- 2 days ago
Most people think being an undercover agent is glamorous. The reality is something darker, lonelier, and far more permanent than any movie shows you.
Every episode takes a lot of research and writing. Drop your next video idea in the comments. I read them all.
Subscribe so you don't miss the next one! 🔔
VIDEO TOPICS/TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 The Recruit
2:24 The Trainee
4:59 The Case Officer
7:12 The Deep Cover Officer
10:04 The Singleton
12:39 The Chief Of Operations
14:52 The Chief Of Station
18:07 The Division Chief
20:30 The Deputy Director
23:04 The Legend
Every episode takes a lot of research and writing. Drop your next video idea in the comments. I read them all.
Subscribe so you don't miss the next one! 🔔
VIDEO TOPICS/TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 The Recruit
2:24 The Trainee
4:59 The Case Officer
7:12 The Deep Cover Officer
10:04 The Singleton
12:39 The Chief Of Operations
14:52 The Chief Of Station
18:07 The Division Chief
20:30 The Deputy Director
23:04 The Legend
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Level 1. The Recruit.
00:02You walk into a federal building in a city you've never been to before.
00:05The application took nine months to process.
00:08The background check took even longer than that.
00:11They interviewed your high school teachers.
00:13They interviewed your college roommates.
00:15They interviewed the woman you dated for six months four years ago.
00:18They talked to neighbors you never knew you had.
00:21They pulled your tax returns going back a decade.
00:24They looked at every credit card statement.
00:26They looked at every bank deposit.
00:28They looked at every gap in your employment history.
00:31They wanted to know about the trip to Mexico when you were 22.
00:35They wanted to know about the marijuana you tried in college.
00:38They wanted to know about the parking ticket you forgot to pay in 2017.
00:43By the time you sat down for the polygraph,
00:45they knew you better than your own family did.
00:48You sat in a small room with a man named David who didn't tell you his last name.
00:53He asked you the same questions in 12 different ways.
00:56Have you ever sold drugs?
00:58Have you ever been blackmailed?
00:59Have you ever lied on a government form?
01:02Have you ever had contact with a foreign intelligence service?
01:05The machine measured your heart rate and your breathing,
01:08and the sweat on your fingertips.
01:10He told you to relax.
01:12You couldn't relax.
01:13Nobody can relax during a polygraph.
01:16That's the point.
01:16They want to see how you respond under pressure.
01:20Pressure is the only environment you'll ever work in.
01:23Three months later, a letter arrives at your mother's house because you don't have a permanent address yet.
01:28The letter is plain white.
01:30There is no return address.
01:32Inside is a phone number and a date and the name of a hotel in Northern Virginia.
01:37You show up on the date.
01:39A woman meets you in the lobby.
01:41She doesn't introduce herself.
01:43She walks you to a conference room on the seventh floor.
01:46There are four people inside.
01:48They tell you that you've been selected.
01:50They tell you that everything from this point forward is classified.
01:54They tell you that you can never speak about this work to anyone.
01:58Not your parents.
01:59Not your future spouse.
02:01Not your children.
02:02You sign the papers.
02:04You don't read most of them.
02:05You couldn't understand them even if you did.
02:08You are now the property of the United States government in a way civilians will never comprehend.
02:13You walk out of the building feeling lighter and heavier at the same time.
02:17You don't know how to explain that feeling.
02:20You won't be able to explain it to anyone for the rest of your life.
02:24Level 2.
02:25The Trainee.
02:26They send you to a facility in rural Virginia.
02:29The facility doesn't show up on any map.
02:31The road leading to it doesn't appear on GPS.
02:34You're given a new name to use during training.
02:37Not your real name.
02:38Not yet your operational name.
02:40Just a placeholder.
02:42The instructors call you by it.
02:44The other trainees call you by it.
02:46After three weeks, you stop responding to your real name even when you're alone.
02:50The training lasts 18 months.
02:52The first six months are classroom work.
02:55You sit in windowless rooms learning the architecture of foreign intelligence services.
02:59You memorize organizational charts of the Russian SVR.
03:03You memorize the structure of the Chinese Ministry of State Security.
03:06You memorize the layers of the Iranian VVAC.
03:09You learn the histories of every major espionage case of the last 50 years.
