Speaker 2
Either way, nobody pays a price except Kiev. Yeah. For our capability, once it's launched, is
Speaker 1
there a way to, there's no way to cancel it? If that is an upgrade to the system, it's a new upgrade. But the last I heard, which was still when I was with CIA, they're fire and forget, man. Once they're up, they're up. I would be surprised if there was no cancel button somewhere by now. But when I was there, man, that was how it worked. Once you launched them, you are 100% dedicated, which is why we are not a first strike nation. Man, it's some fascinating stuff for
Speaker 2
sure. As you closed that chapter of your life, what was the spark that initiated the CIA path? It was an accident, actually. So, you
Speaker 1
know, I was... Like all great CIA and nuke careers. Oh, fuck, it was an accident. It's one of those things, man. When you're just trying to escape discomfort, you end up doing some cool shit sometimes. But, you know, I'm sitting under the ground. I'm sitting underground, not with a cutie, not, you know, getting a blowjob to pass the time. So did you have...
Speaker 2
it's a bunker 10 it's a it's a top side five but a bunker 10 did you have a rating system like that we called them falcon goggles that's fucking great god i love it fucking military nothing changes but
Speaker 1
uh but yeah so um you know i'm underground watching and waiting for the end of the world to come. So when I when the time came to leave, Air Force asked for volunteers. My hand was the first one up. Malmstrom Air Force Base, first hand up, first person in line to leave or second person in line to leave early out of Malmstrom because they were force shaping for Iraq and Afghanistan. And, you know, I signed my paperwork. I'm free in 90 days. And I remember the staff sergeant or whatever was like, what are you going to do? Like, you're going to go work in corporate America and you'll get a job. I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do. I hadn't thought that far. I just knew I wanted the fuck out of here. I didn't really know what I wanted to do next. So I start looking like most military people do for other government jobs. Because one thing I know is the government and I have zero idea how any of my skills are applicable to 7-Eleven or CVS Health or, you know, whatever company was out there at the time. So I come across the Peace Corps. I come across AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps. AmeriCorps sounds cool. Travel around America, go to inner school, inner city schools, rural schools, teach kids. That sounds cool. Like that's way better than destroying the planet. Peace Corps, you go around the world and like you live in tents with hippie chicks from the United States and all other countries of the world. Like now that sounds like, that sounds like we're a place where you can chase tail and like change the world. So I'm all in on Peace Corps. Sign up for, go make my applicant online platform or whatever the hell is called, portal. Get on the early days of a computer, back when you had computer labs, before everybody had their own personal computer. So I'm no shit putting in my application for the Peace Corps and a screen, a red screen pops up that says, hey, you may be qualified for other national security jobs or you may qualify for other jobs based on your answers. Are you willing to put your application on hold for 72 hours while a recruiter reaches out to you? I'm 27 years old. It's not the Air Force. So I'm like, shit, yeah, like I'll put myself on hold. So I put my little hold button. 24 hours later, I get a phone call, 703 area code, which I didn't realize at the time was important, but that's the Langley, Virginia area code. And, uh, and on the other end of the line, somebody, some lady is like, Hey, are you Andrew Bustamante? Or are you Andrew Gregg? My name before CIA. Are you Andrew Gregg? Uh, we saw your application for the Peace Corps. We think that you're qualified for other jobs in national security. Would you be interested in an interview? So sure. And that's how it started. And then from there, I got a FedEx overnight ticket, FedEx overnight hotel reservation, FedEx overnight car rental, went up to Langley, Virginia, Washington, DC, and found out that the national security element that was interested in me was actually CIA. So
Speaker 2
it was quick. I've had a few agency guys on here, and it was a long drawn out process for all of them. It sounds like yours was pretty fast tracked.
