CIA Spy on The Most Dangerous Spy Mission Ever Declassified
Summary
Geopolitical Insights: The podcast explores the intricacies of espionage and the role of the CIA in geopolitical rivalries, highlighting the human element and team dynamics in intelligence operations.
Espionage Techniques: Andrew Bamonte discusses the evolution of espionage strategies, emphasizing a hybrid approach that combines traditional spy tactics with modern counter-terrorism techniques.
Surveillance and Privacy: The conversation delves into the pervasive nature of surveillance, both abroad and domestically, and the implications for privacy, especially for high-net-worth individuals traveling internationally.
Conspiracy Theories: The podcast addresses the anatomy of conspiracy theories, distinguishing between skepticism and speculation, and how gaps in information can fuel public speculation.
Technology and State Influence: The discussion touches on the relationship between government agencies and tech companies, exploring the potential for state influence in the tech sector through investment and cooperation.
Market Dynamics: The conversation highlights the impact of government policy on business operations, using examples like Elon Musk's interactions with government officials to illustrate how policy can trump business interests.
International Business Risks: The podcast underscores the risks faced by businesspeople in adversarial countries, including potential surveillance and the need for awareness of local dynamics and government influence.
Book Promotion: Andrew Bamonte's book, "Shadow Cell," is promoted as a detailed account of modern espionage, offering readers a firsthand look at the challenges and strategies involved in intelligence work.
Transcript
Today I'm speaking with a former CIA agent who led a team of spies on the ground in one of America's most aggressive adversarial countries. Today we dispute myth from facts. We talk about surveillance and privacy and what the CIA really does. His name is Andrew Bamonte. This is the Jay Martin Show where we dissect the greatest minds in geopolitics and finance. You're going to enjoy this one. >> This is J. Monte. >> All right, here I am with Andy Bamante. Andy, it's great to have you back on the show. >> Thanks, Jan. Glad to be back, man. >> So, here's what I want to talk about. You are a former CIA agent, as is your wife. You led a team of spies on the ground in one of America's most powerful adversarial countries, and you almost didn't make it out. Uh but you did and you since moved on from the agency and you published a book on that experience, Shadow Cell, uh the CIA tried very hard to prevent you from publishing this book, but thankfully a legal battle grounded in the First Amendment allowed you to get this book out. Uh so here's where I want to start. What will people understand after they read Shadow Cell? Uh, it's a great question and I appreciate the the quick summary there too, Jay. So, uh, and more than anything, I appreciate the fact that your cover is already bent and curled, so I can tell that you've been reading the book. >> You can tell, right? Yeah. Yeah. >> No, but uh, in all honesty, when people read Shadow Cell, I I think they're going to have two kind of aha moments simultaneously. first they're going to realize how much of espionage is a team sport and the movies don't do a very good job of showing that uh you know you don't you get a sense that there are multiple people who play a role but there's always a hierarchy in the movies and the field officer who's the one out there on the leading edge is always the hero when in reality it's very very different and inside our shadow cell all of the people collecting the secrets were valuable team players but the real hero was actually my wife with her anxiety disorder who came up with the entire strategy that everybody else followed uh to make such success. Right? So the first thing people will learn is how espionage really works. How spy teams actually work. The second thing that people will realize or the second thing that people will learn is that spying is a very human experience. And in our book, we talk not only about our operations, but the operations of a mole. A mole that had penetrated CIA's ranks and how that mole lived his life. How he lived a double life. How he lived two uh two lies simultaneously and why. It's really important to understand that when somebody commits treason against their own country, the reason they're committing that treason is very human. And we never ever see that in movies. We never hear about that in conversations. You don't get that in a 24-hour news report. So, it's a very intimate, transparent look at modern-day espionage. Yeah. Cuz in in the book, you and your team were effectively the bait that was used to lure and find therefore this mole. Is that correct? You were aware there was a mole in the CIA. You didn't know who it was. And so you and your team were essentially deployed in order to bait the mole. Is that that's correct? >> Yeah, that's correct, Jay. And more specifically, it was my wife and I. My wife, who like you said is also former CIA, we were married. We were put under uh under joint kind of cover identities that actually took advantage of the fact that we were married. It's what's called a tandem operating couple. So, we were a tandem couple and we were sent to create a whole new way of spying on our adversary because the mole was helping our adversary. So, anything that historically we had ever done, the mole was already feeding the adversarial country. So, this our adversary was always one step ahead of us. And when you're talking about a geopolitical rival, there's only a handful of countries that meet that criteria for the United States. And when you're talking about trying to outsmart, outwit, outmaneuver a geopolitical rival, a mole is an incredibly damaging thing. So what they asked was for my wife and I to go overseas to an undisclosed location and create a whole new way of operating. And in so doing, CIA knew, but did not tell us, that by creating something new, it would force the mole to have to try to find us, which would make the mole most likely make some kind of mistake that would highlight him to the internal agency. And what was so novel about your approach, yourself and your wife Jihi, was that you borrowed some strategies from traditional spy work and you married them with things that you learned from modern-day terrorist cells and it was this hybrid approach that's now revolutionize the agency to a large degree. Correct. >> That's absolutely right. People don't realize that the biggest evolution in espionage strategy happened in the United States. It happened in 2014. And it did not happen as a result of our own innovation. It happened because we had been fighting a 20-year war on terror. And my wife being one of the architects identified that no other country in the world was fighting that war. So everything that we had learned, hunting down terrorists, tracking their cells, watching the money move, watching the drugs move, seeing how they trafficked people and weapons, how they they created a whole separate financial system called a hala system that was basically a large informal informal banking network. So we we as Americans, we as the CIA understood how this whole thing worked, but none of our adversaries had spent any time or effort fighting terrorism. So it was a completely blind skill set to them. So we took advantage of that. My wife identified how we could borrow from terrorism and use those skills and tactics within the confines of American law to benefit our own kind. >> Okay. And so to to just like massively simplify the process um and kind of how the mission would roll out, you had a team and I would love you to share a little bit on sort of the hierarchy and the various independent roles that exist from your wife Ji who was a targeter versus a field officer and what the individuals do. But you're deployed on the ground and your mission is to kind of uh flush out potentially valuable targets and you just got to I mean walk me through that. How do you discover who might be valuable to you and then how do you bring them into a conversation and start to uh uh squeeze some of that utility out of them? >> Yeah. So, there's a there's a lot going on in the question that you just asked. Uh and I appreciate your approach of trying to keep it simple. So, I'll simply start by talking about the targets. The targets we were trying to identify were targets that were obviously foreigners. foreigners who were related or supporting our adversarial countries government, military and intelligence ambitions. So if they were tied to the the government, if they were tied to the military or if they were tied to intel in either a formal capacity like a government employee or a commercial capacity like a contractor or somebody who like builds new bases or builds airplanes, right? If they were connected in any way to those three priorities, we would identify them as a target for collection. And once you identify your target, then you kind of reverse engineer what skills you need to collect against that target. Because every target requires different skills depending on their language proficiency, where they live, how much they travel, whether or not they use technology, what their technology platform is, if they have families, if they have uh financial issues. So, it takes a lot to identify how best to approach a target. And that's where the different skill sets came in. To answer your question about what you do once you identify the target, it really is old school what we call sticks and bricks. Once you know who you're going to talk to, then the whole idea is to do what's called a bump to approach them and quote unquote socially bump into them where you exchange an introduction and you have uh a very artificial but seemingly genuine conversation to find commonality and eventually build some kind of friendship. As a CIA operator, you know that it's artificial. you know that it's contrived and your goal is to deliver that contrived relationship in such a way that the target does not realize it's artificial. The target believes it's a genuine connection. Okay. So, one of the most shocking moments in this book for me was when a spy hits the ground um or even when No, not even that. You talked about an experience of hitting the ground and you've you've got your cover story about who your character is that you're playing and how that character is going to interact with reality and their backstory and it's amazingly detailed down to what you called pocket litter, right? That just the garbage we all have in our pockets that supports the person that I am, right? Just wild. But what really shocked me was how common it seems to be for the for anybody, the average businessman, the average podcaster to enter some of these countries. and surveillance will jump on you just in case you're somebody of interest. And how common that is and how frequently people of interest, not spies, not government people, just people that might be interesting, entrepreneurs, they hit the ground and right away they're they're tailed by what you called bumbling surveillance and how frequent this is. And I think in a recent podcast you even said pretty much any business owner or executive when they enter so many of our adversarial countries are tail the minute they get off the plane their hotel rooms might be searched as you discussed in the book. Walk me through that cuz that shocked me and I'm sure it shocks a lot of people. What exactly am I talking about here? >> Yeah. So it I think you're right that the revelation is shocking to people at first, but with just a little bit of kind of critical thinking, you start to understand why it's it shouldn't be as much of a surprise as it is. Essentially, we as Americans often forget that we are the wealthiest, most powerful country in the entire world, in the whole world. So when you have an American who controls any amount of wealth and I would say that the target amount of wealth is about a million dollars net worth. If you have a million dollar net worth, there are pe there are businesses all over the world that make it their business just to track your location so that they can market to you, so they can pitch to you, so they can sell to you, so they can steal your secrets. That's the pe like the people who are having their phones hacked and their computers hacked and the people who are finding that when they travel overseas they pick up this bumbling surveillance or what what is I call them bumbling surveillance. They are really just unsophisticated untrained surveillance teams. >> The lowcost tales for some Yeah. Yeah. Okay. >> They're freelancers. They're freelancers that know that if they see your Rolex and they see that you have custom alligator boots, they can follow you for a couple of hours and if they hear you talking about a new deal or if they see you open your computer and log into local Wi-Fi, they can sell that information to their own local government or local criminal organizations and that's part of the economy of the rest of the world. It's mind-boggling to most Westerners to think that you could make a living or that you would want to make a living following around what look like rich people, but it's a very healthy living for most countries in the world, especially those countries that also dislike American government because your wealthiest people are often times tied to government, whether they're contracting to the government or they're engaged in lobbyist activities or something like that. So, it's very very common and it's it's kind of unsettling, but everything we do in the United States to show off our position and our status, our clothing brands, our the way that we mold our facial hair, the fact that we are wearing designer watches and carrying designer uh clutches and wearing designer shoes and