03:13You study the mistakes that got officers killed.
03:16You study the techniques that kept officers alive.
03:19You learn about brush passes and dead drops and signal sites.
03:23You learn about counter surveillance and surveillance detection routes.
03:26You learn that a trip to the grocery store can take four hours when you're being followed.
03:30You need to make sure you're not being followed.
03:33The next six months are physical.
03:35You run until you vomit.
03:37You fight on mats with instructors who don't pull punches.
03:40You learn how to break a man's arm in three different ways.
03:43You learn how to drive a car backwards through an alley at 50 miles per hour.
03:47You learn how to escape from handcuffs.
03:49You learn how to escape from zip ties and rope and duct tape.
03:52You learn how to pick a lock with a paper clip.
03:55The final six months are operational.
03:57They run you through scenarios.
03:59You walk into a hotel bar in Pittsburgh, and you have to recruit a man you've never met.
04:04The man is an instructor playing a role.
04:07He's been in the field for 25 years.
04:09He breaks you in four minutes.
04:11They run you through it again.
04:13He breaks you in six minutes.
04:15They run you through it again.
04:17After 30 attempts, you finally last an hour.
04:19They tell you that's good enough for now.
04:21The washout rate is 35%.
04:24Some people leave because they can't handle the deception.
04:27Some people leave because they fail too many tests.
04:30Some people leave because they realize the person they're becoming is not someone they want to be.
04:35You stay.
04:36You don't know exactly why.
04:38Maybe stubbornness.
04:40Maybe ambition.
04:41Maybe something darker that you don't want to examine too closely.
04:45The graduation ceremony lasts 20 minutes.
04:48There are no family members in the audience.
04:50There is no audience at all.
04:51You receive a folder with your first assignment.
04:54You read it twice.
04:56You burn it before you leave the room.
04:58Level 3.
04:59The Case Officer
05:01Your first assignment is a city in Eastern Europe.
05:04Officially, you work for the State Department.
05:07Officially, you are a junior political officer.
05:09You attend receptions and write cables about local elections.
05:14Unofficially, you are running operations against three foreign intelligence services.
05:19You are recruiting assets inside the host government.
05:21You spend your days at the embassy doing your cover job.
05:25You read the local newspapers.
05:27You meet with academics.
05:28You write reports about parliamentary debates.
05:31The reports are real.
05:33The cover has to be airtight.
05:34If anyone ever investigates you, they will find a real diplomat doing real diplomatic work.
05:40Your nights are different.
05:41You leave your apartment at 9 in the evening wearing one outfit.
05:44You change in a bathroom at a restaurant.
05:47You change again in the back room of a bar where you have an arrangement with the owner.
05:51You walk for two hours through the city making sure nobody is following you.
05:55You take buses and trams.
05:57You double back through alleys.
05:59You watch reflections in shop windows.
06:01By the time you arrive at the meeting site, you have eliminated any possibility that you brought a tail.
06:07The asset is a man who works for the foreign ministry.
06:10He has been giving you documents for eight months.
06:13He thinks you're working for a different country.
06:15The legend you built for him says you're with German intelligence.
06:18He prefers it that way.
06:20He tells himself he's helping the Europeans, not the Americans.
06:23The distinction matters to him.
06:25You let him believe it.
06:27The truth would make him stop.
06:28You can't afford for him to stop.
06:30You meet him for 22 minutes.
06:32He hands you a thumb drive.
06:34You hand him an envelope.
06:36The envelope contains 3,000 euros.
06:38He buys his daughter's medical treatment with the money you give him.
06:41She has a heart condition.
06:43The local healthcare system can't handle it.
06:45He tells himself he's a good father, not a traitor.
06:49You agree with him out loud.
06:50You don't know what you think privately.
06:52You don't have time to think privately anymore.
06:55You file your report when you get home.
06:57The cable goes out at 3 in the morning.
06:59By breakfast, analysts and Langley are reading what your asset risked his life to provide.
07:04You receive a commendation in your file.
07:07You will never see the file.
07:09You will never see the commendation either.
07:11Level 4.
07:12The deep cover officer.
07:14They pull you out of official cover after three years.
07:18Your face is starting to be recognized.