Speaker 1
The first interview, once you're in the application process, that shit takes forever. Right. So I would say from the time that I applied to the time that I got the phone call was less than 72 hours, less than 30 days before I got all the FedEx stuff for my appointment. And then took off and had my first interview. And yeah, from that point, I was still lightning fast compared to most CIA officers from, from first interview to last to actual orientation. I was about nine months where most people are 18 to 24, but it was because I didn't have any of that clearance time. My clearance was already locked in place. And I was, you know, a Brown kid from the air force academy i'd only ever had one job and that's the air force outside of being a bus boy in a fucking you know golf shack but uh not
Speaker 2
a lot of background check to do and
Speaker 1
everything was already on air force records so finding out about me was quick yeah
Speaker 2
that's cool you said uh your your name used to be greg like they changed it So when I married
Speaker 1
at the Air Force Academy, I took my wife. I'm sorry. When I married at the CIA, I took my wife's family name. Oh, really? And I took my wife's family name for two reasons. One, I wanted to honor her dad. My wife comes from a Latino family. And her family name was going to die with her father because he had two daughters and he was the last of his family name. So the name was going to disappear. So when I met my wife, she made it very clear like, hey, I've got to protect my father's name. So I'm going to carry my father's name and I'll hyphenate or whatever else. Well, I carry the last name of a guy I never met. My stepdad didn't give me his name. My mom didn't give me my stepdad's name. So I grew up Andrew Gregg in a family full of people named something else. I had no connection to my names at all. So when I decided to get married, I actually called my father-in my future father-in to ask permission to marry his daughter and then to also ask permission to change my name, to take his family name so that we could try to perpetuate the family name Bustamante. I
Speaker 2
would hope that he was uh that he responded well to that like he was yeah he was touched. Yeah that's really cool.
Speaker 1
Yeah and that's and then the same thing happened so then I told my wife when I proposed to her and she said yes thankfully I was like I'm going to take your last name and she went she loved it and then we went to the agency and told the agency we were getting married and they were bummed out because it's they hate it when you get married because you put something else ahead of the agency but then when they heard i was a field operator when they heard i wanted to change my name and go through the legal process of changing my name then they got excited because that further buried my my record
Speaker 2
yeah wow that's cool, man. Uh, and it's good for the kids cause it's old. And
Speaker 1
now we have a son. Yeah. So now my, what, what would have been the end of the Bustamante family line literally plays with his grandson and my son who's only 11 years old is already adamant that he wants kids. He's already like, that's awesome. I love being a kid. I can't wait to have my own kids. And, you know,
Speaker 2
so. That's super cool. The CIA path, expectation versus reality. So great question. I didn't know what to expect because
Speaker 1
it all came from media. But I did have certain expectations. I expected high speed tech. I expected organization. I expected lack of politics, a focus on the mission. I expected kind of like elite stuff. Yeah. Right. It was not that it was people packing their lunch in Target and Walmart lunch bags. It was people in white Velcro tennis shoes. It was 50 to 75% private contractors. It was a bunch of politics. It was a bunch of like manipulation. It was broken processes and government inefficiency and bureaucracy and, and fucking fiefdom building right between people who were trying to compete up the ladder. It was, it was discouraging to say the least, but there was a lot of, there were pockets of amazing people doing amazing things, bullshit free. Um, and I really, really appreciated that. And I was fortunate enough that by the time that I had to make my, my choice between engaging in the politics and engaging in all the fucking ridiculousness, my wife and I had already decided we were going to to leave. Yeah.