taking business class and staying in first rate hotels. Once you do that, you're just you're amplifying your potential utility to a foreign target. >> Let me ask you because when you say most countries in the world do this immediately, my one of my like points of surprise I think was based on the fact that there would be enough resources to do that. Like how many business people travel to Beijing every day, you know what I mean? Now, let's use let's use Beijing because it's probably one of the more common in terms of like which countries would do this. The biggest adversaries would probably be the most likely. So, Japan far less likely maybe. I'd love to know your thoughts, but China probably highly likely. So, how many business people travel to Beijing from America every single day and there's enough resources, boots in the ground, lowcost surveillance individuals, uh, that'll just tail them. And it just it's so when you say most countries in the world, let's walk through what that means exactly like could I expect that if I let's say I meet your criteria of an interesting person from a net worth or profile standpoint, whatever they're looking for, they can find that in me. I get off an airplane in India. Am I being tailed? >> Yes. >> Yes. Brazil. Am I being tailed? Brazil. Indonesia. Am I being tailed? >> What? >> Keep going. Keep going. Russia. >> Russia. Russia. China. I feel like Yeah, >> China. It seems like a good guess. Here's a place that's shocking. >> South Africa. Yes. France. Yes. >> France. >> France is one of the most hostile countries out there against the United States. >> What about Japan? What about Japan? >> Japan. So, here's the trick. If the local economy pays you enough as a as a local that you don't need freelance work, that's when you don't have to worry about having that kind of surveillance. >> So, what ends up happening is in a place like Japan, the government is so focused on making sure it keeps the people's salaries high. Even if you're like a sushi roll person or if you're like a bartender or if you sell chocolate on the corner street on the or ice cream on the corner, the government subsidizes your salary. So there aren't the very poor in Japan. Any place where you have the very poor living in a city, that's where you have the ripe opportunity for this kind of surveillance activity. >> Interesting. I'm going to uh Kyoto with uh six other business owners in October and I'm like, "Okay, we're going to keep our eyes open, try to find these guys, right? The common faces that seem to be at every restaurant we're at." >> Yeah. It's not quite that easy. But I I totally get what you're saying, >> especially in a place like Japan where the immigration policy forces that that you can't live in Japan unless you are Japanese descent. It makes it very hard to identify any kind of diversity. >> Yeah. Okay. All right. I appreciate that. So, we're back on the ground in this uh adversarial country, and I guess one of the conditions you got to with the CIA is that you can't mention this country by name. You describe it in detail. You give it a code name. In the book, it's code named Falcon. That's the country you're constantly referring to. You know, it's kind of a really actually was a really fun exercise as a reader to just go through the process of trying to figure out where you were, right? Like, it was fun. And I don't want to give too much about the book away, uh, but but walk me through when you were just outlining the process here. You're on the ground. You're discovering targets that might be of value because of who they're connected with. And then you got to you got to make the bump. You got to build the relationship. You got to open the door somehow and get to know their personality, their psychographic, and probably most importantly, their vulnerabilities that you can then pull on. Um, to what extent does the CIA go in order to win people over to their side and squeeze some utility out of them? >> It's another really good observation. So, um, so for the the folks who are listening, who are enjoying this conversation, the book is called Shadow Cell. You'll find it anywhere books are sold. And and Jay, what you're talking about is when we go to actually, it's called develop. When we go to to develop a source, we have to approach that source as a person first. Now CIA has a rule of thumb. It says that people will work for you if you motivate them first and only after you have exhausted all options to motivate their cooperation. Do you try to manipulate them for cooperation? This is completely different than what you hear in the movies. It's totally different than what you hear in the conspiracy theories about CIA. CIA, they are master manipulators. Absolutely. We're all trained in how to manipulate human behavior. But the first step in understanding how to manipulate human behavior is that it's reallying hard. And the first thing that you should do is just try to motivate them. >> Think about how your life works, Jay. If somebody wants you to help them move on the weekend, if they want if they want you to help them, you know, read a uh write a resume or close a business deal, it's so much easier to get you to cooperate when they motivate you to cooperate. Hey, come help me move and I'll buy you a nice bottle of scotch or a six-ack of beer. Hey, come help like review my resume and I'll make a nice dinner for the whole family and the kids can hang out downstairs while you and I talk business for an hour upstairs. Like, that's all motivational. It's still manipulation. It's still you getting what you want from the other person, but it's got this veneer on it where it's inspiring or it's collective or it's, you know, there's social grace in it. So, we try to use those techniques first. So, when you're bumping a target, you're not going in there and showing them some picture of them with their with their mistress and you're like, "Hey, we have blackmail and you're going to give us secrets." If you do that, you can't trust the secrets that you're getting. But when you go in instead and you just have an open-ended conversation, hey, you know, it's 11:30 p.m. at the bar at the Four Seasons in Singapore. And you sit down with the person, you're like, if you're at the bar at 11:30, it's been a long day. And boom, they're like, yeah, it has been a long day. >> And then you're like, I totally get the feeling. I'm the same way. I'm here for business. Are you here for business? and all of a sudden you have a conversation going because the person feels validated in the moment that you understand their challenges. They feel motivated to have the next conversation with you. So that's how you open the door. And that would make sense because I'm far more likely to uh just open up the kimono a little bit if I feel like you're coming from a place of decency, right? But once we get past that um and you need something more from me that I'm not willing to give, there probably comes a point in time where you leverage something you know about me that I don't want other people to know. Maybe you leverage vulnerability. No, no, no. That is alling fiction. That's what kills me about the movies. That's what kills me about the average person's understanding of espionage. >> It's a big part of why I wrote this memoir. >> Yeah. Okay. So what you do, you you carry motivation as far as you possibly can. So it's funny because what you said is eventually you'll get to a place where I don't want to share. What makes you think there's ever a place where you wouldn't want to share? You would have to be suspicious >> in order for you not to want to share. And if I'm doing my job, you're never getting suspicious. You don't think I'm a CIA spy. You think I'm your friend who you met on the road in Singapore. I'm your friend who you've known for three years. I'm your friend who was introduced to you by your other friend from college, right? Why on earth would you ever hold back a secret about work >> when you don't feel any threat at all? And that's what happens. We all go through this throughout our entire life. Here's what's fascinating, Jay. >> The average person has experienced at least five major violations of their trust by the time they're 30 years old. The average person has had five examples where their trust has been utterly violated. Go ahead. Just think through your head. Do you think five sounds about right for you? Do you think you added more? Maybe you're on the low end of the spectrum. >> Estimate five is relatively accurate. Yeah. >> That's a major violation of your trust. A girlfriend or boyfriend who had an affair or cheated on you. That's a business partner who stole money. That's, you know, some neighbor or something that called the police because you were having a party. something where your trust was like, "Holy [ __ ] I thought I could trust that person and I can't." Human beings are far more likely to trust first as long as you don't give them a reason to distrust you because as a as a species, we understand that our survival is like is largely tied to tribal behavior. And you can't become part of a tribe unless you are trusted in that tribe. And subconsciously, you know that in order to be trusted, you must first trust. So, it's shocking because most of us are actually very trusting first. And it's not until after our trust has been violated 12, 15, 30 times that we ever learn to be distrustful first. I really appreciate that. And so, your mission, say I'm the target, say, you know, I'm the guy you're you're bumping, right, and building a relationship with. Your end goal is that we die best friends, right? We just continue down this path of deepening trust and cooperation. And as far as I'm aware, we're just authentically connected as peers because we have so much in common. I enjoy spending time with you, chatting with you about my wins and my losses. And that's where this goes. And if we get off that track, it's because something went wrong right in the process. Like that wasn't the goal. We want to keep going down the I mean, it makes obvious makes a lot of sense when you kind of talk it out like that. But you're right, the intuitive Hollywood bias would be that I have something on this person, so I'm going to turn them, right? And let me just ask you because with current events today, I know some folks in my comments are going to ask this, but what about the Diddy Files? But what about the Epstein files? Isn't this like is that what we think it is where there's some people who are doing some naughty things and now somebody has footage of that and they will be leveraged? What's your take on that sort of current event obsession right now that we're witnessing with those two individuals and a few more? So what we're seeing is is a great example of conspiracy at mass levels because if it was just Diddy or if it was just Epstein and there wasn't so much social media content also being created about the what if imagine what that world would look like if the New York Times or the or the Washington Post or CNN or BBC did a normal news story talking about Diddy getting off uh with light charges and talking about Epstein, you know, who was uh we suspect may have died in prison, but the files aren't being released. If it was just a news story, it would have died as at the same speed that thousands of new stories die every day. But instead, we have content creators, we have YouTubers and Instagrammers and Twitter heads, and we have all these people who are constantly keeping this thing alive. What we're seeing right there is something that we call a conspiracy cycle. Conspiracy cycles happen all the time. Sometimes they can be manufactured. Most of the time they are completely and totally organic. And when they are organic, they're very convenient for a government to let run because all that's happening in a conspiracy cycle is everybody's putting their energy into the conspiracy and nobody's actually focused on solving the problem. This is why the JFK thing has gone on for so long. It's also why for anybody who caught this, there was an excellent article about a month and a half ago about the Martin Luther King files also being released as part of the JFK investigation. And the Martin Luther King family did not want those confidential files to be released, but they were because what those files talked about was how FBI and other government intelligence agencies were were um surveilling, monitoring, and suspecting Martin Luther King and his closest associates of extremist activity. Right? So there was there was a misunderstanding of what Martin Luther King's intentions were at the time that turned into a government investigation. So why am I saying all this? I'm saying this because when you talk about conspiracies, you have to ask yourself, is there an easier explanation for this conspiracy? Is there an easier explanation out there for what happened to Jeffrey Epstein other than he was a super secret CIA or MSAD agent planted onto a billionaire's lifestyle to collect secrets from around the world to collect blackmail from the world's most powerful figures? That's a prettying Hollywood story. Are you telling me you can't think of any simpler explanation? You don't think that he was just a rich guy with rich friends that were doing illegal things and he came under suspicion by FBI for for hiding money in offshore bank accounts. That is so much more reasonable than what people are saying about him. And the same thing for Diddy. You think it's so much easier to just accept he's a rich guy in the production space of music, which we all know is full of sex, alcohol, and you know, poor decisions. Do we really think that like, oh no, he was definitely there plotting and planning to blackmail the world's elite? No. Come on, guys. It's like I understand that it sounds sexy because you could read about it in a book, but real real life criminality and real life espionage. It's so dull and so boring that it