As a companion piece to my reporting on former spies who share parts of their tradecraft as life advice, to both praise and criticism, I went back to former operations officer Andy Bustamante.
Our lively conversation took some unexpected turns. I asked him how he chooses what to share and what not to share of his agency training. I was expecting a “sources and methods” response. But he said, “What I have found is that most people, when they leave intelligence, they take a very broad definition to give themselves lots of space to never, never accidentally disclose something they shouldn’t disclose. What I did was I went in the opposite direction.”
He said he sometimes finds differences between what the CIA and the FBI have determined should be kept secret. He spoke of Surveillance Detection Routes, or SDR, which are meant to thwart people following your trail.
“According to CIA, [SDR] is classified top secret. But SDR methodology, defined by FBI, is public knowledge. How does that work, Sasha? Only in the eyes of the American government does it make sense that two different national security organizations would define the same thing differently.” He says he teaches SDR according to public documents that he attributes to the FBI. (The FBI declined to comment.)
I also noticed that EverydaySpy’s website has a special category called “sex and spies.” He said the agency taught officers to turn their sexual energy into “productivity [that] will ultimately lead you to a place where you have more options to find the actual human connection that you’re looking for.”
The CIA teaching about sex? That was news to me. I awkwardly reached out to the CIA about this and have not received a response. Intelligence community veterans that I later spoke with said they were not familiar with this line of training and found it highly unusual. (One person added that they were discouraged from one-night stands in an introductory class and that officers have to declare any foreign national with whom they have sex.)
I also asked Andy if he ever worries that the intelligence officers from China, Russia, or another adversarial government might benefit from his discourse. “I wrestled with that a lot when I first started my company because it’s very traditionally American,” he said.
“The way I see it, anything anybody teaches can be used unethically. The same skills, like whether you’re learning how to write or whether you are learning how to program or whether your learning how to run, somebody can use it for an unethical purpose — to write propaganda, to hack a computer, to run away from the police.”
Paid subscribers, who help me keep being an independent journalist, can scroll down and watch the second part of my chat with Andy. We go into some of his security tips, which spy tactics don’t exactly translate into civilian life, ways to generally assess people, and the lessons that have helped his business to grow.