Speaker 2
What is the CIA good at? That
Speaker 1
has become a very good and relevant question. Tough question. It's a tough question right now. So, so without a doubt, CIA is good at creating a finished analytical product from all source intelligence. That is what the Central Intelligence Agency does. They own anything. Yeah. They're supposed to be the repository for all source intelligence, which means Navy intelligence, Air Force intelligence, National Security Agency, geospatial, you know, DNI, FBI, all these groups collect intelligence all the time. And they're supposed to send their raw intelligence to the Central Intelligence Agency, where our directorate of analytics or a directorate of analysis takes all that all-source intelligence and vets it, prioritizes it, ranks it, and narrates it into the president's daily brief, which is the daily intelligence briefing for the president. That's what CIA is supposed to do. That's their primary mission. They do that very well. The problem is garbage in, garbage out. Bad intelligence comes in, bad intelligence goes out. So we always have to struggle with getting better intelligence. In addition to that, CIA also has the mission to collect human intelligence, which is also known as human. So that's the intelligence of last resort. When you can't hack a computer system, when you can't fly a drone, when you can't listen to signals intelligence, you have to do something. So you go and try and get a human source. CIA used to be very good at human sources, but between policy, bureaucracy, and funding, especially since the first Trump presidency, when they spent all their time and effort accusing Trump of being a Russian collaborator, you know, he pulled funding, he stopped using CIA. And then for four years, they basically got, you know, washed to the wayside. People left in mass, the Biden administration took over, people kind of tried to stick around, but then they made CIA more of like a hiring clearinghouse for DEI and whatever else. So who knows what that place looks like now. But from what I understand from the scuttlebutt from my peers is that we're a shell of what we used to be in terms of capability and dedication to the mission. There's still pockets of people doing really good work, but our human operational capability is hurting. Is it fixable, do you think? I think everything's fixable. Yeah. Right? I think everything's fixable. I think CIA, what CIA does well and has always done well is they recruit very, very well. Yeah. The people who come in the door there should fucking be there. Yeah. They're smart. They're dedicated. They break the rules. They have zero problem lying to get what they want. And what they want is national security. So they do hire very, very well. It's just a matter of letting the people they hire do their job. And that's a political game. When you've got a group chief or a senior group chief or division chief that just cuts off the ability for a low-level operator to do what they need to do, of course you're not going to get the intel. And ultimately that low-level operator is only going to hit their head against the wall for so long before they say, fuck it, punch out and go join Google. And that's what CIA has to deal with now.
Speaker 2
Did you find a slant politically in any of your superiors?
Speaker 1
Yes, but what I will say is this, the slant changes. The slant changes according to whoever's in the office. So the chief executive, the CIA falls under the executive branch. So the head of the CIA is a political appointee directed by the president who is the chief executive. So when you have a liberal president, everybody who has a liberal political base ends up promoting up the chain. And then when you have a conservative president, the opposite happens. So you see this constant back and forth, or at least I did back in 2007 to 2010. But it started to change and become more volatile with the Obama years. Because when Obama was president, he executed more covert action than any previous president, more executive orders than any previous president. He really used the office of the executive in a way that people hadn't seen before. He was also the first one to really ramrod unpopular policy through when the Democratic Party had control of the House and the Senate. That's how we got Obamacare, right? And it set a precedent for every president since then. That was exactly what was happening at CIA too. So what we saw was not just a back and forth switch between, you know, some conservative leaders and some liberal leaders. Instead, we saw like a big blue wave come through CIA. And what that meant was that everybody who was politically blue kind of went up the food chain and everybody who was politically red had to sit there and wonder when is it going to be our chance or do we just leave now? Yeah.
Speaker 2
So, I mean, it sounds like the, that's kind of the beginning. That was the beginning of the end as far as the capability, capacity, competency of, of the organization. It seems like the FBI kind of suffered from that as well,
Speaker 1
no? Exactly, yeah. I would say the beginning of the end, I mean, it had to have happened earlier than when we saw it. But for sure, for sure, when Trump took office and CIA spent all of its time accusing him of, you know, being a Russian agent by then minus probably 18 months. That must've been when the beginning of the end really started, but it wasn't a surprise to me knowing that it's such a political, it's not political person to person. Leadership is appointed. So that's where the politics really come into play. Yeah. What did you do there? So my formal title was a staff operations officer or what's called a SOO, S-O And that is a person who is essentially a mission planner for field operations collections. My wife was a targeting officer. Both of us fell under the National Clandestine Service, the NCS, which is now known as the director of operations, which is one of the five directorates that are there. So I spent my time building, executing, organizing, administrating operations, both from Langley and in the field. Sometimes they were what we call unilateral operations, which are operations that we execute as CIA without any partners. Sometimes they were joint operations, which means operations that we execute with foreign partners. Sometimes they were joint military operations, which are military operations that we execute with U.S. military personnel.