would never catch your attention. >> That's so interesting. It's, you know, and uh and nobody wants to hear that, right? We want to believe the hyperbole. And and I I I mean I tend to agree with you, you know, and and in a sense that there's usually um you know, two extremes of a story that are told and the truth lies somewhere in the middle in the boring middle, right? A bit of column A, a bit of column B, chop off the pointy edges and there there you go. Um and why wouldn't we have a couple guys here who um have some weird fetishes, right? More money than they know what to do with. They do some weird stuff. Maybe they film it, right? Maybe they have they've had some friends over that are questionable. But, you know, you mix that with, as you said, sort of the the new sort of content industry and all the creators that are looking for clickbait headlines. Yeah. Thumbnails and all of that stuff. But then that runs into peak distrust in government institutions right now, you know, and just basic populism or divisions among society. People are looking for an enemy right now. They're looking to point the finger. They feel like their life isn't going the way they want it to, and they're looking to get angry at somebody. And getting angry at rich people is really easy, right? Especially when you can vilify them like this. And then find a bit of evidence and then a bunch of supporting media that will add to that conviction and it's a whole soup, right? You understand why it's such a strong narrative and one that's going to be very hard to bury. That's interesting. >> So there's there's an anatomy that we learn um a system that explains how a conspiracy happens, right? We call it the anatomy of a conspiracy at CIA. The first step, there's only four steps in the entire cycle, which is why I'm going to tell you, Jay, the first step is something factual has to happen. So, for any conspiracy theory, it has to start from a fact. So, did he really did get accused of beating women and and prostitution across state boundaries? And he really did go to court for it, right? He really did get tried. Jeffrey Epstein really did have pictures with famous people and run a billion dollar hedge fund. Like, these are real things. So it starts from something real. Well then the next step is there has to be a gap in the information available to the public. Without the gap then what you have is a complete story instead of the foundation for a conspiracy. The third thing you need to have is speculation. Speculation not skepticism. Skepticism is healthy. Skepticism is normal. Skepticism is rational. But speculation is irrational. Speculation is nothing more than just people making guesses. Not even educated guesses, just guesses. And then the fourth step is that speculation has to close a gap where the knowledge was missing. So we speculate about why we're missing the knowledge and then there you have a complete cycle. So now the facts still remain, the gap still remains and the speculation just gets ramped up and then everybody has their loop closed. And and human brains love a closed loop. It's the reason that we all to a certain extent we get satisfied when we solve a math problem. It's why we all love finishing movies. It's why we all love finishing books. We like a closed loop. It's very comp. It's very fulfilling. Yeah. It's it ends like the mental fixation on the project or the process itself. So people love these conspiracies. We're just prone to them naturally. So it's a very easy um habit to fall into. >> Yeah. And I like how you put the you juxtaposed skepticism and speculation in that way. Skepticism is reflecting on a situation and questioning what happened. Questioning whether the things you were told actually occurred. Speculation is guessing what might also have occurred. And you can take that to a pretty crazy extent. >> Correct. >> Um, okay. I want to use a couple other examples then. We all carry iPhones in our pocket. Those iPhones have dozens of apps that have asked for permission to use our microphone and our camera. And I could speculate that therefore my personal privacy is a thing of the past. Anything I say in the presence of my phone or my laptop or my smart TV or probably some other stuff uh could be accessed, could be recorded, could be listened to. Maybe privacy as we like to believe in it is just a romantic historical idea that no longer exists. Is that speculation or is that true? And then the next step say that therefore that means I am being listened to. I am being tracked. This information is being leveraged against me and I need to be careful. Those those two things don't both have to be true. But what's your take on that concept and speculative idea? >> Absolutely. The privacy argument is a great example of this speculation versus skepticism, right? So, let's approach it as a skeptic would approach it first. So, here's the claim. The claim is you have a right to privacy. That's a very common claim. I would say most of us probably agree with that claim. I have a right to privacy, right? If it's not a government-given right, it's at least a human right, right? So, I have a right to privacy. the the skeptic looks at that and says, "Do I really like where does it say I have a right to privacy?" Now, this is really this is really wild and we're gonna get a lot of pissed-off people, but you for being pissed off. You can read the Constitution yourself. There is no statement guaranteeing your right to privacy. The term right to privacy does not exist in the Constitution. The term right to privacy does not exist in the Bill of Rights. The term right to privacy exists in no amendment ever written ever by any federal documentation. Americans have no reasonable justification to believe they have any right to privacy because it doesn't exist in any documentation defining the rights of an American citizen. What has happened is that since the beginning of America, there have been court cases where the court the the uh judges of the court inferred from certain amendments that there is a reasonable right to expect privacy. So what does that mean? It means it's totally up to interpretation and it means that it's inferred by the court that you're in. There is really only 12 instances where any kind of government documentation talks about you having a right to privacy. And those 12 instances are 12 different state constitutions within the 50 states of the United States. Meaning there are still 38 states that do not in their state constitution give you any right to privacy. And only 12 states specifically use that term. So, while every American believes they have a right to privacy, in fact, there is no such thing as a right to privacy unless you live in one of the 12 states where the state constitution gives it to you. That is a skeptic. A speculator, a speculator would then go the step to say, well, if I don't have a right to privacy, then they must be listening to my phone. They must be tracking my messages. I must need endto-end encryption because the government is absolutely listening to me. That's all speculation. There's no logical reason to expect that you, as one of 330 million Americans, would rise to the occasion for the government to spend any money actually listening to your phone calls. If you're a drug dealer, you go up that list of importance. If you're a pedophile, you go up that list of importance. And guess what? You have no right to privacy. So, if we think that you're touching kids or selling drugs, we're going to listen to your phone call. And you have no legal recourse. That's just the way that the government was built because we're supposed to be keeping the rest of the population safe. >> Okay. Can I throw one more at you? Another example like this. All right. So, let's talk about um call it like state capitalism. I want to know like where's the boring reality? Where does the skeptic belief lie? Where does the speculative belief lie? I could say that I think if the CIA or similar organizations were being quite savvy, they would probably have a front for some investment banks and they would be some of the key investors in some of the world's biggest tech platforms because these are the best spyware that exist because we voluntarily subscribe. Facebook, Google, uh X, Tik Tok, you name it. And I know there's organizations like it's called Inqutel, which is like the it's kind of like an investment bank owned by the CIA to a degree. Correct. >> And and the concept of the black budget, which I want to understand more, but that's sort of like a >> Well, I'll let you explain that cuz I'm curious about that black abyss of money. But so I might go as far as to say that if this is true, that it's in the CIA's best interest to control some of these mega tech platforms, they would find a covert way to do so and white label some of the biggest investment banks. Maybe Andre Horowitz is a CIA arm and they're funding the biggest tech platforms in the world and therefore have access to all this data and that's the speculative runaway. Like where does where does that marriage really lie? What's your thoughts on state creep big tech surveillance and the the capital agreements? >> I love your question because inside your question itself Jay if you go back and listen to your own question back again you'll see how even in your own manifestation of the question you crossed out of skepticism and into speculation. You started by saying the skeptic would say that the government would have a vested interest in large tech, >> but then by the end you said so it would make sense that the government would want to control these large tech companies. >> The first statement was skepticism. The second statement was speculation. You're the Inqel example is a perfect example. Inel already exists. It's already publicly known. It's a giant investment platform funded by CIA and other government organizations to invest in cutting edge technology. DARPA is the same way. And you have many cleared contractors from Lockheed to Khaki to Northrup Grumman. All of which are in the same boat. They're all commercially viable companies. They're investment platforms that are that are funded by the government. There's also an excellent example throughout the history of like World War II. World War II has great examples. End-to-end encryption as we know it was actually created by a Dutch company, a Dutch company in the 1940s. The United States identified that Dutch company and the United States wanted to be able to have the ability to hack into the encryptions that the Nazis would use. So, we bought a majority stake in that Dutch company back in like 1944, something ridiculous. Mhm. >> Well, that Dutch company helped us crack the code against the Nazis, but we retained ownership of that company all the way until like the '90s, and we kept leveraging that same ownership stake to hack into various encrypted systems that were being used by warlords across Africa, uh, oligarchs across Europe, drug dealers in South America, because everybody would go to the best company in the world for endto-end encryption, and CIA owned a majority a shake. And that came out in a New York Times, I believe it was a New York Times piece in about 2017, 2018. So, anybody can look that up, right? CIA owned the world's best encryption company. Look it up. You'll find all the details yourself. But it's a super fascinating example because you're damn right. It makes sense that CIA and all of the leading intelligence services of the world would want to have a stake in the most current, most modern technology that's being created. People forget that that the reason we have pens that write upside down is because NASA was the one who funded that research. Governments always fund innovative, cutting edge research first because they have plenty of money to do it. Commercial organizations don't do that. Now where it's crosses from skepticism into speculation is when you start thinking that those those commercial organizations are in the government's pocket like the government can control them. The government can't control Facebook. It can't control Google. It can't control YouTube. Inside the United States, a company has all the same rights and privileges as an individual citizen. So what you cannot do to a citizen, you also cannot do to a company because it's treated like an American citizen. Does that mean that Facebook and YouTube don't cooperate with the government? Of course not. If if you were a US citizen, would you cooperate with the government? Especially if the government had the ability to stop your business, seize your revenue, if they had the ability to basically write a policy that made your whole business illegal, right? Think about Blockbuster. Blockbuster was like the world's best video rental store until a brand new technology came wrong around and bankrupted Blockbuster. At any given time, Facebook knows that policy could be written tomorrow that makes social media Facebook illegal just like policies being written that makes Tik Tok illegal. Right? A few words from the pen of a bureaucrat can kill your billion dollar business. So with that in mind, it's it's just a simple incentive for Facebook to cooperate with CIA, FBI, DEA, you name it. Why Google wants to remain the world's biggest search engine? A a simple stroke of policy and it loses that advantage. So it wants to cooperate and it owns YouTube. So YouTube wants to cooperate. So all these companies, they're not under the government's control. They just understand it's in their best interest to continue to land on the side that supports government goals. Maybe you see that as the same thing. That's fine if you do, but at the end of the day, you're doing it, too. You don't want the government to change a policy that cancels your ability to make money. So, you continue to pay your taxes, drive the speed limit, and you know, pay your proper dues to make sure that you don't have your business