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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:56 - CIA and the President
12:34 - War in Ukraine
53:30 - Most powerful intelligence agencies
1:00:40 - David Petraeus
1:10:17 - Undercover disguises
1:23:16 - Human nature
1:32:36 - CIA recruitment process
1:49:19 - CIA and secrecy
1:55:52 - Cyber security
2:06:34 - Sexpionage
2:13:08 - Private intelligence
2:26:35 - NSA and Snowden
2:54:34 - Conspiracy theories
3:15:42 - CIA and UFOs
3:30:27 - Spy tricks
3:47:10 - Advice for young people

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Mossad has no qualms doing what it takes to ensure the survival of every Israeli citizen around the world.

Most other countries will stop at some point, but Mossad doesn't do that.

The following is a conversation with Andrew Bustamante, former CIA covert intelligence officer and US Air Force combat veteran, including the job of operational targeting, encrypted communications and launch operations for 200 nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Andrew's over 7 years as a CIA spy have given him a skillset and a perspective on the world that is fascinating to explore.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Andrew Bustamante.

The Central Intelligence Agency was formed almost 75 years ago.

The mission of the CIA is to collect intelligence from around the world that supports a national security mission, and be the central repository for all other intelligence agencies so that it's 1 collective source where all intelligence can be synthesized and then passed forward to the decision makers.

That doesn't include domestic intelligence.

It's primarily looking outward, outside the United States.

Correct, CIA is the foreign intelligence collection king spoke, if you will.

FBI does domestic, and then Department of Homeland Security does domestic.

Law enforcement essentially handles all things domestic.

Intelligence is not law enforcement, So we technically cannot work inside the United States.

Is there clear lines to be drawn between, like you just said, the FBI, CAA, FBI, and the other US intelligence agencies, like the DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Homeland Security, NSA, National Security Agency, and there's a list.

There's a list of about 33 different intelligence organizations.

So like the Army, the Navy has all the different organizations have their own intelligence groups.

So is there clear lines here to be drawn, or is the CIA the giant integrator of all of these?

So yes, there are absolutely lines, and more so than the lines, there are lines that divide what our primary mission is.

That's 1 of the benefits and the superpowers of the United States, is we prioritize everything.

So different intelligence organizations are prioritized to collect certain types of intelligence.

And then within the confines of how they collect, they're also given unique authorities.

Authorities are a term that's directed by the executive branch.

Different agencies have different authorities to execute missions in different ways.

FBI can't execute the same way CIA executes, and CIA can't execute the same way NGA executes.

But then at the end, excuse me, when it's all collected, then yes, CIA still acts as a final synthesizing repository to create what's known as the President's Daily Brief, the PDB.

The only way CIA can create the PDB is by being the single source of all source intelligence from around the IC, the intelligence community, which are those 30-some-odd and always changing organizations that are sponsored for intelligence operations.

What does the PDB, the President's Daily Brief, look like, how long is it, what does it contain?

So first of all, it looks like the most expensive book report you can ever imagine.

It's got its own binder, it's all very high end.

It feels important, it looks important, It's not like a cheap trapper keeper.

It's somewhere between, I would give it probably between 50 and 125 pages a day.

It's produced every day around 2 o'clock in the morning by a dedicated group of analysts and each page is essentially a short paragraph to a few paragraphs about a priority happening that affects national security from around the world.

The president rarely gets to the entire briefing in a day.

He relies on a briefer instead to prioritize what inside the briefing needs to be shared with the president.

Because some days the PDB will get briefed in 10 minutes and some days it'll be briefed over the course of 2 hours.

How much competition is there for the first page?

And so how much jockeying there is for attention?

I imagine for all the different intelligence agencies and within the CIA, there's probably different groups that are modular and they all care about different nations or different cases.

Do you understand how much competition there is for the attention, for the limited attention of the president?

You're 100% correct in how the agency and how officers and managers at the agency handle the PDB.

Everybody wants to be the first on the radar.

The thing that we're not baking into the equation is the president's interests.

The president dictates what's on the first page of his PDB and he will tell them usually the day before, I wanna see this on the first page tomorrow.

I don't wanna hear about what's happening in Mozambique.