Speaker 2
How much autonomy do you have as the supervisor that's kind of directing these things to make changes, decisions on the fly, et cetera? It's
Speaker 1
a good question. When you are the operator in the field, you have a lot of autonomy in the moment, but you always know that your head is on chopping block when you go back to justify the decisions that
Speaker 2
you made. Yeah, so the big mish is the big mish, the little intangibles you can wiggle.
Speaker 1
Correct, as long as you can justify them. And I mean, sometimes you have to fucking argue stupid shit, right? Like, why did you spend $200 on this dinner instead of $75 on this dinner? So sometimes the stuff is stupid. Um, but at the same time, I mean, sometimes the decision you make on the fly is what makes for mission success or mission failure, or two out of five objectives are successful. Three out of five objectives are a miss. Like, you know, that's the stuff that happens on the fly. But for sure, when you're in the, in the office, in the front office or the back office, when you're in the office, you don't get any autonomy. Like you, all you can do is ask for permission because you're in the office. So even though you know that what they need is a, you know, a hundred thousand dollar cash that has to get out tonight. You still have to ask before you send the infusion. In fact, one of the big reasons I left CIA when I left CIA, I was in special activities division, Air Branch, as a full performance, above the bell curve kind of performer. And it was 2013, maybe, no, it was 2014. And I was a middle level manager. I had a supervisor above me. And then the person above my supervisor was the SAD director, special activities director. That's where all of our Navy SEALs, Green Berets, they all end up in special activities division and uh the we were supporting a counter-terrorism operation through remote drone actions in an active zone of hostility and the uh my supervisor left for the day went to go pick up his son or his child or something he was gone for the day and we got an emergency request in from the unit controlling the drones. And they were controlling the drones from a covert US location. And they asked for a funding infusion, they needed a funding infusion in order to be able to execute a, you know, some sort of order or payment that had to be done that night, before the next day in order to keep the birds in the air. I had nobody to ask my direct supervisor was gone. It was, it was a funding request that was within tolerances of my approval authority, right? But my supervisor was gone. So I opted to approve the funding request.
Speaker 2
Can you say how much it was for?
Speaker 1
Six figures. Yeah. It was less than a million dollars. So I approved the funding request. It sat in the inbox for my supervisor. So I bypassed the inbox, called the budget and finance people myself, who I had built a relationship with, called the budget and finance people, said, hey, I have a request that needs to be approved tonight, five o'clock Eastern time. It needs to be approved tonight so that we can keep missions going tomorrow, mission critical funding decision. And they were like, okay, well, we need a supervisor signature. And I was like, my supervisor's out for the day. I'm exercising my authority according to this bylaw or whatever. Right. So one thing leads to another money gets sent. Mission continues. Mission success, right? You see the hot spark in the ultra, in the ultra violet spectrum, bad guys blow up, good guys sweep in, everything is a success. The next day I get called into the office, not by my supervisor, but my director above him who reads me the riot act about how I should have never approved that funding request without getting his permission first. I should have never called the head of budget and finance. It's not my job to work with the fucking penny pushers. It's my job to work with the operators. And like, I should have called the front office and gotten a meeting immediately with the director of SAD to get this thing approved. And of course I'm sitting there and they don't want to hear an argument. It's I'm right back to the military again. It's all yes, sir. No, sir. No excuse, sir. Right. That's what they're expecting. I'm sitting and I'm like, I had the authority to make the decision. It's not a front office matter, right? Like there's a very clear threshold of when I'm supposed to interrupt your workday. This was not that matter. It just so happens that this guy had a beef with the head of budget and finance. So he was fucking chewing me out because he had a beef with budget and finance. So he felt like my loyalty was misaligned. Like, you know, army, army ranger guy. So I was just like, I mean, that was, that was the conversation where I was like, I did the right thing. I followed the rules. There was mission success. Like, this is what I'm fucking trained and hired to do. And I'm still getting my ass chewed out. And when you get your ass chewed out in CIA, it's just like getting your ass down in the military. It's not over with the chew out. You know that you're on the fucking blacklist for at least six months, right? You're going to miss the promotion. You're not going to get the good assignments. You're going to get all the late shifts. Like it sucks. What they didn't know is I had already asked myself the question of, this what I want for my family? When I got that lecture about loyalty and my loyalty to the director, instead of my loyalty to the agency and the mission, it was clear that I was in the wrong place. How is there