closed. >> Yeah. No, no doubt. Okay. I um you know what I was thinking about as you're explaining that you you mentioned as powerful as some of these companies are their more powerful adversary is always the policy creator right the government. And it seems like if an entrepreneur reaches that level of hyper success eventually that's the opponent they run into. Go back to like doesn't m Rockefeller you build the massive conglomerate take over the industry nationwide eventually you run into a bureaucrat >> uh who can stop you dead in your tracks. That was part of the reason I was curious if that was why Elon Musk was cozying up to the administration in the fashion that he was. here's an entrepreneur who's, you know, out of out of the stratosphere, right? We know where this is going. Eventually, you'll run into the bureaucrat that stops in your tracks. And studying that history, I wondered if that was part of his strategy. Uh, cozing up to the White House, building those relationships, more of a cooperative take. Uh, I don't know if it worked out for him, but >> I know it's a perfect example of of what you're saying, right? Policy will always trump business. Always. In the United States, that's how it's going to always work. We are a bull market. But who defined that bull market? The government, right? The government controls martial law. The government controls the tax base. The government controls the investment uh interest rate. The government controls everything. That's what a government is supposed to do. So whether you want big government or small government is irrelevant because you still want government and government's job is to control the commercial uh activity of the country that it's within. So Elon Musk thought that if he cozied up to the head diplomat or the head bureaucrat that somehow it would make a difference. And Donald Trump basically came in and was like, "Uh, hey, thanks for all your help, Elon. We're not helping you." And Elon could throw a fit and he could cry about it and he could, you know, say he's going to fund opposition parties, but at the end of the day, the bureaucrat won. And Elon Musk for all his power, all his innovation, all his wealth was left packing. >> Nobody wants to hear that. Hey, nobody. Nobody. Especially not my audience. They're losing it right now in the comments about this. Yeah. Libertarians and >> I'm here to tell you the truth, right? Like you the liberty that you have, libertarian, was given to you. It was given to you by some bureaucrat. And you can disagree with that all day long. If you want to drive to Capitol Hill, I promise you somewhere on Capitol Hill, they're having a conversation right now about how they gave you your liberty and how you're ungrateful to them and how they need to create a new narrative that you can believe because what you're believing right now is a narrative that's spun by foreign intelligence. That's that is the way it works on Washington DC. That's why your downhome Arkansas boy who gets into Congress at 27 years old, by the time he's 47 years old, but 20 years in that congressional seat, he doesn't give a about you anymore. All he cares about is staying in office, cashing in 250k a year to write policies that may or may not help you, but always spinning the content. >> Okay. A couple couple other questions I want to ask you here and I actually want to close the loop on the ground surveillance and bring it home to the US. We talked about, you know, Indonesia, India, Brazil, China, Russia, Japan, um high-profile businessman gets off an airplane or woman gets off an airplane into the airport, start navigating the city in their tail just in case there's something interesting about them. Does that occur in the United States? >> Why would it not? Like this is I I'm trying to make sure people understand the concept here. >> Yeah. So why do you think it would not exist in the United States? >> Uh cost of labor would be my first >> exactly right because >> because what you have to consider is in the United States everybody who has a job is trying to maximize their income in their job >> and you have a very small economy that's the gig economy and you have almost no freelancers in the United States. Right? Being a freelancer is basically like saying you're unemployed. Um, and for all the freelancers out there who disagree, you're obviously a very busy freelancer. So, you know, five freelancers off the top of your head who are not as busy as you. Once you leave the borders of the United States, freelancing is a full-time job. For most of the world, freelancing, second jobs, third jobs, fourth jobs are very, very common because just making enough money to survive dayto-day is a is a challenge. In the United States, we don't have that challenge. So when you go to another foreign country, there's always 10 people who are like, "Well, my shift just ended, so I might as well go sit in the lobby of this hotel and read a newspaper for a couple of hours because if some somebody interesting walks by, all I have to do is know know their their name, their hotel room, when they arrived, a couple of things that I could use to describe them, and that that individual can now literally go out the front of the hotel. They can go find a cop. They can go find a criminal. And they can be like, "Hey, I've got information you might be interested in. If you have five bucks, I'll tell you about this rich American oil tycoon that just checked in at the Four Seasons, and he's going to be there until Thursday." Now, that criminal, there's a there's a good market there because that criminal wants to know who that person is, so he can mug him the next day and take his watch. And the police want to know who that person is because the police are like, "Oh, I also need a second or third job. So maybe what I'll do is wear my uniform off duty tomorrow and I'll shake down that guy for a $100, you know, uh, bribe." It's if you've been through Mexico, you've seen this firsthand. Yeah, that's fascinating. Okay. So therefore in the US if it's less likely from a human labor standpoint is that replaced by something else by some kind of digital surveillance tracking anything like this? >> Uh it's it's not. And what you're getting what we're getting to here, Jay, is part of the problem, part of the challenge of the United States on a on a law enforcement and national security level is that the United States is one of the most what we call permissible countries in the world. Permissible means you have the ability to carry out nefarious activity almost with local permission because there's nobody that's going to stop you, research you, police you. whatever else. I mean, [ __ ] in the United States, half the states don't even like their own police officers. So, of course, we have a permissible environment here for criminals. So, when the when foreign intelligence organizations look at the United States, they see wealth, power, and a permissive environment. Whereas in the United States, when we look at Saudi Arabia or when we look at Russia or when we look at China, we don't think for a second that those are permissible areas. We think, "Oh, those are police states. Those are surveillance states. I don't want to go there and be a criminal. All the criminals of the world say, "I want to go to the United States and be a criminal." And all an intelligence operator is is a professionally trained criminal. >> I like that. I like that. Look, Andy, I'm um I'm glad you're able to publish this book. And you know what I would say? First of all, to anybody who's hearing any part of this conversation and you're just not enjoying um the perspective that the government has far more control than you wish it did, you know, we we most of my audience is commodity investors, right? And we should know it's not your job to complain about the rules as an investor. It's your job to understand them and then play the game to win, right? That's that's the you don't I have the cards I I have in my hand. It's my job to play a good game. And so what I appreciate about your take, Annie, is that you come from what you might call the belly of the beast. You come from boots on the ground work in these adversarial countries. You're inside the organization, assembled the team, uh, sent on the missions. And so what you're talking about is from a place of personal experience, as is the book, man. Shadow Cell. I'm just going to shout it out one more time because it'll open your eyes and it's uh it's written really well. like it puts you in the shoes of you when your heart rate's going up and you think you're in a bit of a compromised state uh on the streets of Falcon, right? And it brings you right into the room uh into the stress and into the risk and the severe risk, right? You know, it's it's one thing that I think maybe we we tend to sensationalize that might be true is the consequences of, you know, American intelligence officers working in these adversarial countries. what can actually happen to these individuals if they are picked up, right? And that can actually be incredibly dire, violent, and consequential. And that's not just hyperbole. Would you agree with that? Absolutely. It's funny. My wife, who's the co-author of the book, her job at CIA was to be the person who could disappear other people. So, it was called a capture or kill targeter. So, she could decide whether a target is captured or killed. And regardless of whether they're captured or killed, they're going to disappear from everyday life. And if anybody here thinks that that's unbelievable, like it's hard to make somebody disappear, just think about how many Americans are being held in overseas prisons that you don't even know about. It seems like by the time you hear about it in the newspaper, they've already been in prison for 3, 5, 7, 12 years >> because they were essentially just disappeared once once they were arrested. They were put into prison. There was no public notification. Nobody called their family to say this is where that person is. For years, it just went by that nobody knew where this person went until the adversarial country announced to the Americans, hey, we have your prisoner because they violated this, that, or the other law. So, it's shockingly simple to disappear a person. And my wife was very keenly aware of that throughout all of our operations with Shadow Cell because she knew that I would be the person to get disappeared. And if somebody gets disappeared, as you mentioned in the book, I believe like any intelligence officer is subject to plausible deniability from the government. Meaning it's highly likely the government might just say, "We don't know what you're talking about. We don't know who that person is. Have fun with them. They committed a crime. Their fault. Too bad, right? They can wash their hands of the >> um of the situation that's in their rights to do so." >> Uh that's super wild. Okay. I do have one last question for you. And you may or may not have a take on this, but just given everything we just discussed um and how easy it is to disappear people, especially in these kind of surveillance states like China, like Russia, what's your take on Jack Ma when he disappeared for 3 to four months and then just suddenly reappeared without any sort of explanation? Now, he obviously disappeared after saying some uh critical things about the government in China. Suddenly he was gone and then he just came back and it's like business as usual like everyone's like okay we're just not gonna ask questions like what what happened there what's your take Andy? Yeah, it's it's a great question, right? Jack Ma is the founder of Alibaba, right? We're talking about the same Jack Maw, >> correct? Yes. >> So, so Alibaba, like all super successful countries in China, is not a commercial company exclusively. It's partially owned by the government. It's called a state-owned enterprise, an SOE. So, the government controls everything about a a large corporation. So whether you're talking about Huawei or whether you're talking about the biggest EV manufacturer, whether you're talking about any business in China, if it's big enough, it's state controlled and Alibaba is one of those. So where did he go? I don't want to get into the conspiracy world, right? Because remember fact, he disappeared. >> Then there was an information gap. So now we got to make sure that we're skeptical and not speculative because if we're speculative, we're feeding a conspiracy. >> So my skeptic side says, "Where did he go for 3 months?" He is super wealthy, so he could have just taken three months off. He could have gone to some sort of weird hippie retreat. He could have gone to an education camp. The Chinese government could have said, "Hey, you can't be critical of us. We're the ones that are making you millions of Juan a year. Yuan a year." So, they could have taken him and penalized him. They could have put him in some kind of luxurious uh prison or they could have put him in some kind of house arrest to punish him without making it public. There's lots of things that could have happened, but the fact remains he fell off the map for a quarter. And why? Like you don't fall off the map when you're the CEO of, you know, a $700 million organization. So what exactly is happening here? We don't know for sure. So my take is it's very likely that the government got involved because he was an opponent of a government that is heavily policed and his success was tied to the government supporting his business. But what did they do? I'm not sure. >> Okay. Look, Andy, I appreciate your time, man, and congrats on the book. Um, check it out. Shadow Cell. Anywhere books are sold, you'll find it. Uh, yourself and your wife, Jihei. Congratulations. Really glad that you were able to get the book published, by the way. And, uh, very keen to hear people's response. So, grab a copy. Let me know what you think, guys. And Andy, thanks so much for your time today. Thanks day.