I don't really care about what's happening in Saudi Arabia.

And regardless of whether or not those are the 3 biggest things in the world, the president's the executive, he's the 1, he's the ultimate customer, so we do what the customer says.

That has backfired in the past, if you haven't already started seeing how that could go wrong.

That has backfired in the past, but that is essentially what happens when you serve in the executive branch.

So what's the role of the director of the CIA versus the president?

So the president really leads the focus of the CIA?

The president is the commander in chief for the military, but the executive, the president is also the executive for the entirety of the intelligence community.

If you look at it like a business, the customer, the person spending the money is the president and the director is the CEO.

So if the director doesn't create what the president wants, there's going to be a new director.

That's why the director of CIA is a presidential appointed position.

Sometimes they're extremely qualified intelligence professionals.

Sometimes they're just professional politicians or soldiers that get put into that seat because the president trusts them to do what he wants them to do.

Another gaping area that causes problems, but that's still the way it is.

So you think this is a problematic configuration

It is a massive flaw in the system, Because if you're essentially appointing a director to do what you want them to do, then you're assigning a crony.

And that's what we define corruption as within the United States.

And inside the United States, we say, if you pick somebody outside of merit for any other reason other than merit, then it's cronyism or it's nepotism.

All presidential appointees are appointed on something other than merit.

So for an intelligence agency to be effective, it has to discover the truth and communicate that truth.

And maybe if you're appointing the director of that agency, you're not, they're less likely to communicate the truth to you unless the truth aligns perfectly with your desired worldview.

Well, not necessarily perfectly because there are other steps, right?

They have to be, They have to go in front of Congress and they have to have the support of multiple legislatures or legislators, but the challenge is that the shortlist of people who even get the opportunity aren't a meritorious list.

It's a shortlist based off of who the president is picking or who the would-be president is picking.

Now, I think we've proven that an intelligence organization can be extremely effective even within the flawed system.

The challenge is how much more effective could we be if we improved?

And that's, I think that's the challenge that faces a lot of the U.S.

I think that's a challenge that has resulted in what we see today when it comes to the decline of American power and American influence, the rise of foreign influence, the authoritarian powers, and a shrinking US economy, a growing Chinese economy, and it's just, we have questions, hard questions we need to ask ourselves about how we're gonna handle the future.

What aspect of that communication between the president and the CIA could be fixed to help fix the problems that you're referring to in terms of the decline of American power?

So when you talk about the president wanting to prioritize what the president cares about.

That immediately shows a break between what actually matters to the long-term success of the United States versus what benefits the short-term success of the current president.

Because any president is just a human being and has a very narrow focus.

And narrow focus is not a long-term calculation.

Exactly, what's the maximum amount of years a president can be president?

In the United States, according to our current constitution.

But they're very limited in terms of what they have to prioritize.

And then if you look at a 4 year cycle, 2 years of that is essentially preparing for the next election cycle.

So that's only 2 years of really quality attention you get from the president, who is the chief executive of all the intelligence community.

So the most important thing to them is not always the most important thing to the long-term survival of the United States.

What do you make of the hostile relationship that to me at least stands out of the presidents between Donald Trump and the CIA?

Was that a very kind of personal bickering?

I mean, is there something interesting to you about the dynamics between that particular president and that particular instantiation of the intelligence agency.

Man, there were lots of things fascinating to me about that relationship.

So let me start with the good first, because there's a lot of people who don't think there was any good.

So the good thing is we saw that the president, who's the chief customer, the executive to the CIA, when the president doesn't want to hear what CIA has to say, he's not gonna listen.

I think that's an important lesson for everyone to take home.

If the president doesn't care what you have to say, he's gonna take funding away or she will take funding away.

They're going to shut down your operations, your missions.

They're gonna kill the careers of the people working there.

For the 4 years that President Trump was the president, basically everybody at CIA, their career was put on pause.

Some people voluntarily left their career there because they found themselves working for a single customer that didn't want what they had to produce.

So for people who don't know, Donald Trump did not display significant deep interest in the output.

And then what do disinterested customers do?

They go find someone else to create their product.

And that's exactly what Donald Trump did.