Speaker 2
not a protocol for your supervisor is out that you still have the ability to get ahold of him in the fucking CIA. There is a protocol for that. But I
Speaker 1
think the bigger protocol is to call from the building to an external undercover officer creates a connection. Oh, I got you. Right. So we always have to be cognizant of our cover and our cover reasons for contacting, which is why we also have a protocol for when you don't have to call somebody in. Right. Because it's like a three step process call from a, to make a classified line, a covert line obfuscated to an open line. And then they have to call a different number to get to another open line that can make yourself a coded line. And it's just a pain in the ass. I
Speaker 2
mean, can you just like send them a DM on Instagram? Like you send him a shamrock, he sends an eggplant back and that means it's good. That
Speaker 1
would be badass. Hopefully they're doing that kind of thing now right i
Speaker 2
mean to me that would make more sense hashtag
Speaker 2
or like the um it's like the way people you know terrorists communicate playing fucking video games you know it's like something that hiding in plain sight is probably smarter than trying to be ultra protective of it and
Speaker 1
well that's what i mean what you're really talking about there is uh is the fact that our bureaucracy keeps us from being nimble. Yeah. When you're a fucking, you know, rock pounder, you know, terrorist jihadi raghead, you can do whatever you want to do. You can come up with innovative ways to do shit because there's no bureaucracy. So the eggplant shamrock works, but when you're in fucking the government, you have to write a white paper about why shamrock and eggplant. And then you have to explain how you're going to guarantee that somebody doesn't accidentally fat finger unicorn instead of shamrock. And it's just like, oh, it's a pain. It's a fucking mess.
Speaker 2
Is there a mission that you were in charge of that you're most proud of that you can talk about? I mean, how many of them or any of them, how much can you talk about some of the things that you've done?
Speaker 1
Yeah, so the secrecy agreement that we sign is a secrecy agreement that's actually quite narrow. People don't realize how narrow the lifetime secrecy agreement is for CIA. But what it applies to is our own personal operational histories. So we can't disclose the details of our personal operational histories without written approval of CIA. I am trying to get that. I've been trying since 2001 to get that. We have a book that we've been trying to publish. We have a book that's already approved, already purchased. Everything is lined up and ready to go. We were right on the cusp of getting CIA approval to publish about a year and a half ago. And then the geopolitical nature of the world changed and CIA came back and, and, um, removed our ability to publish. So we're, we're going through the process now of, do we have to ask them nicely or do we have to go to court to get CIA to release a document that they already said once was, uh, was unclassified. So
Speaker 2
I guess of what you can share, is there something that you're most proud of that you can talk about at all?
Speaker 1
So in an effort to try to answer with something, right? There are absolutely missions I'm very proud of. The mission that I'm the most proud of was the last joint tandem operation I did with my wife. We had a chance to operate in Asia, building something that had never been built before in order to take on a localized threat that I'm not allowed to explain. But anybody that understands geopolitics probably understand it. We had to build a new process for taking on a rising near peer competitor out of an Asian location. And we were sent on this op and it was clear we were intended to fail. Like it was clear that it was an impossible task. We were told it was an impossible task by our supervisors. And we went out there thinking we were going to fail also just being like, Hey, this is hell of a sunset tour. We're going to fail here and then bounce to corporate America. But instead it worked. Our plan worked. We ended up building resources and momentum at a grassroots level with other field officers who wanted to get on board. And we ended up creating a process that then permeated the entire CIA. And it's why I want to tell the story, right? It's why I want the book to come out. It's why I want CIA to get out of the way and let us tell people about the heroic efforts of other CIA officers. All my wife and I did was went out there and said yes to a stupid idea. It was a bunch of other people who made the shit happen, right? So it's not even like one of those, it's not a CIA story about how the CIA is broken and fucked up. It's not a story about how we're the best thing since sliced bread. And those are what most CIA books are. Instead, we're just trying to tell a story about real American heroes doing real American shit. But unfortunately we don't get to talk about it. Yeah.