CIA Spy on Executed Mossad Spies, Dad's Murder & Infiltrating #1 Enemy | Andrew Bustamante • 334
Julian Dorey · 9 Sep 2025 · 3h 49m
Guest: Andrew Bustamante · Host: Joey Def, Julian Dorey
A former CIA officer returns for another long conversation, opening with a staged kidnapping bit before settling into a detailed discussion of his new memoir about a covert operation in a hostile country he calls Falcon. He explains why he wrote the book, the legal fight with the agency over what could be published, and why professional espionage looks nothing like the movies. He walks through failing the final exercise at the farm, being reassigned to a support role while his wife rose quickly as a targeter, and how the two of them eventually built a compartmentalized team structure designed to protect a source while also flushing out a suspected mole inside CIA leadership. He describes recruiting a young Falconian intelligence contact through a colleague, running procurement and dead-drop logistics under cover as a business traveler, and the surveillance-detection tradecraft he used on every trip, including using an arcade to control his exposure. The back half of the conversation covers the moment he spotted the same surveillance figure twice in one day, the tense hours afterward waiting to see if he'd be detained, his eventual interrogation at a border crossing, and how that operational model was later adopted more broadly inside the agency. Interwoven throughout are personal stories about his father's murder, his mother's remarriage, and how those experiences shaped his career choices, along with commentary on privacy, government power, and why he plans to leave the US eventually.
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What comes up
Timestamps link into the episode on YouTube.
- Staged kidnapping intro
- Legal fight to publish the book
- Why professional espionage isn't like James Bond
- Compartmentalization and CIA's broken evaluation system
- Father's murder and family background
- Debate over right to privacy and government power
- Failing the final farm exercise
- Reassignment and wife outpacing his career
- Building the cell model to catch a mole
- Surveillance detection and the arcade tactic
- Getting made and the border interrogation
- Aftermath, the mole, and CIA reorganization
Said on this episode
Quoted from the auto-generated transcript, which mishears names and technical terms. podcite.com reports what a show said; it does not endorse or fact-check it.
“Professional intelligence, it's subtle, it's nuanced, it's invisible.”
“There's actually so much about that story that is truly classified that really truly couldn't be shared.”
“Nobody knows what any fuckingbody else is doing. The people that you actually discover did something significant inside CIA only happens when they reach senior echelons.”
“I am the CIA guy with the hair. I get approached a dozen times a day.”