CIA Spy on The Most Dangerous Spy Mission Ever Declassified
Summary
Transcript
Today I'm speaking with a former CIA agent who led a team of spies on the ground in one of America's most aggressive adversarial countries. Today we dispute myth from facts. We talk about surveillance and privacy and what the CIA really does. His name is Andrew Bamonte. This is the Jay Martin Show where we dissect the greatest minds in geopolitics and finance. You're going to enjoy this one. >> This is J. Monte. >> All right, here I am with Andy Bamante. Andy, it's great to have you back on the show. >> Thanks, Jan. Glad to be back, man. >> So, here's what I want to talk about. You are a former CIA agent, as is your wife. You led a team of spies on the ground in one of America's most powerful adversarial countries, and you almost didn't make it out. Uh but you did and you since moved on from the agency and you published a book on that experience, Shadow Cell, uh the CIA tried very hard to prevent you from publishing this book, but thankfully a legal battle grounded in the First Amendment allowed you to get this book out. Uh so here's where I want to start. What will people understand after they read Shadow Cell? Uh, it's a great question and I appreciate the the quick summary there too, Jay. So, uh, and more than anything, I appreciate the fact that your cover is already bent and curled, so I can tell that you've been reading the book. >> You can tell, right? Yeah. Yeah. >> No, but uh, in all honesty, when people read Shadow Cell, I I think they're going to have two kind of aha moments simultaneously. first they're going to realize how much of espionage is a team sport and the movies don't do a very good job of showing that uh you know you don't you get a sense that there are multiple people who play a role but there's always a hierarchy in the movies and the field officer who's the one out there on the leading edge is always the hero when in reality it's very very different and inside our shadow cell all of the people collecting the secrets were valuable team players but the real hero was actually my wife with her anxiety disorder who came up with the entire strategy that everybody else followed uh to make such success. Right? So the first thing people will learn is how espionage really works. How spy teams actually work. The second thing that people will realize or the second thing that people will learn is that spying is a very human experience. And in our book, we talk not only about our operations, but the operations of a mole. A mole that had penetrated CIA's ranks and how that mole lived his life. How he lived a double life. How he lived two uh two lies simultaneously and why. It's really important to understand that when somebody commits treason against their own country, the reason they're committing that treason is very human. And we never ever see that in movies. We never hear about that in conversations. You don't get that in a 24-hour news report. So, it's a very intimate, transparent look at modern-day espionage. Yeah. Cuz in in the book, you and your team were effectively the bait that was used to lure and find therefore this mole. Is that correct? You were aware there was a mole in the CIA. You didn't know who it was. And so you and your team were essentially deployed in order to bait the mole. Is that that's correct? >> Yeah, that's correct, Jay. And more specifically, it was my wife and I. My wife, who like you said is also former CIA, we were married. We were put under uh under joint kind of cover identities that actually took advantage of the fact that we were married. It's what's called a tandem operating couple. So, we were a tandem couple and we were sent to create a whole new way of spying on our adversary because the mole was helping our adversary. So, anything that historically we had ever done, the mole was already feeding the adversarial country. So, this our adversary was always one step ahead of us. And when you're talking about a geopolitical rival, there's only a handful of countries that meet that criteria for the United States. And when you're talking about trying to outsmart, outwit, outmaneuver a geopolitical rival, a mole is an incredibly damaging thing. So what they asked was for my wife and I to go overseas to an undisclosed location and create a whole new way of operating. And in so doing, CIA knew, but did not tell us, that by creating something new, it would force the mole to have to try to find us, which would make the mole most likely make some kind of mistake that would highlight him to the internal agency. And what was so novel about your approach, yourself and your wife Jihi, was that you borrowed some strategies from traditional spy work and you married them with things that you learned from modern-day terrorist cells and it was this hybrid approach that's now revolutionize the agency to a large degree. Correct. >> That's absolutely right. People don't realize that the biggest evolution in espionage strategy happened in the United States. It happened in 2014. And it did not happen as a result of our own innovation. It happened because we had been fighting a 20-year war on terror. And my wife being one of the architects identified that no other country in the world was fighting that war. So everything that we had learned, hunting down terrorists, tracking their cells, watching the money move, watching the drugs move, seeing how they trafficked people and weapons, how they they created a whole separate financial system called a hala system that was basically a large informal informal banking network. So we we as Americans, we as the CIA understood how this whole thing worked, but none of our adversaries had spent any time or effort fighting terrorism. So it was a completely blind skill set to them. So we took advantage of that. My wife identified how we could borrow from terrorism and use those skills and tactics within the confines of American law to benefit our own kind. >> Okay. And so to to just like massively simplify the process um and kind of how the mission would roll out, you had a team and I would love you to share a little bit on sort of the hierarchy and the various independent roles that exist from your wife Ji who was a targeter versus a field officer and what the individuals do. But you're deployed on the ground and your mission is to kind of uh flush out potentially valuable targets and you just got to I mean walk me through that. How do you discover who might be valuable to you and then how do you bring them into a conversation and start to uh uh squeeze some of that utility out of them? >> Yeah. So, there's a there's a lot going on in the question that you just asked. Uh and I appreciate your approach of trying to keep it simple. So, I'll simply start by talking about the targets. The targets we were trying to identify were targets that were obviously foreigners. foreigners who were related or supporting our adversarial countries government, military and intelligence ambitions. So if they were tied to the the government, if they were tied to the military or if they were tied to intel in either a formal capacity like a government employee or a commercial capacity like a contractor or somebody who like builds new bases or builds airplanes, right? If they were connected in any way to those three priorities, we would identify them as a target for collection. And once you identify your target, then you kind of reverse engineer what skills you need to collect against that target. Because every target requires different skills depending on their language proficiency, where they live, how much they travel, whether or not they use technology, what their technology platform is, if they have families, if they have uh financial issues. So, it takes a lot to identify how best to approach a target. And that's where the different skill sets came in. To answer your question about what you do once you identify the target, it really is old school what we call sticks and bricks. Once you know who you're going to talk to, then the whole idea is to do what's called a bump to approach them and quote unquote socially bump into them where you exchange an introduction and you have uh a very artificial but seemingly genuine conversation to find commonality and eventually build some kind of friendship. As a CIA operator, you know that it's artificial. you know that it's contrived and your goal is to deliver that contrived relationship in such a way that the target does not realize it's artificial. The target believes it's a genuine connection. Okay. So, one of the most shocking moments in this book for me was when a spy hits the ground um or even when No, not even that. You talked about an experience of hitting the ground and you've you've got your cover story about who your character is that you're playing and how that character is going to interact with reality and their backstory and it's amazingly detailed down to what you called pocket litter, right? That just the garbage we all have in our pockets that supports the person that I am, right? Just wild. But what really shocked me was how common it seems to be for the for anybody, the average businessman, the average podcaster to enter some of these countries. and surveillance will jump on you just in case you're somebody of interest. And how common that is and how frequently people of interest, not spies, not government people, just people that might be interesting, entrepreneurs, they hit the ground and right away they're they're tailed by what you called bumbling surveillance and how frequent this is. And I think in a recent podcast you even said pretty much any business owner or executive when they enter so many of our adversarial countries are tail the minute they get off the plane their hotel rooms might be searched as you discussed in the book. Walk me through that cuz that shocked me and I'm sure it shocks a lot of people. What exactly am I talking about here? >> Yeah. So it I think you're right that the revelation is shocking to people at first, but with just a little bit of kind of critical thinking, you start to understand why it's it shouldn't be as much of a surprise as it is. Essentially, we as Americans often forget that we are the wealthiest, most powerful country in the entire world, in the whole world. So when you have an American who controls any amount of wealth and I would say that the target amount of wealth is about a million dollars net worth. If you have a million dollar net worth, there are pe there are businesses all over the world that make it their business just to track your location so that they can market to you, so they can pitch to you, so they can sell to you, so they can steal your secrets. That's the pe like the people who are having their phones hacked and their computers hacked and the people who are finding that when they travel overseas they pick up this bumbling surveillance or what what is I call them bumbling surveillance. They are really just unsophisticated untrained surveillance teams. >> The lowcost tales for some Yeah. Yeah. Okay. >> They're freelancers. They're freelancers that know that if they see your Rolex and they see that you have custom alligator boots, they can follow you for a couple of hours and if they hear you talking about a new deal or if they see you open your computer and log into local Wi-Fi, they can sell that information to their own local government or local criminal organizations and that's part of the economy of the rest of the world. It's mind-boggling to most Westerners to think that you could make a living or that you would want to make a living following around what look like rich people, but it's a very healthy living for most countries in the world, especially those countries that also dislike American government because your wealthiest people are often times tied to government, whether they're contracting to the government or they're engaged in lobbyist activities or something like that. So, it's very very common and it's it's kind of unsettling, but everything we do in the United States to show off our position and our status, our clothing brands, our the way that we mold our facial hair, the fact that we are wearing designer watches and carrying designer uh clutches and wearing designer shoes and taking business class and staying in first rate hotels. Once you do that, you're just you're amplifying your potential utility to a foreign target. >> Let me ask you because when you say most countries in the world do this immediately, my one of my like points of surprise I think was based on the fact that there would be enough resources to do that. Like how many business people travel to Beijing every day, you know what I mean? Now, let's use let's use Beijing because it's probably one of the more common in terms of like which countries would do this. The biggest adversaries would probably be the most likely. So, Japan far less likely maybe. I'd love to know your thoughts, but China probably highly likely. So, how many business people travel to Beijing from America every single day and there's enough resources, boots in the ground, lowcost surveillance individuals, uh, that'll just tail them. And it just it's so when you say most countries in the world, let's walk through what that means exactly like could I expect that if I let's say I meet your criteria of an interesting person from a net worth or profile standpoint, whatever they're looking for, they can find that in me. I get off an airplane in India. Am I being tailed? >> Yes. >> Yes. Brazil. Am