07:20The local services have begun building files on every American diplomat.
07:25They suspect you.
07:27They can't prove anything yet.
07:28The agency decides to retire that identity and build you a new one.
07:34The new identity has nothing to do with the United States government.
07:37You are a businessman now.
07:40You work for a logistics company headquartered in Dubai.
07:44The company is real.
07:45It has employees and offices and clients.
07:48It has tax records going back 11 years.
07:52It is also a CIA front.
07:55Only six people in the world know that.
07:57The other employees are real businessmen who have no idea what's happening in the back office.
08:03You travel constantly.
08:06You go to countries where the United States has no diplomatic presence.
08:10You go to countries where being identified as American would mean immediate arrest or worse.
08:16You meet people that no embassy officer could ever meet.
08:20You sit in hotel suites in Damascus and Tehran and Caracas.
08:24You listen to men explain their countries to you.
08:27You take mental notes that you will write up later in coded language.
08:32You transmit those notes through encrypted channels.
08:35The handlers receiving them are people you have not seen in person in over 18 months.
08:41The loneliness is different from anything you experienced as a junior officer.
08:46As a junior officer, you had colleagues.
08:49You had an embassy.
08:50You could walk into the secure room and complain about your day to people who understood.
08:56Now, you have nobody.
08:58Your cover wife is not your real wife.
09:01She is another officer playing a role.
09:04You like her.
09:05You may even love her in some way.
09:07But you can never be honest with her about anything that matters.
09:11Your neighbors think you sell shipping insurance.
09:14Your in-laws think you're a boring man who travels too much for work.
09:18Your real parents have not heard your real voice in four years.
09:24You call them on holidays from a sanitized line.
09:27You tell them you're doing well.
09:29You tell them work is fine.
09:31You tell them you'll visit soon.
09:34You haven't visited in six years.
09:36You won't visit for at least two more.
09:40The cover identity you wear becomes more real to you than the person you used to be.
09:45Sometimes you forget which name your mother gave you.
09:49That scares you more than any operation ever has.
09:53You write your real name on a piece of paper one night just to remember the shape of it.
09:58You burn the paper afterward.
10:00You always burn everything afterward.
10:03Level 5.
10:04The Singleton
10:06The agency has a small group of officers who don't fit into any normal program.
10:11They don't work out of stations.
10:12They don't have handlers in the traditional sense.
10:15They operate alone, often for years at a time.
10:18They go to places where having any backup at all would compromise the mission.
10:22You become one of them.
10:24They give you a target.
10:26The target is a senior official in a country that is not officially an enemy of the United States.
10:30It is also not officially a friend.
10:33The official has access to information that the agency wants very badly.
10:38Nobody has been able to get close to him in seven years.
10:41They tell you to figure it out.
10:43They give you a budget and a timeline.
10:45The timeline is open-ended.
10:47The budget is not.
10:48They tell you to disappear.
10:50You disappear.
10:52You spend four months building a new identity from scratch in a third country.
10:56You buy a small business that gives you a reason to travel to the target country regularly.
11:01You learn the language to the point that locals assume you grew up there.
11:04You build relationships with people who orbit the target.
11:07His secretary's brother.
11:09His tennis coach.
11:10The owner of the restaurant where he eats lunch every Thursday.
11:14You don't approach the target directly for 14 months.
11:17When you finally do, the meeting feels like an accident to him.
11:21You sit at the bar next to him and you make a comment about the soccer match on the television.
11:25He responds.
11:26You have a 12-minute conversation about midfielders.
11:30You don't see him again for six weeks.
11:32The next meeting is also accidental.
11:34The third meeting is also accidental.
11:37By the eighth meeting, he greets you by name.
11:40By the 15th, you are friends.
11:42By the 30th, he is telling you things he has not told his own wife.
11:46The asset he becomes will produce intelligence for six years.
11:50He will never know you are American.
11:52He will die thinking he was helping a friend.
11:55You will attend his funeral under your cover identity.
11:58You will weep at the graveside.
12:00The tears will be real.
12:01You loved him in some way.
12:03You also got him killed by giving him things to do that exposed him.
12:07Both things are true at the same time.
12:09You learn to hold contradictions like that.
12:12You learn that holding them is the only way to survive in this work.
