‘It’s ****ing WEIRD, Man’ Former CIA Spy Andrew Bustamante on Kirk, JFK & RFK Shootings

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0:35The CIA's been a long time for a long time.

0:35Piers Morgan:When you look at that shooting, what's the stuff you, with your former CIA, had on go? That's a bit weird. We still don't know what the motive was. Anything is a possibility, but what are the probabilities that it played out the way that we're being told? It doesn't make sense. He had a plan to succeed. That's fucking weird, man. The CIA employs tens of thousands of people who labor on mostly unglamorous duties, like monitoring foreign media and transcribing very dull conversations. But his secret operations on foreign soil, carried out by bona fide spies, are riveting to almost everybody. Journalists, whistleblowers, congressional inquiries have surfaced many chilling details about the CIA's meddling over the decades.

1:13Piers Morgan:And the dawn of new media has posed a new challenge for an agency whose work is definitially secretive, spies who go on podcasts. Andrew Bustamante is one of such formerly secret agents. His insights have been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world. Despite this, he says he plans to completely disappear in the next couple of years. Should be easy for a spy. But not before promoting his new book, Shadow Cell. And some might think getting a haircut. I wouldn't. I like your hair. Andrew, great to see you again. And to meet you in person, actually. We've only ever done this down the line before.

1:44Piers Morgan:So great to have you in the studio here. I want to come to your fascinating book. And every time I interview you, I'm enthralled by what you say about it all. But first question, the Charlie Kirk murder has, like everything like this in modern times now, led to a plethora of conspiracy theories raging around. And I had Robert O 'Neill, who was a Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden on last week, on Monday, saying that there were a lot of questions he felt just didn't quite stack up with it. Everything you've seen about the shooter, what happened, the fact it was a single bullet, the way he was able to put together his gun, dismantle his gun, get away and so on, the weird text messaging with his transitioning boyfriend and so on.

2:33Piers Morgan:What do you make of it all? Do you think there are unanswered questions with this? Does it make sense to you? Oh, absolutely there are unanswered questions. It doesn't make sense to me completely, and I think that's why there are conspiracy theories that are popping up around the shooting. The problem is that, like so much of what happens in the real world, there are areas that are protected, areas of information that are not available to the public. So the public doesn't get a full picture. You were just talking about the emergence of new media. Part of the unexpected or possibly unproductive side effect of that new media is that we now know more of what we don't know.

3:13Whereas in the past, when we didn't know, we didn't even realize we had a gap of information.

3:18Piers Morgan:What is the stuff when you look at that shooting? What's the stuff for you with your former CIA had on go? That's a bit weird. So first of all, the fact that there's really no significant new information since about September 19th. That's fucking weird, man. Right. Like how how how is this so significant that we're having national days of silence for Charlie Kirk? How is it so significant that it's making international media day after day, but we can't get new information. We still don't know what the motive was. We're having people like the transgender roommate slash lover disappear and nobody's talking to them.

3:57And there doesn't seem to be a large manhunter.

3:59Piers Morgan:No, I don't think it's an autopsy report yet. I don't think we've had an autopsy. Exactly. So this is information that doesn't seem unreasonable to share and yet it's not being shared. So the question becomes why. There's lots of legitimate reasons why it wouldn't be shared yet, but that's not good enough for us with our current appetite. From a technical point of view about the shooting itself, a 22-year-old who's not military trained to be able to get up on that roof, put together a gun, then dismantle it, fire off one shot with a bold-action rifle that belonged to his grandfather, reportedly, and get away.

4:37Piers Morgan:But to be able to assassinate somebody in that clinical manner, Does that seem likely, or is there something we don't know about what this kid was doing before all this? We look at everything in intelligence through a lens of probability. Anything is a possibility, but what are the probabilities that it played out the way that we're being told? So when I think of his age, and I think about the fact that he grew up in a hunting family, and I think about the fact that he was familiar with that particular weapon, he was familiar with the campus. He had what we call the advantage of area familiarity, Area Familiarity, Area Fam.

5:12He had all of those benefits that Charlie and Charlie's team did not have. Plus, of course, he had the element of surprise on his side. But when it comes to the technical elements of being able to handle that weapon, I tend to agree more with Rob. It doesn't make sense how... Unless he spent hours in premeditation assembling and disassembling his gun, he already had his ingress and his egress route planned. He already knew where he was going to stash the weapon. He had a plan to succeed. his dad is the reason his plan to disappear ultimately didn't succeed. And that was obviously a variable he didn't account for.

5:46So is it possible that he prepared to the extent that he needed to prepare to run such an effective operation? Yeah, it's possible. But is it probable that he did it alone? It's not really probable that one 22-year-old would be able to figure all of that out.

6:02Piers Morgan:And to fire one shot and be successful in your mission. Yeah. I mean, arguably, you can see that he hadn't trained for the shot distance. because while he did shoot Charlie in a fatal location, it's unlikely he was aiming for that specific location. So there are certain elements that highlight he was amateur as a professional killer. A Navy SEAL, like Rob, wouldn't make a mistake like that, wouldn't see that tumble and not predict it. Right. I mean, Rob had a lot of questions, but one of which was just the amount of time it took him, like you said, to assemble and disassemble. He said he didn't think he could do it in the time that they believed this boy did it.