I being tailed? Brazil. Indonesia. Am I being tailed? >> What? >> Keep going. Keep going. Russia. >> Russia. Russia. China. I feel like Yeah, >> China. It seems like a good guess. Here's a place that's shocking. >> South Africa. Yes. France. Yes. >> France. >> France is one of the most hostile countries out there against the United States. >> What about Japan? What about Japan? >> Japan. So, here's the trick. If the local economy pays you enough as a as a local that you don't need freelance work, that's when you don't have to worry about having that kind of surveillance. >> So, what ends up happening is in a place like Japan, the government is so focused on making sure it keeps the people's salaries high. Even if you're like a sushi roll person or if you're like a bartender or if you sell chocolate on the corner street on the or ice cream on the corner, the government subsidizes your salary. So there aren't the very poor in Japan. Any place where you have the very poor living in a city, that's where you have the ripe opportunity for this kind of surveillance activity. >> Interesting. I'm going to uh Kyoto with uh six other business owners in October and I'm like, "Okay, we're going to keep our eyes open, try to find these guys, right? The common faces that seem to be at every restaurant we're at." >> Yeah. It's not quite that easy. But I I totally get what you're saying, >> especially in a place like Japan where the immigration policy forces that that you can't live in Japan unless you are Japanese descent. It makes it very hard to identify any kind of diversity. >> Yeah. Okay. All right. I appreciate that. So, we're back on the ground in this uh adversarial country, and I guess one of the conditions you got to with the CIA is that you can't mention this country by name. You describe it in detail. You give it a code name. In the book, it's code named Falcon. That's the country you're constantly referring to. You know, it's kind of a really actually was a really fun exercise as a reader to just go through the process of trying to figure out where you were, right? Like, it was fun. And I don't want to give too much about the book away, uh, but but walk me through when you were just outlining the process here. You're on the ground. You're discovering targets that might be of value because of who they're connected with. And then you got to you got to make the bump. You got to build the relationship. You got to open the door somehow and get to know their personality, their psychographic, and probably most importantly, their vulnerabilities that you can then pull on. Um, to what extent does the CIA go in order to win people over to their side and squeeze some utility out of them? >> It's another really good observation. So, um, so for the the folks who are listening, who are enjoying this conversation, the book is called Shadow Cell. You'll find it anywhere books are sold. And and Jay, what you're talking about is when we go to actually, it's called develop. When we go to to develop a source, we have to approach that source as a person first. Now CIA has a rule of thumb. It says that people will work for you if you motivate them first and only after you have exhausted all options to motivate their cooperation. Do you try to manipulate them for cooperation? This is completely different than what you hear in the movies. It's totally different than what you hear in the conspiracy theories about CIA. CIA, they are master manipulators. Absolutely. We're all trained in how to manipulate human behavior. But the first step in understanding how to manipulate human behavior is that it's reallying hard. And the first thing that you should do is just try to motivate them. >> Think about how your life works, Jay. If somebody wants you to help them move on the weekend, if they want if they want you to help them, you know, read a uh write a resume or close a business deal, it's so much easier to get you to cooperate when they motivate you to cooperate. Hey, come help me move and I'll buy you a nice bottle of scotch or a six-ack of beer. Hey, come help like review my resume and I'll make a nice dinner for the whole family and the kids can hang out downstairs while you and I talk business for an hour upstairs. Like, that's all motivational. It's still manipulation. It's still you getting what you want from the other person, but it's got this veneer on it where it's inspiring or it's collective or it's, you know, there's social grace in it. So, we try to use those techniques first. So, when you're bumping a target, you're not going in there and showing them some picture of them with their with their mistress and you're like, "Hey, we have blackmail and you're going to give us secrets." If you do that, you can't trust the secrets that you're getting. But when you go in instead and you just have an open-ended conversation, hey, you know, it's 11:30 p.m. at the bar at the Four Seasons in Singapore. And you sit down with the person, you're like, if you're at the bar at 11:30, it's been a long day. And boom, they're like, yeah, it has been a long day. >> And then you're like, I totally get the feeling. I'm the same way. I'm here for business. Are you here for business? and all of a sudden you have a conversation going because the person feels validated in the moment that you understand their challenges. They feel motivated to have the next conversation with you. So that's how you open the door. And that would make sense because I'm far more likely to uh just open up the kimono a little bit if I feel like you're coming from a place of decency, right? But once we get past that um and you need something more from me that I'm not willing to give, there probably comes a point in time where you leverage something you know about me that I don't want other people to know. Maybe you leverage vulnerability. No, no, no. That is alling fiction. That's what kills me about the movies. That's what kills me about the average person's understanding of espionage. >> It's a big part of why I wrote this memoir. >> Yeah. Okay. So what you do, you you carry motivation as far as you possibly can. So it's funny because what you said is eventually you'll get to a place where I don't want to share. What makes you think there's ever a place where you wouldn't want to share? You would have to be suspicious >> in order for you not to want to share. And if I'm doing my job, you're never getting suspicious. You don't think I'm a CIA spy. You think I'm your friend who you met on the road in Singapore. I'm your friend who you've known for three years. I'm your friend who was introduced to you by your other friend from college, right? Why on earth would you ever hold back a secret about work >> when you don't feel any threat at all? And that's what happens. We all go through this throughout our entire life. Here's what's fascinating, Jay. >> The average person has experienced at least five major violations of their trust by the time they're 30 years old. The average person has had five examples where their trust has been utterly violated. Go ahead. Just think through your head. Do you think five sounds about right for you? Do you think you added more? Maybe you're on the low end of the spectrum. >> Estimate five is relatively accurate. Yeah. >> That's a major violation of your trust. A girlfriend or boyfriend who had an affair or cheated on you. That's a business partner who stole money. That's, you know, some neighbor or something that called the police because you were having a party. something where your trust was like, "Holy [ __ ] I thought I could trust that person and I can't." Human beings are far more likely to trust first as long as you don't give them a reason to distrust you because as a as a species, we understand that our survival is like is largely tied to tribal behavior. And you can't become part of a tribe unless you are trusted in that tribe. And subconsciously, you know that in order to be trusted, you must first trust. So, it's shocking because most of us are actually very trusting first. And it's not until after our trust has been violated 12, 15, 30 times that we ever learn to be distrustful first. I really appreciate that. And so, your mission, say I'm the target, say, you know, I'm the guy you're you're bumping, right, and building a relationship with. Your end goal is that we die best friends, right? We just continue down this path of deepening trust and cooperation. And as far as I'm aware, we're just authentically connected as peers because we have so much in common. I enjoy spending time with you, chatting with you about my wins and my losses. And that's where this goes. And if we get off that track, it's because something went wrong right in the process. Like that wasn't the goal. We want to keep going down the I mean, it makes obvious makes a lot of sense when you kind of talk it out like that. But you're right, the intuitive Hollywood bias would be that I have something on this person, so I'm going to turn them, right? And let me just ask you because with current events today, I know some folks in my comments are going to ask this, but what about the Diddy Files? But what about the Epstein files? Isn't this like is that what we think it is where there's some people who are doing some naughty things and now somebody has footage of that and they will be leveraged? What's your take on that sort of current event obsession right now that we're witnessing with those two individuals and a few more? So what we're seeing is is a great example of conspiracy at mass levels because if it was just Diddy or if it was just Epstein and there wasn't so much social media content also being created about the what if imagine what that world would look like if the New York Times or the or the Washington Post or CNN or BBC did a normal news story talking about Diddy getting off uh with light charges and talking about Epstein, you know, who was uh we suspect may have died in prison, but the files aren't being released. If it was just a news story, it would have died as at the same speed that thousands of new stories die every day. But instead, we have content creators, we have YouTubers and Instagrammers and Twitter heads, and we have all these people who are constantly keeping this thing alive. What we're seeing right there is something that we call a conspiracy cycle. Conspiracy cycles happen all the time. Sometimes they can be manufactured. Most of the time they are completely and totally organic. And when they are organic, they're very convenient for a government to let run because all that's happening in a conspiracy cycle is everybody's putting their energy into the conspiracy and nobody's actually focused on solving the problem. This is why the JFK thing has gone on for so long. It's also why for anybody who caught this, there was an excellent article about a month and a half ago about the Martin Luther King files also being released as part of the JFK investigation. And the Martin Luther King family did not want those confidential files to be released, but they were because what those files talked about was how FBI and other government intelligence agencies were were um surveilling, monitoring, and suspecting Martin Luther King and his closest associates of extremist activity. Right? So there was there was a misunderstanding of what Martin Luther King's intentions were at the time that turned into a government investigation. So why am I saying all this? I'm saying this because when you talk about conspiracies, you have to ask yourself, is there an easier explanation for this conspiracy? Is there an easier explanation out there for what happened to Jeffrey Epstein other than he was a super secret CIA or MSAD agent planted onto a billionaire's lifestyle to collect secrets from around the world to collect blackmail from the world's most powerful figures? That's a prettying Hollywood story. Are you telling me you can't think of any simpler explanation? You don't think that he was just a rich guy with rich friends that were doing illegal things and he came under suspicion by FBI for for hiding money in offshore bank accounts. That is so much more reasonable than what people are saying about him. And the same thing for Diddy. You think it's so much easier to just accept he's a rich guy in the production space of music, which we all know is full of sex, alcohol, and you know, poor decisions. Do we really think that like, oh no, he was definitely there plotting and planning to blackmail the world's elite? No. Come on, guys. It's like I understand that it sounds sexy because you could read about it in a book, but real real life criminality and real life espionage. It's so dull and so boring that it would never catch your attention. >> That's so interesting. It's, you know, and uh and nobody wants to hear that, right? We want to believe the hyperbole. And and I I I mean I tend to agree with you, you know, and and in a sense that there's usually um you know, two extremes of a story that are told and the truth lies somewhere in the middle in the boring middle, right? A bit of column A, a bit of column B, chop off the pointy edges and there there you go. Um and why wouldn't we have a couple guys here who um have some weird fetishes, right? More money than they know what to do with. They do some weird stuff. Maybe they film it, right? Maybe they have they've had some friends over that are questionable. But, you know, you mix that with, as you said, sort of the the new sort of content industry and all the creators that are looking