12:16You go home that night to your hotel room.
12:18You drink a glass of scotch.
12:20You stare at the ceiling for three hours.
12:22You don't sleep.
12:23You don't cry.
12:25You don't do anything.
12:27You just exist in the space between who you are and who you pretend to be.
12:31The next morning, you board a flight.
12:33You begin the next operation.
12:35There is always a next operation.
12:37Level 6.
12:39The Chief of Operations.
12:41They bring you back to headquarters because your body is starting to break down.
12:45Your psychiatrist has started using words like dissociation.
12:49You are missing things in the field that you should be catching.
12:52You are 41 years old.
12:54You have been operational for 17 years.
12:57They give you a corner office in a building you can't tell anyone you work in.
13:01You manage 30 case officers spread across four countries.
13:04You read their cables every morning.
13:07You approve their operations.
13:09You decline their operations.
13:11You worry about them.
13:12You worry about their assets.
13:14You worry about the assets they haven't recruited yet.
13:17The longer an operation runs without producing, the more pressure builds.
13:21Pressure makes officers cut corners.
13:24Cut corners get people killed.
13:26Your job is to prevent people from being killed.
13:29You don't always succeed.
13:31There is a Tuesday in October when one of your officers is arrested in a hostile country.
13:35The local service caught him meeting an asset.
13:38The asset is being tortured at this exact moment in a basement somewhere.
13:42Your officer is being held in a different basement somewhere else.
13:46You spend the next 11 weeks negotiating his release through three different back channels.
13:50You fly to Vienna twice.
13:53You fly to Geneva once.
13:54You meet with people whose names you cannot say even inside the secure room.
13:59Some of those names are also working for us in ways too sensitive to confirm in writing.
14:04The officer comes home eventually.
14:06The asset does not.
14:08You write a letter to the asset's family that you cannot send.
14:11The asset's family does not officially know what their son was doing for the last four years of his life.
14:16The letter sits in a safe in your office.
14:18You will never throw it away.
14:21You will never read it again either.
14:23The job teaches you that some things are designed to never be resolved.
14:27You are responsible for outcomes.
14:29You are not allowed to grieve them publicly.
14:31You are not allowed to grieve them privately either.
14:34There is no time.
14:35There is another cable on your desk.
14:38There is another decision waiting.
14:40There is always another decision waiting.
14:42You pour yourself a coffee.
14:44You start reading.
14:45The clock on the wall says 5 in the morning.
14:48The day has already begun.
14:50Level 7.
14:51The chief of station.
14:53They give you the top job in a major foreign capital.
14:57You are now the senior American intelligence officer in a country with 80 million people.
15:03The local counterintelligence service is sophisticated.
15:06They have been studying CIA operations since before you were born.
15:09You have 60 officers under your command.
15:13You have hundreds of assets in your network.
15:15You have a budget that runs into the tens of millions of dollars annually.
15:21You meet with the ambassador every morning at 8.
15:23The two of you have a complicated relationship.
15:27He resents that you don't fully report to him.
15:29You resent that he doesn't understand what you actually do.
15:33You both understand that publicly disagreeing would be a disaster.
15:38So you don't.
15:40You meet with the local intelligence service chief twice a month.
15:44He is technically your liaison partner.
15:46He is also actively running operations against your country.
15:51You both know this.
15:52You both pretend not to know this.
15:56You drink coffee together.
15:57You exchange information that has been carefully sanitized to seem useful while revealing nothing.
16:04You are friendly.
16:06You are not friends.
16:08You manage crises that nobody at home will ever hear about.
16:12An asset disappears for three days and reappears claiming illness.
16:17Did he get rolled?
16:18Is he being doubled?
16:20Is the next thing he tells you a controlled message designed to feed you false intelligence?
16:25You have to decide.
16:28You don't have enough information to decide correctly.
16:31You decide anyway.
16:34A senior official in the host government starts giving signals that he wants to defect.
16:39Defectors are gold.
16:42Defectors are also disasters waiting to happen.
16:45If he defects and you exfiltrate him successfully, you get a star on your file.
16:50If he gets caught during exfiltration, you get a diplomatic incident.
16:55The bilateral relationship will be set back a decade.
