Andrew Bustamante

Andrew Bustamante is a former CIA clandestine officer turned public analyst, podcaster, and entrepreneur. After leaving the agency he became a prominent voice on intelligence tradecraft, UAP disclosure, and geopolitics, and co-hosts the EverydaySpy platform. He is also the author of the memoir Shadow Cell, a CIA-reviewed account of a covert intelligence operation he ran jointly with his wife against a major U.S. adversary in Asia.

Biography

Bustamante was born in Arizona. His birth father, an Air Force enlisted man, was stabbed to death at a bar in San Francisco when Bustamante was approximately three to four months old; the attacker was a drug dealer who had been mocked in public and returned to deliver seventeen stab wounds. His mother subsequently remarried and moved the family to Pennsylvania. Raised in a household his mother described as "anti-religious," Bustamante later converted to Christianity during his first year at the United States Air Force Academy, influenced by a classmate named Meredith Jessup whose patient example of faith Bustamante credits with beginning his conversion: "By the end of probably six months, I was like, there's something to this Jessup guy... How is he so kind? How is he so friendly?" He completed his conversion while handwriting a calligraphed Bible journal as a wedding gift for a fellow academy graduate and man of faith, Ian Slasnak, encountering what he describes as a decisive moment of belief in the middle of the Psalms.

At age twenty-two, while at the Air Force Academy, Bustamante used an internal military cemetery database to locate his father's grave at a national cemetery near Colorado Springs and visited it for the first time.

CIA career

Bustamante served as a CIA clandestine service officer, conducting field intelligence operations on a case-by-case, need-to-know basis. He describes the agency's operational structure as one in which funding approval — not individual interest — determines which programs are stood up: "In order for an operation to be stood up, it has to be funded... When funding is actually approved, that means that there's such a preponderance of evidence that it's a national security concern." He entered the CIA in 2007, trained by veteran Cold War officers who were themselves having to relearn tradecraft in the post-9/11 oversight environment.

Bustamante technically failed the farm's case officer certification panel — not due to inadequate scores but due to professional friction with supervisors, at a time when post-9/11 recruitment surges had overwhelmed a system designed for thirty trainees per cohort. He subsequently worked as a Staff Operations Officer (SOO), a role that placed him on the headquarters side supporting field case officers rather than running operations directly. This position made him popular with field officers but disliked by Langley leadership.

Shadow Cell operation

Bustamante and his wife, also a CIA officer and targeter, were recruited into a sensitive compartment internally referred to as "Falcon House" — a unit dedicated to operations against a major U.S. adversary in Asia (referred to as "Falcon" in his memoir, widely understood to be China, given that Bustamante has publicly stated he speaks Thai and Chinese). Unbeknownst to the couple, Falcon House was using their assignment to flush out an internal mole: by deploying two new officers building original operations, they would force the mole to reach for unauthorized information, revealing himself.

Working from a forward station (referred to as "Wolf"), Bustamante and his wife devised a decentralized cell structure modeled on al-Qaeda's courier network: a small team of case officers ran independent sub-operations, reporting results only upward through Bustamante, so that the mole inside Falcon House could never identify the sources. Bustamante himself entered Falcon approximately every forty days on a cover identity, performing logistics — procuring cash, SIM cards, and equipment — via dead drops so that case officers could execute operations without leaving traceable supply chains.

The operation succeeded: the mole was eventually identified. Bustamante and his wife were rapidly promoted from middle to senior management based on the operation's results, and trained other CIA personnel in the cell model before leaving the agency for personal reasons — primarily to raise a family without the demands that precluded both spouses from field operations simultaneously.

Shadow Cell memoir

Three years before publication, the CIA classified the entire manuscript. Bustamante and his co-author (his wife) ultimately obtained release by threatening a First Amendment lawsuit through an attorney who held back-channel negotiations with the agency. The published version does not name the target country or most operational participants, though Bustamante has noted publicly that anyone who listens to his podcasts and reads thirty pages of the book will be able to identify "Falcon." He describes the memoir primarily as a tribute to the team of case officers who executed the shadow cell operations, rather than to himself.

