Every year, the federal government spends an estimated $3 billion of your tax dollars on the Central Intelligence Agency. Other than the supposed protection a sophisticated international clandestine espionage network provides the nation's citizens, what do we actually get for our share of CIA budget? Nothing!
In the interest of getting something for my taxes, and because I think espionage is kind of cool, I asked former CIA agent Jason Hanson to reveal the best life hacks his CIA training could provide.
According to his biography, Hanson spent seven years in the CIA as an agent with a top secret security clearance. After retiring from the agency in 2005, he started the Tactical Spy School in Utah, got $150k in funding on Shark Tank, and wrote some best-selling books (Spy Secrets That Can Save Your Life, and Agent of Influence: How to Use Spy Skills to Persuade Anyone, Sell Anything, and Build a Successful Business), all in order to “help good, honest Americans stay safer and be more prepared in the crazy and unpredictable world that we live in.”
Get off your phone
While Hanson teaches his Spy School students to drive defensively, escape from duct tape and handcuffs, and other cool-in-the-movies tricks, his most important piece of personal safety advice is so practical your mom probably said it to you: Stop looking at your phone all the time.
“You should be paying attention to your surroundings,” Hanson said, “Twenty or 25 years ago, we were walking around actually looking [where we were] walking. That's how we need to be. I use a flip phone, and I've never sent a text message in my life.”
Establish the baseline of any situation
Once you've switched off your phone, look around to get a feel for your location. Hanson isn't advising adopting the hyper-vigilant lifestyle of spies in war zones—just basic situational awareness. “Everything has a baseline,” Hanson explained, "If you walk into a Starbucks every day, you know the baseline of Starbucks.”
So spend a moment taking the metaphorical temperature of any new situation you’re in; If something feels off, or out of place, trust your instincts and either proceed with caution or retreat.
“One time I was almost kidnapped," Hanson said. "I'm out in the morning in a place I can't name and I saw two guys coming in my direction. They didn't match the baseline; they didn't dress like everybody else there; they basically stuck out like a sore thumb. They look at me. I look at them. And these two guys look at each other and step apart, trying to force me to go and between them. Well, as soon as I saw that, I turned the other way and took off running. If I had had my head buried in the phone, I would have walked directly into those two guys.”
When in danger, retreat or run
Like anyone who has any practical experience with real violence, Hanson advises avoiding or running from danger instead of whipping out the ninja moves you learned in that Aikido class at the Y. “Listen, you do not want to be in a fight,” Hanson said. ”Fighting is a last resort. If you see that creeper ahead, you go in the other direction and avoid [them]."
Should you carry a weapon?
Hanson says that his personal daily carry includes a firearm, but dude lives in Utah where you can do that, and he's in the self-defense racket. If you can’t or won’t carry a gun, Hanson recommends a tactical pen. “I carry one every single day, it's a regular writing pen. But it's made of a much harder metal. So I can smash windows out, I can break things, and you can carry this all over the world. It's perfectly legal.”
How CIA training can help you at work
Personal safety is one thing, but the CIA’s knowledge can help you professionally, too. “Somebody I've worked with has a great saying: CIA officers are the world's best salespeople. The only difference is, you sell vacuums, and we sell treason," Hanson said.
Hanson's supposedly CIA-approved advice for getting ahead at work isn’t that far from his advice for maintaining personal safety: “Shut up, observe, and pay attention to what's going on,” he said. “Observing and paying attention to your colleagues, which is spying one-on-one, it's super easy to do. Julie over there loves Diet Coke, and one day, you bring her a Diet Coke. Phil loves baseball, so you bring him a Red Sox cap for his birthday. That allows you to get to know your colleagues for real, but it's also putting a good foot forward. So you hopefully get ahead in the place where most people don't pay attention to anything because they're only caring about themselves.”
Lie detection with the CIA
You don't need a polygraph machine to suss out dishonesty, whether in a work or relationship sense. Hanson has an easy-to-use, presumably CIA-developed technique to turn yourself into a human lie detector. The key, according to Hanson, is to determine the baseline for how your subject responds to easy questions, then spring a hard, confrontational question at them. If you’re interviewing a potential candidate for job, you might ask a few general questions and then fix a steely look on them and say, “When was the last time you stole something?”
"Ask somebody a question and pay attention to the first three to five seconds of the response,” Hanson advised. "As human beings, we’re just not born to lie ... If I’m being honest, I don't even really have to think about the answer, because I'm telling the truth. But if I'm lying to you, I may be like, ‘can you repeat the question?’ Or I may start stammering or freeze up because I'm trying to buy time for my brain to come up with a lie.”
Using the CIA's tactics against the CIA
If you’ve been thinking, “Steve, how do you even know this guy was in the CIA?” I had the same concern. He looks the part, and talks a good game, but he could be a fake. The CIA doesn’t readily give up information on its members—I couldn’t call them for verification—so I used Hanson’s own CIA techniques against him. After establishing his baseline behavior by asking easy-to-answer questions and carefully observing him, I turned things around and hit him with: “Are you lying about being in the CIA?”
Sadly, he didn’t prove that I am actually the master interrogator by freezing up and starting to stammer. Instead, Hanson told me it was a good question, and acknowledged that fact-checking his background would be difficult. But he suggested one method for telling a CIA guy from a fraud would be getting someone who you know is in the CIA and setting up a three-way conversation so the real company man could quickly suss out the impostor.
How do you join the CIA?
If you're hoping that secret agents will visit you in the middle of the night because they've been monitoring how successful you've been at Call of Duty, that's not how it works. Most people get into the CIA by applying on the website. Make sure you have a clean background, though—criminal charges, recent use of marijuana, and any use of harder drugs will disqualify you.