17:00You spend six months on this one decision.
17:03You barely sleep.
17:05Your wife thinks you're having an affair.
17:08You come home at two in the morning smelling like cigarettes and bourbon.
17:13You haven't smoked in 12 years.
17:16The cigarettes belong to the official you've been meeting.
17:18The bourbon belongs to the only place that's open at the hour you can safely meet him.
17:24You can't explain any of this to her.
17:27You let her think what she wants to think.
17:30The marriage doesn't survive that year.
17:34Nothing in this job survives eventually.
17:36You sign the divorce papers in your office on a Wednesday.
17:40You walk into a meeting ten minutes later about a different operation.
17:45Your face shows nothing.
17:47Your colleagues notice nothing.
17:50That is the skill that defines you now.
17:54You go back to your apartment that night.
17:56You eat dinner alone.
17:58You go to bed alone.
18:01You wake up alone the next morning and do it all again.
18:05Level 8.
18:06The Division Chief
18:08You are running an entire region now.
18:11The Russia House or the East Asia Division or the Counterterrorism Center.
18:15Pick any of them.
18:17They are all variations of the same thing at this level.
18:20You report to the Deputy Director for Operations.
18:23You sit in meetings at the White House.
18:25You brief the National Security Council.
18:28You are part of the small group of people who actually know how American foreign policy gets made.
18:33Decisions that will shape the lives of millions of people get made by eight tired bureaucrats in a windowless room.
18:40They are based on incomplete information and competing political pressures.
18:44You authorize operations that would never be approved if anyone outside this room knew about them.
18:50You authorize operations that would have been considered acts of war 50 years ago.
18:55You authorize operations that you yourself would not have approved when you were a junior officer.
19:02You would have thought they were too risky.
19:04You would have thought they were too cynical.
19:06You would have thought they were too morally compromising.
19:10You approve them now because you have learned what your predecessors learned.
19:14The alternatives are usually worse.
19:16You testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
19:20The questions are aggressive.
19:22The Senators want answers.
19:24You give answers.
19:26The answers are technically accurate.
19:28They are also carefully constructed to obscure exactly what they are constructed to obscure.
19:34Everyone in the room understands the game.
19:37The Senators ask follow-up questions in private after the cameras are off.
19:41You answer those more directly.
19:44They thank you.
19:45They say they appreciate your candor.
19:48They go on television the next day and call for more oversight.
19:52You watch them on the news.
19:54You don't get angry.
19:55You stopped getting angry years ago.
19:58The cynicism has become so deep that it no longer feels like cynicism.
20:02It feels like clarity.
20:05You sit with the clarity for a long time.
20:08Sometimes it comforts you.
20:10Sometimes it terrifies you.
20:12You can no longer tell the difference.
20:14You have stopped trying.
20:17The young officers you mentor look at you with something like awe.
20:21You remember when you used to look at people like that.
20:24You wonder if you were ever as innocent as they seem now.
20:28Level 9.
20:29The Deputy Director.
20:31You are one of the five most powerful people in American intelligence.
20:35You have an office on the seventh floor at headquarters.
20:38The seventh floor is where the leadership sits.
20:42The cafeteria on the seventh floor has better food than the rest of the building.
20:46The bathrooms are nicer.
20:49None of it matters.
20:50You eat lunch at your desk.
20:53You haven't used the regular bathroom on the seventh floor in two years because you don't have time.
20:58You manage budgets that exceed the GDP of small countries.
21:03You make personnel decisions that determine whether a particular foreign government will be penetrated next year.
21:10You decide whether a particular terrorist network will be disrupted before its next attack.
21:16You are briefed every morning at six by analysts who have been awake all night reading cables from around the
21:22world.
21:33You watch a drone strike in real time on a screen in a secure room.
21:38The target is a man who has killed Americans.
21:41The strike is legal under the legal frameworks that have been constructed to make such strikes legal.
21:47The man dies.
21:49Two other men die with him.
21:52You don't know who they were.
21:54You will never know.
21:56Their families will never know what happened.
21:59You go home that night to a wife who has stopped asking how your day was.
22:03She knows you can't tell her.
22:05You eat dinner.
22:07You watch a baseball game.
22:09You go to bed.