Post-CIA activities

After leaving the CIA, Bustamante appeared on the History Channel series Beyond Skinwalker Ranch, traveling the continental United States to investigate sites exhibiting anomalous phenomena correlated with those recorded at Skinwalker Ranch. In 2024 he hosted Brandon Fugal, owner of Skinwalker Ranch, on his own podcast (the SRS Show), describing Fugal as one of his most anticipated interview subjects after more than a year of attempts to secure the meeting. He also co-authored a security proposal for the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 2024 presidential campaign warning that a human assault at a public event represented one of the candidate's top security threats.

Faith after the CIA

Bustamante converted to Christianity during his Air Force Academy years, and his CIA career deepened rather than eroded his faith. He argues that reading the Bible after field service yields a fundamentally different experience than reading it before, and that the pragmatic, objective worldview demanded by covert operations aligns with, rather than contradicts, biblical teaching: "one of the things I've really loved doing is reading the Bible since CIA... Reading the Bible after CIA is a mindbody." He contends that the fundamental principles of espionage are prefigured in Jesus's teachings — citing specifically the parable of the seat at the feast, in which Jesus instructs guests to sit at the lowest place so that the host may elevate them, as a precise parallel to cover identity management and social positioning. He also draws a parallel between undercover work and the Incarnation — Christ living among humans in a disguised nature while known to only a few — noting even the denial of Peter as an analog for source handling under cover.

His wife, raised Buddhist, has maintained her own faith while showing increasing curiosity in Christian thinking, which Bustamante takes as further personal confirmation of the faith's coherence.

UAP and anomalous phenomena

Any analysis of UAP claims must begin by ruling out known terrestrial explanations before positing unknown ones. During field research for Beyond Skinwalker Ranch, he observed phenomena — anomalous radiation levels, energy readings, and unidentified lights — where two to five percent of recorded events could not be explained by any known terrestrial model: "What is the remaining two to 5% of strange stuff in the sky? Now I'm not saying it's all aliens, but what I am saying is it's something we don't know." Any unexplained finding must first be cross-checked against Special Access Programs and DARPA projects before being attributed to non-human intelligence: "you always have to run all of the strange findings you find through an index of special projects like could this be a special project could this be like a subdivision of a subdivision of a private military contractor."

On David Grusch's 2023 Congressional testimony, Bustamante assessed Grusch as a "true type of whistleblower" who had attempted proper internal channels before going public, while cautioning that government officials deliberately use over-generalized terminology — such as "biologics" — that cannot be held to specific claims: "government people work really hard to use terminology that they can't be held accountable to in the future. So it's over generalized and under committed." He also flagged the presence of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper around Grusch's disclosure — relaying a concern passed to him by filmmaker Jeremy Corbell — as a possible marker that the episode was a limited hangout rather than a genuine leak.

Bustamante has argued that intensified government UAP attention tracks left-leaning politics — "follow the correlation between liberal politics and the UFO narrative; they go very close to each other" — and that in the wake of the Chinese spy balloon incident of 2023, three subsequent UAP sightings over the United States were likely relabeled from "spy balloons" to "UFOs" to avoid international incident: "When you start saying that there's spy balloons over missile bases in the United States, your average American does not stay passive and content."

By his second season of field investigations with the Beyond Skinwalker Ranch team, Bustamante had become more confident that anomalous phenomena are real and physically measurable — but no more confident that they are alien in origin. He describes consistent energy signature gaps, magnetic anomalies, and geospatial data gaps at certain specific locations, phenomena that technical experts in their fields cannot explain: "there really is something strange. There really is some kind of phenomenon that is consistent, is measurable, is witnessed, and is happening in our planet's atmosphere." He poses the question of why two adjacent plots of geologically identical granite terrain can exhibit entirely different energy and magnetic signatures, and argues that the answer — whatever it is — does not require extraterrestrial agency to be scientifically revolutionary: "I am more convinced than ever that there is something happening. I am not any more convinced that it is alien in nature, but I am more and more confident that it does defy science as we understand science today."