And he did it through the private intelligence world, funding private intelligence companies to run their own operations that brought him the information he cared about when CIA wouldn't.

It also didn't help that CIA stepped outside of their confines, right?

CIA is supposed to collect foreign intelligence and not comment on domestic matters.

They went way outside of that when they started challenging the president, when they started questioning the results, when they started publicly claiming Russian influence, that's all something the FBI could have handled by itself, the Justice Department could have handled by itself.

CIA had no place to contribute to that conversation, and when they did, all they did was undermine the relationship they had with their primary customer.

Let me sort of focus in on this relationship between the president or the leader and the intelligence agency and look outside the United States.

It seems like authoritarian regimes or regimes throughout history, if you look at Stalin and Hitler, if you look at today with Vladimir Putin, the negative effects of power corrupting the mind of a leader manifest itself is that they start to get bad information from the intelligence agencies.

So this kind of thing that you're talking about, over time, they start hearing information they want to hear.

The agency starts producing only the kind of information they want to hear and the leader's worldview starts becoming distorted to where the propaganda they generate is also the thing that the intelligence agencies provide to them.

And so they start getting this, they start believing they're on propaganda and they start getting a distorted view of the world.

Sorry for the sort of walking through in a weird way, but I guess I wanna ask, do you think, let's look at Vladimir Putin specifically, Do you think he's getting accurate information about the world?

Do you think he knows the truth of the world, whether that's the war in Ukraine, whether that's the behavior of the other nations, in NATO, the United States in general.

It's rare that I'll talk about just thinking.

I prefer to share my assessment, why I assess things a certain way, rather than just what's my random opinion.

In my assessment, Vladimir Putin is winning.

They're winning in Ukraine, but they're also winning the battle of influence against the West.

They're winning in the face of economic sanctions.

Empirically, when you look at the math, they're winning.

So when you ask me whether or not Putin is getting good information from his intelligence services, when I look at my overall assessment of multiple data points, he must be getting good information.

I don't know how such deep cronyism, such deep corruption can possibly yield true real results.

And yet somehow there are real results happening.

So it's either excessive waste and an accidental win, or there really is a system and a process there that's functioning.

So this winning idea is very interesting.

In what way, short term and long term, is Russia winning?

Some people say there was a miscalculation of the way the invasion happened.

There was an assumption that you would be able to successfully take Kiev, you'd be able to successfully capture the east, the south, and the north of Ukraine and with what now appears to be significantly insufficient troops spread way too thin across way too large of a front.

So that seems to be like an intelligence failure.

And, and that doesn't seem to be like winning.

In another way, it doesn't seem like winning if we put aside the human cost of war.

It doesn't seem like winning because the hearts and minds of the West were completely on the side of Ukraine.

This particular leader in Volodymyr Zelensky captured the attention of the world and the hearts and minds of Europe, the West, and many other nations throughout the world, both financially in terms of military equipment and in terms of sort of social and cultural and emotional support for the independence fight of this nation.

So against that pushback, why do you think there's still kernels of winning in this on the Russian side.

And the miscalculations are not unexpected.

Anybody who's been to a military college, including the Army War College in Pennsylvania, where so many of our military leaders are brought up.

When you look at the conflict in Ukraine, it fits the exact mold of what an effective, long-term military conflict, protracted military conflict would and should look like for military dominance.

Now, did Zelensky and did the Ukrainians shock the world?

But in that, they also shocked American intelligence, which, like you said, miscalculated.

The whole world miscalculated how the Ukrainians would respond.

Putin did not move in there accidentally.

He had an assessment, he had high likelihood of a certain outcome, and that outcome did not happen.

He basically created an infiltration campaign that turned key leaders over in the first few days of the conflict.

He invaded Georgia the exact same way and it worked.

There was no reason to believe it wasn't going to work again.

So he just carried out the same campaign.

That was a miscalculation for sure on the part of Putin.

And the reason that there was no support from the West, because let's not forget, there is no support.

There is nothing other than the Lend-Lease Act, which is putting Ukraine in massive debt right now to the West.

That's the only form of support they're getting from NATO or the United States.