6:39Piers Morgan:And it's interesting because the only equivalent kind of story in the last few years where there are even more unanswered questions is the young person who has tried to assassinate Donald Trump. Absolutely. From a similar roof, from a similar distance, about whom we seem to know absolutely nothing. I mean, even the guy on the golf course, we know a bit more because he defended himself and everything else. But that original shooter remains just so weird. Like, this kid had no digital footprint, nothing. From a CIA point of view, when you encounter that, where someone tries to assassinate the president of the United States or a very high-profile figure, and when you dig into it, for a young person to have no digital footprint whatsoever, that, to me, is very, very odd.

7:23Absolutely. There's hidden information there, without a doubt. It's funny, my mind worked very similar to yours, Piers, when I started to research the elements that made up the Charlie Kirk assassination. I immediately was triggered to look back at Thomas Crooks, the one who tried to kill Donald Trump when he was on the campaign in Butler, Pennsylvania. The parallels are very, very powerful, very humbling, right? You're talking about similar age groups. You're talking about high levels of intelligence. You're talking about a level of emotional IQ that made them actually well-liked in their community.

7:59So no one expected that they would have this killer instinct inside them. And arguably, maybe they didn't. They certainly were able to carry out something dangerous, but could they have done it alone? We don't know. But even now, when you research Thomas Crooks, even now, there's still no mode of assignment. There's nothing. There's still no public information. Now, the person he tried to assassinate, of all the people in the country, if you're trying to kill the president, you should be an open book to the American people, unless there's something you don't want the American people to know.

8:29Piers Morgan:Well, and of course it goes right back to JFK and the unanswered questions there and everything else. And, you know, I've had a lot of people on talking about the JFK files. And you just think, will we ever find out? Would you think we ever will? Will we ever know for sure? In the world of intelligence, in my experience, when there's something that is damaging to the idea of the American government, the idea of the structure that we have, the specificity of how we carry out our operations. When something is butting up against those areas of information, we'll never know because it's not in the government's best interest to actually be transparent with the people.

9:15It's in the government's best interest to tailor and cultivate what's released, and that includes cultivating and tailoring what isn't released.

9:22Piers Morgan:I had Oliver Stone on the filmmaker with his son last week talking about the RFK assassination and how he was certain, they've done a documentary about this, he was certain that was a CIA inside job. Did you ever hear anything about that when you were... The RFK assassination is another interesting example of where information is missing, but, and what's left doesn't stack up. The pre-2001 CIA, pre-911 CIA, is a very different beast than the CIA I grew up in. And one of the things that they teach us when we go through our onboarding is how different and kind of Wild West, unsupervised, very reckless that previous CIA was.

10:06It was born of the time, at the time it was needed, and it was kind of ignored for 30 years before any significant oversight was applied to it. So could they have been involved? I don't put anything beyond what CIA without oversight could have done. especially considering it only falls under the office of the executive, which just implies that at some point in time, it would want to shape the office of the executive. And that is exactly why JFK assassination is so interesting.

10:36Piers Morgan:Whenever I interview people like you, the most popular response from viewers is, there's no such thing as former CIA. And that even if I say to you, are you still in the CIA? Why would you tell me anyway? Gold is up by more than 40 % in value since the beginning of this year. And today's sponsor, Birch Gold, is marking Veterans Day with a tantalising offer. Buy gold, get free silver. For every$5 ,000 purchase from Birch Gold this month, they will send you a free silver round, which commemorates the Gadsden and American flags. Birch Gold helps you to own gold by converting an existing IRA or a 401k into a tax-sheltered IRA in physical gold.

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12:27Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. It's a very valid point. There is no such thing as former CIA. There's no such thing as retired military. The fact that we served once means that at the drop of a dime, at the call, we will serve again.

13:08And I'm not trying to hide that and I'm not trying to say anything else. But there's a difference between being favorably disposed, dedicated, loyal to the mission versus being controlled by the mission today. And when people say, I think what they're implying is that I'm still part of CIA, I am most certainly not part of CIA. CIA is not my friend. They are very publicly not my friend. I get letters from them all the time reminding me to get off screen because I have no business being on screen and threatening me with legal action if I overstep the boundary of my secrecy agreement. So people don't see that part.

13:42They just see me on camera.

13:43Piers Morgan:Your book, they tried to block it for a while, but you finally got it unblocked. What was the kind of stuff which they were objecting to and how much of that in the end has made the final edit? Yeah, absolutely. So my book, Shadow Cell, that was just released in September. Thankfully, we are a New York Times bestseller. I'm very excited about that. Congratulations. Thank you very much. The entire manuscript was finished in 2021 and submitted to CIA in late 2021. And then in 2022, the whole world changed. You had conflicts creep up between the United States and China. You of course had Russia invade Ukraine.