He also questions the anthropocentric assumption embedded in most UAP discourse — that an advanced extraterrestrial civilization would be interested in human beings specifically, rather than in Earth as a resource pool: "Why do we think we're interesting to them? What makes you think that you're more interesting than a dolphin to an alien?"

Iran, Israel, and Mossad

Bustamante has repeatedly analyzed the strategic logic of Israel's military posture and its relationship with Iran. He describes Iran as the primary financier of every adversarial force surrounding Israel — Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis — through a proxy model that allows Iran to wage perpetual war without formal interstate conflict: "What Iran has right now is they prevent themselves from ever having to go into a traditional inter- or intrastate war because they're able to fund proxy groups that die for their own cause but spend Iran dollars to do it."

He characterizes Israel's brazen cross-border strikes — including the killing of a Hamas political leader on Iranian soil in Tehran — as strategically self-defeating: by attacking simultaneously across all four geographic fronts (Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran to the east, Houthis to the south), Israel gave each adversary legitimate pretext to retaliate, while Netanyahu locked in American support by framing the conflict explicitly as a confrontation with Iran. Bustamante also argues that the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack was orchestrated and approved by Iran, and has been strategically successful from Tehran's perspective in shattering the Abraham Accords and leaving Israel more internationally isolated than at any point in decades.

On the U.S. relationship with Israel, Bustamante describes it in purely pragmatic terms: Israel serves as a forward-deployed cache of American military equipment and a rapid-deployment platform in the Middle East, and its economy is heavily integrated with America's, making the alliance economically rational even when Israel's conduct is diplomatically costly. He applies the same instrumental logic to Netanyahu's continuation of the Gaza war: it provides personal cover from pending corruption charges in Israeli courts, expands Israel's regional footprint, and draws no meaningful U.S. restraint under the Trump administration.

On Mossad operations, Bustamante describes the Israeli intelligence service as uniquely brazen compared to Western agencies, taking risks — such as motorcycle drive-by sticky bomb attacks — that reflect a culturally existential mindset toward threat: "Mossad does some of the most daring raids... you really only do that when you're in a position of existential threat." He notes that following the joint Mossad-U.S. strikes inside Iran's borders, Iran launched an internal purge of suspected intelligence sources — with Bustamante assessing that dozens of individuals were arrested and likely executed within weeks: "Iran's on a hunt right now for Iranians who they believe are sources of information. First, assets. And I think if you look in the last 45 days, you're going to find dozens, if not more that were at least arrested and possibly executed."

Jeffrey Epstein and intelligence networks

It is "highly likely" that Jeffrey Epstein was an intelligence target — and that there is a "high probability" he actively functioned as an access agent, passing contact information, personal assessments, and targeting data to foreign intelligence services, given the extraordinary breadth of high-value relationships he cultivated across multiple countries. He distinguishes between Epstein as a witting agent and as an unwitting tool, suggesting Epstein may have agreed to work with multiple foreign services simultaneously because he believed he was smarter than all of them.

On the separate question of FBI involvement, Bustamante advanced the theory that Epstein may have been a confidential FBI informant — reporting the criminal behavior of his wealthy clients to the Bureau in exchange for protection from prosecution: "The theory that we kind of developed... is that there's a good chance that Jeffrey Epstein may have been an FBI source... safe from any charges. Instead, he was reporting to FBI the more egregious criminal activity of all the clients that he was supporting." He argues that protecting even deeply compromised informants is structurally necessary to preserve the reliability of the entire informant system: "if we turn him over to the public, if we break our agreement with him, then everybody else is like, well, I'm not going to work with FBI."

Any intelligence-related files on Epstein are permanently classified under a separate classification system from the criminal proceedings, and will never enter the public record — referencing the Gina Haspel-era destruction of CIA evidence related to Guantanamo as a precedent for how the government handles institutionally damaging material.