So if somebody believed Ukraine would win, if somebody believed Ukraine had a chance, they would have gotten more material support than just debt.

And we can jump into that anytime you want to, but the whole world miscalculated.

Everybody thought Russia was gonna win in 14 days.

I said that they would win in 14 days because that was the predominant calculation.

Once the first invasion didn't work, then The military does what professional militaries do, man.

They reevaluate, they reorganize leaders, and then they take a new approach.

The first 2 campaigns against Ukraine did not work the way they were supposed to work.

The third has worked exactly like it's supposed to work.

You don't need hearts and minds to win Ukraine.

yeah, what you need is control of natural resources, which they're taking in the East, and you need access to the heartbeat, the blood flow of food and money into the country, which they're taking in the South.

The fact that Ukraine had to go to the negotiation table with Russia and Turkey in order to get exports out of the Black Sea approved again demonstrates just how much Ukraine is losing.

The aggressor had a seat at the negotiation table to allow Ukraine the ability to even export 1 of its top exports?

If Russia would have said no, then they would not have had that.

Russia has, that's like someone holding your throat.

It's like somebody holding your jugular vein and saying, if you don't do what I tell you to do, then I'm not gonna let you breathe.

I'm not gonna let blood flow to your brain.

So do you think it's possible that Russia takes the south of Ukraine, it takes, so starting from Mariupol, the Kherson region...

I believe all of that will happen before the fall.

Before winter hits Europe, NATO wants, Germany needs to be able to have sanctions lifted so they can tap into Russian power.

There's no way they can have those sanctions lifted unless Russia wins.

And Russia also knows that all of Europe, all of NATO is the true people feeling the pain of the war outside of Ukraine are the NATO countries because they're so heavily reliant on Russia.

And as they have supported American sanctions against Russia their people feel the pain.

Economically, their people feel the pain.

Because without Russian gas, their people are gonna freeze to death.

The game of war isn't played just, it isn't even played majoritively by the people who are fighting.

The game of war is played by everyone else.

It's an economic game, it's not a military game.

I was on the front in the Herson region, this very area that you're referring to, and I spoke to a lot of people and those, the morale is incredibly high And I don't think the people in that region, soldiers, volunteer soldiers, civilians, are going to give up that land without dying.

I mean, in order to take Odessa, would require huge amount of artillery and slaughter of civilians, essentially.

They're not gonna use artillery in Odessa because Odessa's too important to Russian culture.

It's going to be clearing of streets, clearing of buildings, person by person, troop by troop.

It'll be a lot like what it was in Margol.

Because they can't afford to just do bombing raids because they're gonna destroy cultural significant architecture that's just too important to the Russian culture.

And that's gonna demoralize their own Russian people.

I have to do a lot of thinking to try to understand what I even feel, I don't know.

But in terms of information, the thing that the soldiers are saying, the Russian soldiers are saying, the thing the Russian soldiers really believe is that they're freeing, they're liberating the Ukrainian people from Nazis.

Because I visited Ukraine, I spoke to over 100, probably a couple hundred Ukrainian people from different walks of life.

It feels like the Russian soldiers at least are under a cloud of propaganda.

They're not operating on a clear view of the whole world.

And given all that, I just don't see Russia taking the South without committing war crimes.

And if Vladimir Putin is aware of what's happening in terms of the treatment of civilians, I don't see him pushing forward all the way to take the South.

Because that's not going to be effective strategy for him to win the hearts and minds of his people.

Autocracies don't need to win hearts and minds.

That's a staunchly democratic point of view.

Hearts and minds mean very little to people who understand core basic needs and true power.

You don't see Xi Jinping worrying about hearts and minds in China.

You don't see it in North Korea, you don't see it in Congo, you don't see it in most of the world.

In reality, what people need is food, water, power.

They need income to be able to secure a lifestyle.

I am not in any way, shape, or form saying that my assessment on this is enriching or enlightening or hopeful.

It's just calculatable empirical evidence.

If Putin loses in Ukraine, the losses, the influential losses, the economic losses, the lives lost, the power lost is too great.

So it is better for him to push and push and push through war crimes, through everything else.

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Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy | Lex Fridman Podcast #310