14:20You had new brinksmanship with Iran and North Korea. And as a result of that, CIA deemed the entire book a classified document from beginning to end. The premise of the story, the operation itself, the individuals involved, even the number of cases. Inside the book, we go through detailed the number of officers that were in our cell, the number of cases that the officers managed. CIA wanted none of it released. They deemed it all classified information. My wife and I understood as former CIA officers, what is actually the definition of classified information? And it took us three years of kind of legal back

14:58Piers Morgan:And out of interest, for those who don't really understand this, what is the kind of overarching definition of it? So the definition of human classified intelligence is that it has to be information that exists on a document that has classification markings. That's what makes it classified. There's this catch-all where they can say, oh, if you take what you said, it implies enough information. but that requires a court to come in and say that the court agrees or disagrees with what CIA is saying. So my wife and I knew that what was in the book was not word for word verbatim off of any classified document.

15:34So we knew that it wasn't going to withstand that accusation. But it took us three years because CIA went through different directors. CIA has its own political issues. Of course, CIA is a one way street. You write to them, they may or may not write you back right So it was a lot of back and forth that ultimately only won, we only won because we threatened them with a First Amendment lawsuit. And when we threatened a First Amendment lawsuit with a platform of my size online, that was when they decided to come back and say that it's releasable.

16:03Piers Morgan:I'm thrilled the book got done. It's an insider account of the new spy war. Who right now has the best spies in the world? Which country? The best is a difficult word to answer because you have to think about what... Who are the most effective? The most effective, I would argue, are Mossad, because Mossad has a very narrow threat against it, right? It really is only looking at Iran and Iranian proxies that threaten its eradication. That gives it the benefit of only having a small group of enemies rather than the whole world being an intel target. It also justifies their very, very aggressive, very innovative actions all over the region because they're fighting for their literal survival.

16:44Whereas the United States, as the largest economy, everybody's an enemy. And there's a whole lot of intel that we need to collect. So it makes us less effective compared to Mossad.

16:53Piers Morgan:How did the Mossad not know that October the 7th, we're two years on now, how did it not know, given how obviously brilliantly expert it is at intelligence, how could it have been that the biggest failure of its intelligence ever happened right on its doorstep? It's definitely fruitful grounds for conspiracy. In my experience, it's very, very akin to 9-11. And I think when people make comparisons of October 7 to 9-11 here in the United States, or in the United States, when they make those comparisons, there are areas that don't line up, but there are areas that absolutely do line up. The reason 9-11 happened in both classified and unclassified channels is because of a lack of coordination and communication that would have prevented the attack.

17:38I think we see even now, again, in public information, the same thing is true about October 7th. It was avoidable. It was preventable. But for whatever reason, the different groups that were involved, because imagine you had the Mossad collecting foreign intel, you had Shin Bet managing internal security, and then you had the actual military controlling the border. All three of them, most likely, they report in different channels, they use different code words, they use different rules and regulations. You can see it becoming a bureaucratic kerfluffle that a more nimble enemy could take advantage of.

18:11Piers Morgan:The bit I don't understand is that Hamas seemed to spend 20 years building one of the biggest tunnel networks in the whole region, by far the biggest probably. And the Mossad either didn't know or didn't understand what they may be planning and why they needed to do this. I mean, again, they can take out 3 ,000 guys from Hezbollah with pages that they've worked on for years. They can surgically strike into Iran with its nuclear scientists and nuclear sites and so on with incredible precision. But they didn't work out that if you're building hundreds of miles of underground tunnels that there may be something going on here?

18:54One of the challenges in any kind of intelligence assessment is prioritization of threats and then also understanding the potential or probable timing of an attack. For all we know, Mossad had an assessment that there was going to be some pivotal attack on the 18th of October. Or maybe they had evidence or an assessment that said it would happen on the 3rd of October. And it didn't happen. And it didn't happen. We don't know exactly what they were looking at. All we know is what happened on October 7th. The building of tunnels has lots of explanations. The building of tunnels is also an effective tool for a less threatening enemy, and I would argue Hamas, as threatening as they are, is still less threatening than a formal military.

19:35They use things like tunnels because it's something they can do that avoids imagery collection. It avoids airplane reconnaissance. It avoids pretty much anything unless there's a seismic, a seismic intel source, a mazent intel source nearby.

19:49Piers Morgan:You've warned that America is about to fall. You talk of empires falling from within and you've outlined a lot of internal weaknesses you think are contributing to this. Just to summarize that, why do you fear that this may be the case? When I talk about the decline of the United States, I want to make sure people understand it's not something I'm comparing to Rome. And many people try to make the comparison. It's not the Roman Empire. For the United States, we are the world's only superpower. So if we decline financially, it changes everything. If we decline financially, it changes what we can spend on military.

20:25It changes what technology we can invest in. It changes the value of our dollar and the value of our property, of our stock market to foreign countries. So any decline in our power, our status, our economy is significant. It's even more significant when you consider that our enemies are increasing. China is on the rise. So now not only are we decreasing in speed, but they are increasing in speed, which closes the gap between the two. When two countries reach parity, when they reach equality, that's the worst situation for everybody. I understand that there are people out there who want equality and want fairness, and that's bullshit.