22:11You wake up at three in the morning.
22:13You sit on the edge of the bed.
22:15You think about the men on the screen.
22:18You don't feel guilty exactly.
22:21You stopped feeling guilty about specific operations a long time ago.
22:26You feel something else.
22:28Something heavier.
22:30Something that has been accumulating for 25 years.
22:33You go back to sleep eventually.
22:36You wake up at five.
22:38You go to work.
22:40You do it again.
22:42The next morning brings another briefing.
22:45The next briefing brings another decision.
22:47The next decision brings another set of people who will live or die
22:52because of choices you make in a room without windows.
22:56You stop counting the names after a while.
22:59There are too many to count.
23:01Level 10 The Legend
23:03You retire after 33 years.
23:06The ceremony is small.
23:08There is no public recognition.
23:10Your service is acknowledged in a private room.
23:13The director hands you a medal.
23:15You will never display it.
23:17You sign more papers.
23:18You promise once again to take the secrets to your grave.
23:22You walk out of the building for the last time.
23:25The world looks different.
23:27The colors are sharper somehow.
23:28You drive home.
23:30The drive feels strange.
23:32You move to a small town.
23:34You bought the house years ago through a series of trusts.
23:38The neighbors don't know your real name.
23:40They know the name on the deed.
23:42The name on the deed is the name on the cover identity you used in the late 90s.
23:47It feels like wearing someone else's clothes.
23:50You wake up at 5 every morning.
23:53You walk the perimeter of your property.
23:55You check the locks on every door.
23:57You scan the road for cars that don't belong.
24:00None of this is rational.
24:03All of this is reflex.
24:04The reflexes will never go away.
24:07You had three marriages.
24:09None survived the work.
24:11You have two children.
24:12They are adults now.
24:14They know parts of the truth.
24:15They do not know all of it.
24:17They never will.
24:19Your daughter is a journalist.
24:21You find this funny in a dark way.
24:23She has interviewed people who would have been your assets in another life.
24:27She has no idea.
24:28You will never tell her.
24:30The phone rings sometimes.
24:32The voice on the other end uses a phrase you have not heard in 12 years.
24:37The phrase activates protocols you memorized 30 years ago.
24:41You meet a young officer in a coffee shop in a city four hours from your house.
24:46You give them advice.
24:48You answer questions.
24:50You disappear back into your life.
24:52The agency uses you for these consultations because you carry knowledge that cannot be written down.
24:58Some things only exist in the heads of the people who lived them.
25:02You have nightmares.
25:04The nightmares are worse than they used to be.
25:07They have shape now.
25:08The asset who died in 2003.
25:11The officer you sent into the country where he was killed.
25:14The little girl in the village outside Kandahar who you saw through a drone feed three minutes before the missile
25:20arrived.
25:21You did not authorize that strike.
25:23You only watched it.
25:25Watching is its own kind of authorization.
25:28You know that now.
25:30You know a lot of things now that took decades to understand.
25:34You write nothing down.
25:35The agency would not approve.
25:38You would not approve.
25:40The knowledge dies with you.
25:42That is the deal.
25:43That was always the deal.
25:46You sit on your back porch in the evenings.
25:48You drink whiskey.
25:50You watch the sun go down.
25:51The light changes slowly across the trees.
25:55And for a few minutes the world is very quiet.
25:58Somewhere right now, a young person is walking into a federal building to take a polygraph for the first time.
26:05They have no idea what they are signing up for.
26:08They think they understand.
26:10They have read the books.
26:12They have watched the movies.
26:13They have rehearsed their answers carefully.
26:16The way you once rehearsed yours.
26:18They will fail in ways they cannot anticipate.
26:22They will succeed in ways that will hollow them out from the inside over the course of decades.
26:27They will become people their parents would not recognize.
26:30They will do things that they themselves will not recognize when they look back from where you are sitting now.
26:37The country needs them anyway.
26:40The country has always needed them.
26:42And the country has never been quite honest about what it costs.
26:47The work continues without acknowledgement.
26:49The names disappear.
26:51The operations are buried.
26:53The truth becomes legend.
26:55And the legend becomes silence.
26:57And the silence becomes the only inheritance any of you will ever leave behind.
27:03The cycle continues.
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