Name: Why James Bond would fail instantly as a real CIA spy | Andrew Bustamante
Uploaded: 2026-01-09T18:20:53.000Z
Duration: 14 min 59 s
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One of the most famous spy series of all time actually gets it wrong.

He's always attractive, he's always well spoken, he's always an amazing driver, an amazing fighter, an amazing shot.

And somehow he's able to operate all over the world by calling himself by his true name.

Real espionage is about people who blend in.

People who aren't attractive, people who don't get a second look, people who are terrible with women, people who never drive a fancy car, people who never have to pull out their gun because they're so good at keeping a secret, they can get in and get out without ever even being noticed in the first place.

My name is Andrew Bustamante and I am a former covert CIA intelligence officer and the founder of EveryDaySpy.com.

The public really doesn't realize that they are much closer to CIA spies than they think they are.

International espionage requires a wide range of different types of look and appearance.

There's a place for the very young and the very old.

There's a place for the very fit and the very unfit.

There's a place for tall people, short people.

There's even room for people who have different religious beliefs that require them to wear different types of physical dress.

But when it comes to the one type of person that has the most operational utility, you're looking for somebody who is brown but not too dark, somebody who is thin but not too thin.

Because that's exactly the kind of person that disappears no matter where they go.

Whether they're in Asia or Latin America, whether they're in Canada or Australia, they're overlooked.

They're not the kind of person you remember bumping into when you're standing in line at a local coffee shop.

And that's exactly the kind of gray man that CIA, MI6 and Mossad really look for when they develop a new high performance field operative.

A good covert operator is born with a certain series of skills.

They are very good at thinking on their feet.

They're creative, they're adaptable, they're resilient and resourceful.

They're also able to blend in and disappear.

These are not people who want to be the center of attention.

They're the wallflowers at your school prom.

They're the kids who sit in the second to last row because if they sat in the last row of the school bus, they would be noticed.

The people who turn into Very good spies are the people who enjoy the comfort of anonymity.

Now, when an intelligence service gets a hold of this person who values anonymity, then they have this rich, fertile soil to teach them a whole slew of skills, from hacking skills to tradecraft skills to disguise to foreign language.

And they can put and invest these skills into somebody, knowing that that person will never show off or brag about their skills.

Instead, they're going to use those advanced skills to make themselves even more invisible in front of everybody else.

I often joke that I was the accidental recruit to CIA because I was not a great high school student.

I came from the military, but I was not a good soldier.

I was leaving the US Air Force and trying to find a job that was the exact opposite of working for the Air Force because as an Air Force officer, I was in command of nuclear missiles, knowing that if I turned my key, I would end human life in some places.

So when the time came for me to leave the Air Force, I wanted to do something that was the polar opposite of nuclear missiles.

So I found myself applying to the US Peace Corps.

And in the middle of my application to Peace Corps, I actually had a screen pop up on my computer that said, based on my answers to date in my application, I might qualify for other jobs in the national security sector.

Would I be willing to put my application on pause?

And like any other 27 year old, when I heard that there might be an opportunity for me to do something else, I hit yes.

And I said, yes, I am willing to put my application on hold for 72 hours to see what comes of this.

And that's when I got a phone call one day later from a woman who didn't tell me her last name and came from an unlisted phone number with a 703 area code, which is Langley, Virginia.

to go through an application process that would vet me for a possible role in national security.

I didn't know at the time that I was being vetted for CIA.

I got a set of plane tickets in the mail.

I was only given enough information to make it another day where my next hotel would be, where my next appointment would be.

And that's kind of how I was carried along for the better part of 10 months as I went through test after test and interview after interview where I was applying for and escalating through the process of becoming a CIA operative.

When you think about the process for applying and interviewing to CIA, you have to take every application you've ever made from the military to a job and throw it out the window.

Because the average application and interview process for CIA takes about 18 months.

In fact, if you're a very qualified, high performing candidate, the best you can DO is about nine months.

My own application process took about 11 months.

And over the course of that time, you are exposed to more and more intrusive, personal and high stakes interview styles.

Sometimes you're doing role plays, sometimes you're taking psychological batteries, Sometimes you're doing group or panelist interviews where you're being peppered by a panel of people that you've never talked to before.

And that's not counting all the things they're doing behind the scenes.

Pulling your digital footprint, looking at your police background, looking at your personal finances, looking and reviewing your health history and your family history.

The reason CIA uses this escalation of intrusive interview styles is for two reasons.

One, they're looking to identify the specific soft skills that exist in the right candidate.

But then simultaneously, they're also looking for the person who's unwilling to share certain secrets about themselves.

Where's the person that's too private to share secrets about the affair they had with their spouse?

Or where's the person that's afraid to talk about the fact that they're broke?

Where's the person who's unwilling to share a secret about cheating on an exam in college?

Because if somebody's willing to keep one secret during the interview process, you know, you can't really trust that person to become loyal to the organization when they have to collect secrets of different types that relate to national security and national security policy.

CIA trains with a very specific model that really doesn't exist anywhere else.

First you educate, then you exercise, and then you experience.

They start with classroom education and it really is that.

It's just like being in a college setting.

You have an instructor or two at the front of the classroom and you have a room of anywhere from 30 to 100 new recruits who learn a skill or a concept.

Immediately after that class is over, you take a short break and then you come back for a series of exercises or role plays.

Maybe you role play with another student, maybe you role play with an instructor.

Immediately following that exercise, everyone is kicked out into the real world to go actually exercise the skill that they learned and the skill that was demonstrated in the field.

And what happens is you will either fail or you will succeed.

During the process of Applying that skill in the real world.

And what's really powerful is because you operate alone.

You're the only one who knows if, if you succeeded or failed with that skill.

So then when you come back to the classroom the next day, you're carrying this knowledge in your own head.

And it's up to you whether or not you seek additional help from a peer or from a teacher, whether you admit to your failure or whether you celebrate your success, which is part of the psychological game that must happen in order for you to develop both a loyalty to the organization, but

also a sense of confidence that you can operate single handedly in the field.

And CIA invests a great deal in your training specifically because they do not want to invest in your therapy.

They look for people who are capable of doing both wonderful and terrible things and still be able to sleep at night.

Because they know that if for some reason you're overwhelmed, if for some reason you crack under pressure, if for some reason you break during an operation, there is much more at stake than just your life.

When I actually started training with CIA, I started to have a series of self discoveries.

First, I started to discover that many of the things that I suspected my whole life, many of the things that caused me frustration and disappointment with society, were actually very viable things that CIA taught me to understand.

Later on, it taught me to understand that there really isn't a sense of fairness or transparency or honesty, or that human beings carry from place to place.

It doesn't exist in church, it doesn't exist in the professional workplace, it doesn't exist in the military.

So for me, growing up, it was always very challenging.

Whenever I saw hypocrisy, or whenever I saw people go against their word or people not fulfill their promises, I never understood how it was acceptable.

How is it that President Clinton could lie on the stand, I did not have sexual relations with that woman, and

yet somehow still become a popular president.

Even though everyone tries to say that there are standards of behavior and there are codes of conduct and there are social norms, in reality all of those things are flexible.

So for example, ethics and morals are not the same thing.

And that's something that the average person doesn't really think about or understand.

Ethics are actually something that's defined by your profession.

It's something that comes from outside an external source.

If you're an attorney, there's a code of ethics for attorneys.

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Why James Bond would fail instantly as a real CIA spy | Andrew Bustamante

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