Sean Combs and elite leverage networks

An explicit parallel exists between Sean Combs ("Diddy") and Jeffrey Epstein, analyzed through the lens of intelligence tradecraft. Combs was most likely not a government-backed asset but rather a case study in how extreme wealth and fame amplify personal pathologies while creating what intelligence services would recognize as a natural access-agent profile: someone who can connect disparate networks of powerful individuals and who has the financial means to surveil and document.

Using CIA tradecraft terminology, Bustamante distinguishes between a "useful idiot" — someone exploited unknowingly as a platform, as he characterizes Tucker Carlson's Putin interview — and an "access agent," someone with genuine connections to high-value targets who serves as a conduit into those networks. He suggests Combs may have functioned as the latter, if foreign intelligence was involved at all, though he considers pure predatory pathology amplified by unchecked wealth the simpler and more probable explanation.

He applies a CIA counter-intelligence principle — "every time you catch a mole you have to assume there's two more" — to suggest that whatever corruption was exposed in the Combs case is not isolated to the music industry but reflects a structural pattern across every sector populated by the ultra-wealthy: "there's probably three in the tobacco industry, probably three in the electric vehicles industry, there's probably three in the social media industry."

China's rise

China's ascent to near-superpower status was achieved by replicating the United States' own post-World War II playbook while U.S. attention was monopolized by the War on Terror: exporting Chinese workers, using loans and leases with developing nations who could not repay them, and building telecommunications and financial products from stolen American industrial secrets, then selling them more cheaply to the same global markets.

By 2024, China had already "taken action" on Taiwan through the 2024 legislative elections, in which a pro-unification legislature was returned alongside a pro-independence president — creating the same administrative gridlock that preceded Hong Kong's effective absorption into mainland law. This outcome more closely resembles the Hong Kong model (policy capture by lawyers and administrators) than a Ukraine-style military invasion.

Child soldiers and field atrocities

When asked directly what was the worst thing he ever witnessed a human being do, Bustamante describes his operational exposure to child soldiers in Africa. As a CIA officer meeting with a warlord commander, he was required to sit and listen while the general described the conditioning of child soldiers — fed mixtures including gunpowder and subjected to systematic abuse to break their will and make them "dedicated lethal" fighters — without being able to intervene, because CIA doctrine mandates observation at the second or third ring, never direct action in the field.

He contrasts CIA's required detachment with law enforcement, which must witness and process atrocities directly, expressing particular respect for FBI and beat officers for that reason: "Where law enforcement... they have to actually witness horrible... That's why I have such incredible respect for your FBI, your detectives, even your beat cops."

Black programs and government secrecy

Black budget programs exist and serve a legitimate function even within the CIA itself — shielding expenditure totals from analysts who lack need-to-know: "a black budget is an important thing even to protect from accountants at CIA understanding what CIA is doing." The government's broader mission is keeping the public "willfully ignorant" — not through malice but through structural preference: "The information can be there, but we want you to voluntarily choose ignorance instead."

America's structural decline

In a September 2025 interview on the Danny Jones Podcast, Bustamante argued that American citizens function as "stupid cogs in the system" — not as a criticism but as a structural description: the tax base generated by working Americans funds the military superiority that is the only real guarantor of national sovereignty, and the government's primary interest is in keeping that engine running, regardless of individual autonomy or political preferences. He argued that the U.S. government is not controlled by mysterious dark forces but by "king makers" — ultra-wealthy individuals for whom specific policy outcomes translate directly into massive gains or losses, who place lobbyists into both parties to protect those interests.

Donald Trump is uniquely powerful precisely because no party structure controls him — his power derives entirely from his ability to mobilize voters through marketing mastery, which means he has no institutional constraints on breaking campaign promises, including on releasing Epstein files, ending wars, and reducing debt: "The fact that he can just do what's against his campaign promises shows that he has the power to do whatever the hell he wants."