for clickbait headlines. Yeah. Thumbnails and all of that stuff. But then that runs into peak distrust in government institutions right now, you know, and just basic populism or divisions among society. People are looking for an enemy right now. They're looking to point the finger. They feel like their life isn't going the way they want it to, and they're looking to get angry at somebody. And getting angry at rich people is really easy, right? Especially when you can vilify them like this. And then find a bit of evidence and then a bunch of supporting media that will add to that conviction and it's a whole soup, right? You understand why it's such a strong narrative and one that's going to be very hard to bury. That's interesting. >> So there's there's an anatomy that we learn um a system that explains how a conspiracy happens, right? We call it the anatomy of a conspiracy at CIA. The first step, there's only four steps in the entire cycle, which is why I'm going to tell you, Jay, the first step is something factual has to happen. So, for any conspiracy theory, it has to start from a fact. So, did he really did get accused of beating women and and prostitution across state boundaries? And he really did go to court for it, right? He really did get tried. Jeffrey Epstein really did have pictures with famous people and run a billion dollar hedge fund. Like, these are real things. So it starts from something real. Well then the next step is there has to be a gap in the information available to the public. Without the gap then what you have is a complete story instead of the foundation for a conspiracy. The third thing you need to have is speculation. Speculation not skepticism. Skepticism is healthy. Skepticism is normal. Skepticism is rational. But speculation is irrational. Speculation is nothing more than just people making guesses. Not even educated guesses, just guesses. And then the fourth step is that speculation has to close a gap where the knowledge was missing. So we speculate about why we're missing the knowledge and then there you have a complete cycle. So now the facts still remain, the gap still remains and the speculation just gets ramped up and then everybody has their loop closed. And and human brains love a closed loop. It's the reason that we all to a certain extent we get satisfied when we solve a math problem. It's why we all love finishing movies. It's why we all love finishing books. We like a closed loop. It's very comp. It's very fulfilling. Yeah. It's it ends like the mental fixation on the project or the process itself. So people love these conspiracies. We're just prone to them naturally. So it's a very easy um habit to fall into. >> Yeah. And I like how you put the you juxtaposed skepticism and speculation in that way. Skepticism is reflecting on a situation and questioning what happened. Questioning whether the things you were told actually occurred. Speculation is guessing what might also have occurred. And you can take that to a pretty crazy extent. >> Correct. >> Um, okay. I want to use a couple other examples then. We all carry iPhones in our pocket. Those iPhones have dozens of apps that have asked for permission to use our microphone and our camera. And I could speculate that therefore my personal privacy is a thing of the past. Anything I say in the presence of my phone or my laptop or my smart TV or probably some other stuff uh could be accessed, could be recorded, could be listened to. Maybe privacy as we like to believe in it is just a romantic historical idea that no longer exists. Is that speculation or is that true? And then the next step say that therefore that means I am being listened to. I am being tracked. This information is being leveraged against me and I need to be careful. Those those two things don't both have to be true. But what's your take on that concept and speculative idea? >> Absolutely. The privacy argument is a great example of this speculation versus skepticism, right? So, let's approach it as a skeptic would approach it first. So, here's the claim. The claim is you have a right to privacy. That's a very common claim. I would say most of us probably agree with that claim. I have a right to privacy, right? If it's not a government-given right, it's at least a human right, right? So, I have a right to privacy. the the skeptic looks at that and says, "Do I really like where does it say I have a right to privacy?" Now, this is really this is really wild and we're gonna get a lot of pissed-off people, but you for being pissed off. You can read the Constitution yourself. There is no statement guaranteeing your right to privacy. The term right to privacy does not exist in the Constitution. The term right to privacy does not exist in the Bill of Rights. The term right to privacy exists in no amendment ever written ever by any federal documentation. Americans have no reasonable justification to believe they have any right to privacy because it doesn't exist in any documentation defining the rights of an American citizen. What has happened is that since the beginning of America, there have been court cases where the court the the uh judges of the court inferred from certain amendments that there is a reasonable right to expect privacy. So what does that mean? It means it's totally up to interpretation and it means that it's inferred by the court that you're in. There is really only 12 instances where any kind of government documentation talks about you having a right to privacy. And those 12 instances are 12 different state constitutions within the 50 states of the United States. Meaning there are still 38 states that do not in their state constitution give you any right to privacy. And only 12 states specifically use that term. So, while every American believes they have a right to privacy, in fact, there is no such thing as a right to privacy unless you live in one of the 12 states where the state constitution gives it to you. That is a skeptic. A speculator, a speculator would then go the step to say, well, if I don't have a right to privacy, then they must be listening to my phone. They must be tracking my messages. I must need endto-end encryption because the government is absolutely listening to me. That's all speculation. There's no logical reason to expect that you, as one of 330 million Americans, would rise to the occasion for the government to spend any money actually listening to your phone calls. If you're a drug dealer, you go up that list of importance. If you're a pedophile, you go up that list of importance. And guess what? You have no right to privacy. So, if we think that you're touching kids or selling drugs, we're going to listen to your phone call. And you have no legal recourse. That's just the way that the government was built because we're supposed to be keeping the rest of the population safe. >> Okay. Can I throw one more at you? Another example like this. All right. So, let's talk about um call it like state capitalism. I want to know like where's the boring reality? Where does the skeptic belief lie? Where does the speculative belief lie? I could say that I think if the CIA or similar organizations were being quite savvy, they would probably have a front for some investment banks and they would be some of the key investors in some of the world's biggest tech platforms because these are the best spyware that exist because we voluntarily subscribe. Facebook, Google, uh X, Tik Tok, you name it. And I know there's organizations like it's called Inqutel, which is like the it's kind of like an investment bank owned by the CIA to a degree. Correct. >> And and the concept of the black budget, which I want to understand more, but that's sort of like a >> Well, I'll let you explain that cuz I'm curious about that black abyss of money. But so I might go as far as to say that if this is true, that it's in the CIA's best interest to control some of these mega tech platforms, they would find a covert way to do so and white label some of the biggest investment banks. Maybe Andre Horowitz is a CIA arm and they're funding the biggest tech platforms in the world and therefore have access to all this data and that's the speculative runaway. Like where does where does that marriage really lie? What's your thoughts on state creep big tech surveillance and the the capital agreements? >> I love your question because inside your question itself Jay if you go back and listen to your own question back again you'll see how even in your own manifestation of the question you crossed out of skepticism and into speculation. You started by saying the skeptic would say that the government would have a vested interest in large tech, >> but then by the end you said so it would make sense that the government would want to control these large tech companies. >> The first statement was skepticism. The second statement was speculation. You're the Inqel example is a perfect example. Inel already exists. It's already publicly known. It's a giant investment platform funded by CIA and other government organizations to invest in cutting edge technology. DARPA is the same way. And you have many cleared contractors from Lockheed to Khaki to Northrup Grumman. All of which are in the same boat. They're all commercially viable companies. They're investment platforms that are that are funded by the government. There's also an excellent example throughout the history of like World War II. World War II has great examples. End-to-end encryption as we know it was actually created by a Dutch company, a Dutch company in the 1940s. The United States identified that Dutch company and the United States wanted to be able to have the ability to hack into the encryptions that the Nazis would use. So, we bought a majority stake in that Dutch company back in like 1944, something ridiculous. Mhm. >> Well, that Dutch company helped us crack the code against the Nazis, but we retained ownership of that company all the way until like the '90s, and we kept leveraging that same ownership stake to hack into various encrypted systems that were being used by warlords across Africa, uh, oligarchs across Europe, drug dealers in South America, because everybody would go to the best company in the world for endto-end encryption, and CIA owned a majority a shake. And that came out in a New York Times, I believe it was a New York Times piece in about 2017, 2018. So, anybody can look that up, right? CIA owned the world's best encryption company. Look it up. You'll find all the details yourself. But it's a super fascinating example because you're damn right. It makes sense that CIA and all of the leading intelligence services of the world would want to have a stake in the most current, most modern technology that's being created. People forget that that the reason we have pens that write upside down is because NASA was the one who funded that research. Governments always fund innovative, cutting edge research first because they have plenty of money to do it. Commercial organizations don't do that. Now where it's crosses from skepticism into speculation is when you start thinking that those those commercial organizations are in the government's pocket like the government can control them. The government can't control Facebook. It can't control Google. It can't control YouTube. Inside the United States, a company has all the same rights and privileges as an individual citizen. So what you cannot do to a citizen, you also cannot do to a company because it's treated like an American citizen. Does that mean that Facebook and YouTube don't cooperate with the government? Of course not. If if you were a US citizen, would you cooperate with the government? Especially if the government had the ability to stop your business, seize your revenue, if they had the ability to basically write a policy that made your whole business illegal, right? Think about Blockbuster. Blockbuster was like the world's best video rental store until a brand new technology came wrong around and bankrupted Blockbuster. At any given time, Facebook knows that policy could be written tomorrow that makes social media Facebook illegal just like policies being written that makes Tik Tok illegal. Right? A few words from the pen of a bureaucrat can kill your billion dollar business. So with that in mind, it's it's just a simple incentive for Facebook to cooperate with CIA, FBI, DEA, you name it. Why Google wants to remain the world's biggest search engine? A a simple stroke of policy and it loses that advantage. So it wants to cooperate and it owns YouTube. So YouTube wants to cooperate. So all these companies, they're not under the government's control. They just understand it's in their best interest to continue to land on the side that supports government goals. Maybe you see that as the same thing. That's fine if you do, but at the end of the day, you're doing it, too. You don't want the government to change a policy that cancels your ability to make money. So, you continue to pay your taxes, drive the speed limit, and you know, pay your proper dues to make sure that you don't have your business closed. >> Yeah. No, no doubt. Okay. I um you know what I was thinking about as you're explaining that you you mentioned as powerful as some of these companies are their more powerful adversary is always the policy creator right the government. And it seems like if an entrepreneur reaches that level of hyper success eventually that's the opponent they run into. Go back to like doesn't m Rockefeller you build the massive conglomerate