do something, when you try to force them to do something using coercion, you violate their trust and let them know that they can never count on you or trust you again.

It is much easier to infiltrate and manipulate someone based on their existing ideology or ego than to try to force them to do your will through coercion. Sexpionage is a term that has become popular because it refers to the sexual act in operations, and can often be categorized as heterosexual sex, female operations that seduce male targets, but can also be homosexual operations. They can also be group sex operations. It can be any kind of kinky operation you can think of. In real life, sexpionage exists and sexpionage

works

. What's important to understand is that sex in operations is not something the CIA encourages or condones for its own officers.

And the reason is that every CIA officer is first and foremost an American citizen, which means that he has all the rights, privileges and protections of any American citizen. So, just as you cannot force someone to perform a sexual act against their will, you cannot order someone to perform a sexual act against their will. That's why the CIA takes great pride in professionalizing all of its officers to keep sex completely separate from operations. That said, foreign countries have learned that American culture and ideology are often stifled or intimidated by the concept of sex. For a country as powerful and rich as we are, we are still very sexually repressed.

Therefore, it is a very successful operational tactic for foreign countries to use sexpionage against American targets because in a foreign country, the individual does not have the same rights and protections that an American citizen has. So maybe China would order a Chinese intelligence officer to have sex with an American target, or Russia would order it, or Belarus would order it, right, because they have a completely different set of government guidelines for their citizens and they know that American citizens are susceptible to love, acceptance, physical intimacy and often feel guilty about it because we were built on a Christian foundation.

The simple fact is that the future prospects for any first world country, and the United States included, are dark, bleak and difficult. In my opinion, World War III has already begun. World War III has been going on for almost a full decade now. When you think about World War I and World War II, the two conflicts were totally different, even though they were only a few decades apart. And when you think about how warfare has evolved from World War II, to Vietnam, Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and even what we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, the nature of war is always evolving.

Why would we think that World War III would be anything like World War II, with nuclear weapons and superpowers? Instead, World War III is based on a common and current military doctrine, which, the most current military doctrine is the doctrine of proxy war, when you have two created competitors that fund proxies to fight on their behalf. What was Syria? What was Libya? What is Yemen? What is Ukraine? What is Israel? These are all countries that are being funded by external aggressors that are really trying to compete with each other. It is the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, the British, the Americans and the Canadians who finance the conflict through these poorest third world countries.

That is the definition of power conflicts. Because you can risk international power without risking the lives of your own citizens. This is the world we live in. Your allies are not your allies because they believe in you, your allies are your allies because you address some type of need that they need. It is very much a business transaction. They have a need, you have a service and vice versa. I left the CIA in 2014 for family reasons. And when I say family reasons, I don't mean that something went wrong with my family, I meant that I had a family and I could quickly see that the life that the CIA wanted for me was not the life that I wanted for my family.

Mywife, who is also a CIA officer, she and I met at the CIA. We met, lived and worked undercover. We had our first child in 2013, and when he turned 1, we quickly saw that we always chose work over parenthood, even though we had chosen to be parents. The thought that kept me awake at night was that I was constantly struggling with the question: Do I choose my career over my child's or my child over my career? And the fact that I was having that fight at night is what pointed me to the reality that the CIA didn't care.

The CIA simply saw me as another resource, another number, another person to do the job, but my son would never see me that way. My future children would never see me as replaceable. Well, when I took that message to my supervisors at the CIA and tried to figure out a way that I could be a current father but also an effective CIA officer, they had no patience for that discussion. For them it was a very clear choice between one or the other. They were not prepared for my response, and they were not prepared for the response of the people who came after me.

Because from 2014 to today, the CIA has seen a mass exodus of talent because the old ways of trying to force people to stay in their system don't work for today's professional. Now we choose to use the CIA as a springboard. People choose to work at the CIA because they care about service for a while, but then they also care about building their own resume, they focus on building their career opportunities, they focus on building their wealth, and there's nothing you can do about it. that. those things from within the boundaries of Langley, Virginia. When I first left CIA in 2014, I went through a period of about six months where I was unemployed, and part of my unemployment was because when you leave the CIA, you still remain in a covered status, which means that technically you still can't reveal your identity.