On the missing trillions from the Pentagon budget — which Bustamante traces to a combination of black programs, clandestine commercial fronts, and the structural impossibility of documenting illicit funding — he stated that the money is not "missing" in any meaningful sense but is laundered through financial instruments including venture capital, 401(k) vehicles, and cryptocurrency transitions between competing financial centers in Dubai, Shanghai, and New York: "It's not fraud, waste, and abuse because that money can't get into that budget without essentially being captured outside of the American tax base."

Malmstrom Air Force Base UFO incident

Before joining the CIA, Bustamante served as a missile crew commander, deputy crew commander, and command post commander at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, where approximately 150–200 Minuteman III ICBMs were housed 100 feet underground, each missile carrying up to ten MIRV nuclear warheads. While at Malmstrom, he witnessed a systematic shutdown of multiple missile systems — comparable to the Robert Salas incident of 1967 — for which the command post received only a "thank you for submitting" response from the chain of command rather than the standard operational diagnosis or corrective action report. He dismissed the Wall Street Journal claim that such incidents were explained by electromagnetic pulse testing, noting that EMP creates permanent damage and that military operational weapons systems are shielded against EMP precisely because you cannot risk permanently destroying nuclear launch control systems — and that any legitimate EMP testing would be conducted at remote test ranges, not near operational silos.

He conducted a separate study commissioned by an ultra-high-net-worth investor examining a mine near a nuclear facility overseas and found that worldwide, nuclear facilities and military installations have significantly higher rates of UAP incident reports — attributable in part to trained observers and established reporting culture, but also to a pattern in which incidents near nuclear sites are classified rather than dismissed, suggesting there is "some truth to there's UFOs in the sky that have national security implications that qualify to be classified."

CIA secrecy agreements and the Shadow Cell publication fight

Bustamante revealed in 2025 that every CIA officer signs two separate secrecy agreements — one contractual with the CIA and one as criminal liability with the federal government — creating double-jeopardy exposure that keeps most former officers silent: potential criminal prosecution and a civil suit can be pursued simultaneously for the same disclosure.

The Shadow Cell memoir, covering the operation Bustamante and his wife ran against a nuclear-armed adversary he calls "Falcon" to identify a mole codenamed "Scimitar" inside CIA's most sensitive collection house, was initially approved by the CIA in 2019 under the first Trump administration's transparency gestures, but was reclassified in 2022 when global instability — the Ukraine invasion, China spy balloons, Iranian incursions — made the operational details suddenly relevant. The book was unblocked only after Bustamante's wife, a law school graduate, threatened a First Amendment lawsuit through attorney Mark Zaid — the CIA approved publication within three weeks of receiving the legal threat.

The operation described in Shadow Cell — using Bustamante and his wife as unknowing bait to draw out "Scimitar" while they built decentralized intelligence cells modeled on Al-Qaeda sleeper cell structure — was designed as a counter-mole technique. Because "Falcon House" (the most sensitive division) had a penetration and could not trust any of its own senior officers, Bustamante and his wife were recruited from unrelated parts of the agency and tasked with building operations that fed information only to leadership-level approval, not through the normal chain, thereby limiting the mole's access to operational details. The mole was ultimately arrested — Bustamante believes around 2017 or 2019 — after multiple parallel bait operations, with a Department of Justice public record but no significant press coverage.

Podcast appearances

Bustamante appeared on the Lex Fridman Podcast (episode #310) to discuss his CIA career, intelligence tradecraft, and views on the geopolitical landscape, including the China threat and covert operations methodology.

In a separate appearance on the Danny Jones Podcast (episode #84), titled "#84 - Former CIA Super Spy Explains UFO's," Bustamante appeared alongside Jones to discuss his CIA career and views on the UAP phenomenon from an intelligence tradecraft perspective. He appeared on the Flagrant podcast with Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh to discuss China's rise, the Israel-Hamas conflict, and his assessment of Epstein's probable FBI ties. On the Julian Dorey Podcast (episode #224), Bustamante analyzed the Iran-Israel proxy conflict, Mossad's operational culture, UAP phenomena, and the Sean Combs case from an intelligence perspective.

See also

• Jim DeToro
• Counter-disclosure
• 2023 UAP Congressional Hearing

References