take over the industry nationwide eventually you run into a bureaucrat >> uh who can stop you dead in your tracks. That was part of the reason I was curious if that was why Elon Musk was cozying up to the administration in the fashion that he was. here's an entrepreneur who's, you know, out of out of the stratosphere, right? We know where this is going. Eventually, you'll run into the bureaucrat that stops in your tracks. And studying that history, I wondered if that was part of his strategy. Uh, cozing up to the White House, building those relationships, more of a cooperative take. Uh, I don't know if it worked out for him, but >> I know it's a perfect example of of what you're saying, right? Policy will always trump business. Always. In the United States, that's how it's going to always work. We are a bull market. But who defined that bull market? The government, right? The government controls martial law. The government controls the tax base. The government controls the investment uh interest rate. The government controls everything. That's what a government is supposed to do. So whether you want big government or small government is irrelevant because you still want government and government's job is to control the commercial uh activity of the country that it's within. So Elon Musk thought that if he cozied up to the head diplomat or the head bureaucrat that somehow it would make a difference. And Donald Trump basically came in and was like, "Uh, hey, thanks for all your help, Elon. We're not helping you." And Elon could throw a fit and he could cry about it and he could, you know, say he's going to fund opposition parties, but at the end of the day, the bureaucrat won. And Elon Musk for all his power, all his innovation, all his wealth was left packing. >> Nobody wants to hear that. Hey, nobody. Nobody. Especially not my audience. They're losing it right now in the comments about this. Yeah. Libertarians and >> I'm here to tell you the truth, right? Like you the liberty that you have, libertarian, was given to you. It was given to you by some bureaucrat. And you can disagree with that all day long. If you want to drive to Capitol Hill, I promise you somewhere on Capitol Hill, they're having a conversation right now about how they gave you your liberty and how you're ungrateful to them and how they need to create a new narrative that you can believe because what you're believing right now is a narrative that's spun by foreign intelligence. That's that is the way it works on Washington DC. That's why your downhome Arkansas boy who gets into Congress at 27 years old, by the time he's 47 years old, but 20 years in that congressional seat, he doesn't give a about you anymore. All he cares about is staying in office, cashing in 250k a year to write policies that may or may not help you, but always spinning the content. >> Okay. A couple couple other questions I want to ask you here and I actually want to close the loop on the ground surveillance and bring it home to the US. We talked about, you know, Indonesia, India, Brazil, China, Russia, Japan, um high-profile businessman gets off an airplane or woman gets off an airplane into the airport, start navigating the city in their tail just in case there's something interesting about them. Does that occur in the United States? >> Why would it not? Like this is I I'm trying to make sure people understand the concept here. >> Yeah. So why do you think it would not exist in the United States? >> Uh cost of labor would be my first >> exactly right because >> because what you have to consider is in the United States everybody who has a job is trying to maximize their income in their job >> and you have a very small economy that's the gig economy and you have almost no freelancers in the United States. Right? Being a freelancer is basically like saying you're unemployed. Um, and for all the freelancers out there who disagree, you're obviously a very busy freelancer. So, you know, five freelancers off the top of your head who are not as busy as you. Once you leave the borders of the United States, freelancing is a full-time job. For most of the world, freelancing, second jobs, third jobs, fourth jobs are very, very common because just making enough money to survive dayto-day is a is a challenge. In the United States, we don't have that challenge. So when you go to another foreign country, there's always 10 people who are like, "Well, my shift just ended, so I might as well go sit in the lobby of this hotel and read a newspaper for a couple of hours because if some somebody interesting walks by, all I have to do is know know their their name, their hotel room, when they arrived, a couple of things that I could use to describe them, and that that individual can now literally go out the front of the hotel. They can go find a cop. They can go find a criminal. And they can be like, "Hey, I've got information you might be interested in. If you have five bucks, I'll tell you about this rich American oil tycoon that just checked in at the Four Seasons, and he's going to be there until Thursday." Now, that criminal, there's a there's a good market there because that criminal wants to know who that person is, so he can mug him the next day and take his watch. And the police want to know who that person is because the police are like, "Oh, I also need a second or third job. So maybe what I'll do is wear my uniform off duty tomorrow and I'll shake down that guy for a $100, you know, uh, bribe." It's if you've been through Mexico, you've seen this firsthand. Yeah, that's fascinating. Okay. So therefore in the US if it's less likely from a human labor standpoint is that replaced by something else by some kind of digital surveillance tracking anything like this? >> Uh it's it's not. And what you're getting what we're getting to here, Jay, is part of the problem, part of the challenge of the United States on a on a law enforcement and national security level is that the United States is one of the most what we call permissible countries in the world. Permissible means you have the ability to carry out nefarious activity almost with local permission because there's nobody that's going to stop you, research you, police you. whatever else. I mean, [ __ ] in the United States, half the states don't even like their own police officers. So, of course, we have a permissible environment here for criminals. So, when the when foreign intelligence organizations look at the United States, they see wealth, power, and a permissive environment. Whereas in the United States, when we look at Saudi Arabia or when we look at Russia or when we look at China, we don't think for a second that those are permissible areas. We think, "Oh, those are police states. Those are surveillance states. I don't want to go there and be a criminal. All the criminals of the world say, "I want to go to the United States and be a criminal." And all an intelligence operator is is a professionally trained criminal. >> I like that. I like that. Look, Andy, I'm um I'm glad you're able to publish this book. And you know what I would say? First of all, to anybody who's hearing any part of this conversation and you're just not enjoying um the perspective that the government has far more control than you wish it did, you know, we we most of my audience is commodity investors, right? And we should know it's not your job to complain about the rules as an investor. It's your job to understand them and then play the game to win, right? That's that's the you don't I have the cards I I have in my hand. It's my job to play a good game. And so what I appreciate about your take, Annie, is that you come from what you might call the belly of the beast. You come from boots on the ground work in these adversarial countries. You're inside the organization, assembled the team, uh, sent on the missions. And so what you're talking about is from a place of personal experience, as is the book, man. Shadow Cell. I'm just going to shout it out one more time because it'll open your eyes and it's uh it's written really well. like it puts you in the shoes of you when your heart rate's going up and you think you're in a bit of a compromised state uh on the streets of Falcon, right? And it brings you right into the room uh into the stress and into the risk and the severe risk, right? You know, it's it's one thing that I think maybe we we tend to sensationalize that might be true is the consequences of, you know, American intelligence officers working in these adversarial countries. what can actually happen to these individuals if they are picked up, right? And that can actually be incredibly dire, violent, and consequential. And that's not just hyperbole. Would you agree with that? Absolutely. It's funny. My wife, who's the co-author of the book, her job at CIA was to be the person who could disappear other people. So, it was called a capture or kill targeter. So, she could decide whether a target is captured or killed. And regardless of whether they're captured or killed, they're going to disappear from everyday life. And if anybody here thinks that that's unbelievable, like it's hard to make somebody disappear, just think about how many Americans are being held in overseas prisons that you don't even know about. It seems like by the time you hear about it in the newspaper, they've already been in prison for 3, 5, 7, 12 years >> because they were essentially just disappeared once once they were arrested. They were put into prison. There was no public notification. Nobody called their family to say this is where that person is. For years, it just went by that nobody knew where this person went until the adversarial country announced to the Americans, hey, we have your prisoner because they violated this, that, or the other law. So, it's shockingly simple to disappear a person. And my wife was very keenly aware of that throughout all of our operations with Shadow Cell because she knew that I would be the person to get disappeared. And if somebody gets disappeared, as you mentioned in the book, I believe like any intelligence officer is subject to plausible deniability from the government. Meaning it's highly likely the government might just say, "We don't know what you're talking about. We don't know who that person is. Have fun with them. They committed a crime. Their fault. Too bad, right? They can wash their hands of the >> um of the situation that's in their rights to do so." >> Uh that's super wild. Okay. I do have one last question for you. And you may or may not have a take on this, but just given everything we just discussed um and how easy it is to disappear people, especially in these kind of surveillance states like China, like Russia, what's your take on Jack Ma when he disappeared for 3 to four months and then just suddenly reappeared without any sort of explanation? Now, he obviously disappeared after saying some uh critical things about the government in China. Suddenly he was gone and then he just came back and it's like business as usual like everyone's like okay we're just not gonna ask questions like what what happened there what's your take Andy? Yeah, it's it's a great question, right? Jack Ma is the founder of Alibaba, right? We're talking about the same Jack Maw, >> correct? Yes. >> So, so Alibaba, like all super successful countries in China, is not a commercial company exclusively. It's partially owned by the government. It's called a state-owned enterprise, an SOE. So, the government controls everything about a a large corporation. So whether you're talking about Huawei or whether you're talking about the biggest EV manufacturer, whether you're talking about any business in China, if it's big enough, it's state controlled and Alibaba is one of those. So where did he go? I don't want to get into the conspiracy world, right? Because remember fact, he disappeared. >> Then there was an information gap. So now we got to make sure that we're skeptical and not speculative because if we're speculative, we're feeding a conspiracy. >> So my skeptic side says, "Where did he go for 3 months?" He is super wealthy, so he could have just taken three months off. He could have gone to some sort of weird hippie retreat. He could have gone to an education camp. The Chinese government could have said, "Hey, you can't be critical of us. We're the ones that are making you millions of Juan a year. Yuan a year." So, they could have taken him and penalized him. They could have put him in some kind of luxurious uh prison or they could have put him in some kind of house arrest to punish him without making it public. There's lots of things that could have happened, but the fact remains he fell off the map for a quarter. And why? Like you don't fall off the map when you're the CEO of, you know, a $700 million organization. So what exactly is happening here? We don't know for sure. So my take is it's very likely that the government got involved because he was an opponent of a government that is heavily policed and his success was tied to the government supporting his business. But what did they do? I'm not sure. >> Okay. Look, Andy, I appreciate your time, man, and congrats on the book. Um, check it out. Shadow Cell. Anywhere books are sold, you'll find it. Uh, yourself and your wife, Jihei. Congratulations. Really glad that you were able to get the book published, by the way. And, uh, very keen to hear people's response. So, grab a copy. Let me know what you think, guys. And Andy, thanks so much for your time today. Thanks day.