CIA affiliation. However, all the protections you had were phone numbers to call and references that would say you worked for them, those references and those protections were gone. There are even scenarios where both the husband and wife are undercover and married and the children don't know. And a big part of that is because in that secrecy agreement that you sign, there's also a disclosure where you have to say that you will ask the CIA for permission before you reveal your true affiliation to your own children. And that way you won't tell your 6-year-old that you're a CIA officer and then make him brag to all of his friends.

Instead, you are now legally guilty for keeping the secret from your own family. My resume had references and previous work experience that never answered the phone and never responded to emails, so I couldn't even put together a decent resume to get a job. After six months of going from a successful CIA officer to an unemployed loser dad with his wife and kids living in his father-in-law's garage, it was a humbling experience. After leaving the CIA, I discovered how much the CIA training and the skills they had imparted to me translated into everyday life. Business life, professional life, relationships, family, social life.

Because what the CIA really teaches in essence are psychological frameworks, psychological mental models, and systems of thought that give you an advantage, an unfair advantage over your opponent. Well, in a normal, everyday society, where no one else has learned these psychological frameworks or processes, if you know them and other people don't, you have an unfair advantage in all aspects of life. And once I made that connection myself, using my CIA skills to get promoted in a corporate job, using my CIA skills to quickly grow a new business, using my CIA skills to find and acquire partners and financiers to grow my business.

What worries the CIA most is the revelation of its operational secrets, not the secrets it uses to optimize its own officers. All I had to do was run it like a CIA operation against a specific target that had the opportunity I wanted. And that's how I got into a Fortune 7 company, CVS Health, by essentially cultivating an asset from a top executive who gave me a job sight unseen and who was high enough in the position that all I had to do was perform. . And then once I took the position, I used more CIA skills to quickly learn the job, build relationships and alliances with other people who were already there, to help other people succeed and look good to their boss.

And four years later, I was promoted four times. It was a quick experience that showed me how immediately tangible CIA skills were in the corporate environment, business environment, and everyday life. And that's how I built my company, Everyday Spy, teaching the skills that optimize CIA officers to work on all aspects of life, on all elements of their health, all elements of how they generate wealth and lead a career, and all the elements of your relationships and professional networking. Desolate stays honest, man. I mean, if you want to look at the world through a lens of optimism, by all means do so, but if you want to look at a world in which you will have a strategic advantage in the future, you have to see it for what it is.

When I look at America's future, it is important to understand two things. First, I'm looking at the future of America through the lens of a 43-year-old businessman and father of an 11-year-old and a 6-year-old. I have two children who are not yet teenagers and their young professional lives won't really begin until they are between 19 and 21 years old. It is my responsibility now to think about the environment they will have when they are 20 years old. They can't make that decision for themselves. So when I think about America nine or ten years from now, do I think America will be the best place for my 20-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter to find opportunities?

I'm not so sure that's the case. I'm not so sure that the United States in 10 years won't be more divided, less powerful, and more controlling from a state with control of the citizenry by the federal government. I'm not convinced that that's going to be the best foundation for my children to have opportunities, which is why I plan to leave the United States in the next five to seven years, because I want to give them the opportunity to succeed. In my opinion, the best opportunity for anyone who has a business, who has wealth, who is growing their wealth, or who is developing any type of business acumen, the best place to grow and be successful in the future, is actually less likely to be the United States. and more likely it will be some other third nation until the United States has time to go through its adolescence.

The countries that are on my short list of places to look for opportunities for my children, there are countries in Europe like Portugal or Spain, Italy, Croatia. There are Latin American countries. We look specifically at Costa Rica. We have looked at Mexico. There are countries that are very rich like Switzerland or Norway. There are countries all over Africa. These countries are not perfect in themselves, but where they are imperfect is different from where we are headed in our own imperfection. Because we're moving more toward a state of chaos and unpredictability, whereas a lot of these other third world countries or developing countries have very predictable systems.

They may be corrupt, but unsurprisingly, they are. There are many countries in the world where $10,000 can get you basically anything you want, while here in the United States, $10,000 in the bank doesn't even qualify you for a home loan, right? How do you deal with that? How do you evaluate the impact of that on the future state of the family you're trying to build?