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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
iHeart Podcasts. Hear more Kiss Podcast playlists and listen live on the free iHeart app. This is the Kyle and Jackie O's show, guys. Jackie O's. What's it like to be a CIA spy? Ooh. Indeed. It's quite the exciting conversation we're about to have. This guy, former CIA agent or officer or whatever they call himself, he was in the CIA for seven years, recruited straight out of college.
At 23 years old, this guy joins the CIA. What a life.
Chapter 2: What is it like to be a CIA secret agent?
I want to know... recruited like did he did he apply did he want to be an apply let's get him on his name is jason hansen good morning jason thanks for coming on hey what an exciting yeah absolutely hey so so good to be here yeah thank you uh jackie's asked when they grabbed you out of college did you apply to the cia or did do they come recruiting how does the whole recruitment process work
Well, so here's the truth is 99% of people join the agency apply. So I did apply. I was a person who applied. I went through the 12-month process, which is very in-depth. About 1% of people are those super geniuses who speak 17 languages. Those are the ones that typically get recruited, and I was not one of those. And when they got you and you trained, what do they train you?
It's a year, you said, intensive training. Is that like hand-to-hand combat, weapons, or is it interrogation, or is it all of this? It is all types of awesome training. It's evasive driving. It's hand-to-hand combat. It's shooting, all kinds of firearms training. So the training is amazing and a heck of a lot of fun. Wow. How good does that sound, Jackie?
I'm really fascinated by relationships and marriage and all of that stuff. Now, being a CIA agent, you can't tell your partner, can you, that that's what you do? Well, if you're married, yes, you can tell your spouse. I was single at the time, so I was dating, and unfortunately, you can't use that as a pickup line to pick up a girl at a bar, so they all thought I did something else.
And do you have to make it boring? What was your cover? Is it a boring job so they don't ask questions, or do you have to do a whole backstory? No, you make it the world's most boring thing.
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Chapter 3: How does the CIA recruitment process work?
So you tell them, oh, yeah, I do IT work or I do computer repair or I work in marketing. You want to make it so boring, like you said, that nobody asks you any questions. Did anyone catch you out or were they suspicious or think maybe you were having an affair? Great question, because girls are on to us. Girls, it's very difficult to bullshit to a girl and get away with it, don't you guys think?
It's not easy. Now, how did you get around that, Jason? So we have a saying is parallel the truth. So for instance, your cover needs to be something you know about. I know about marketing. I know about some IT stuff. You don't say you're an airline pilot if you don't know how to fly a plane.
So my cover paralleled the truth enough that I could easily blend in because it was pretty close to who I really am. Okay, that's fascinating. So if Brooklyn, our gay newsreader, was a CIA agent, you'd say what, Brooklyn, that you were a gay newspaper journalist? Would that be an easy sort of a cover for our guy? Exactly. Yeah, right. Yes, 100%.
He couldn't be a straight newspaper guy because you would get unstuck within the stars. Very obvious you're not a straight guy. So now, Jason, what else do we need to know? You're married now. You've got a plethora of books. He's done that Spy Secrets That Can Save Your Life. That's available to buy. He's an accomplished author. What was the scariest moment? Were you ever deployed into a country?
Like, for example, I'm a slightly overweight 53-year-old, 54, that has, like, a Santa Claus beard. Would I be good, like, as an undercover Santa Claus? Because I wouldn't be able to be thrown into Syria without standing out like, you know, like a sore thumb. Where do they send you? Yeah, but you could just...
So the beauty is there's American businessmen all over this world who travel all over the world, right? Yeah. So you just go over and you pretend you're an American businessman. You have a company that's backstopped. And so you just make yourself seem as normal as boring to a real American businessman. And it's very easy to blend in in the world we live in. Wow. Okay.
So what was the scariest or hairiest situation you'd been in?
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Chapter 4: What kind of training do CIA agents undergo?
I mean, without going into any details that are going to get me in trouble, is I had to draw my gun on more than one occasion. Thankfully, fortunately, I never had to use it because when people are looking at the wrong end of a gun, usually they obey you and they know you mean business and they're going to leave you alone.
So in real life, it is not like James Bond because there's no shooting and driving down streets in a tank and all that. You try and blend in as much as possible. And on a rare occasion, you might have to use hand-to-hand self-defense or you might have to draw your gun. But those are very few and far between. So you're talking like Jason Bourne stuff?
Like you can leap from one building, smash through a window of another and continue fighting bad guys? Are you up to that level? I... I wish I was that good. If Hollywood movies showed what spying was really like, nobody would watch the movie. I wondered that. So do you watch CIA movies? I do. And they're highly entertaining.
But again, they're not truthful whatsoever, because in the real spying world, you need to be basically a ghost. I mean, you need to go in, do your job and have nobody notice you. And that's not exciting to watch on TV. Of course. Yeah, wow. Okay, so it's nowhere near what we think it is. Okay, we've got some callers. People are ringing through, fascinated. Let's get to Michaela.
You're on the air with our CIA man. What's your question? Hi. I wanted to know, are there any, like, personal boundaries that you wouldn't cross? So, like, for example, if you're married and you have to sleep with someone else for a mission, are you allowed to say no, or do you have to go through with it?
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Chapter 5: How do CIA agents handle relationships and secrecy?
Oh, no, you've got to sleep with the other people. Is that right, Jason? You must. So, in the U.S. government, I don't know how the Australians do it, but in the U.S. government... A employee of the CIA or employee of any intelligence agency in no way can have a relationship with someone who's in a foreign country. So you can't sleep with them.
However, the Cubans, the Russians, the Chinese, their spies are sleeping with people like crazy. Is that right? Why are we holding ourselves back in the spy world? Why aren't you guys banging all the spies from the other countries like they're doing you? Because it's so much more dangerous. You're more likely to get compromised. You're more likely to flip to the other side.
So we want to make sure we're not having any gray area with our spying, especially men, because men are idiots. I was once overseas out of nowhere. Four beautiful women started hitting on me. Of course, that doesn't happen in real life because I'm not a billionaire. I'm not a movie star. So I know what's going on, and I'm not an idiot who is about to go home with one of these women.
So you think that they were trying to disable you, they pinned you as an agent and they sent these beautiful femme fatales to try and bring you down? Is that the vibe? That is. It's a honeypot. We call them honeypots. They're everywhere. They still use them all the time today. They try and seduce you and then they take pictures of you in a compromising position.
They try and blackmail you and it's a nasty business. Oh my God. And are they spies or are they hired by the spies? It depends. Sometimes they're the spies, but a lot of times they're just hired. So the Russians, you know, they may go and hire a bunch of prostitutes and say, hey, we need you to seduce these guys.
We need you to bring them back to this hotel room, which we have bugs and we have cameras at so we can record everything and blackmail them. Have you bugged other people's hotel rooms? Like, is that easy? Because it looks easy in the movie, but is it easy or is it pretty hard to stash a bug? I'll neither confirm nor deny, but if I had to guess, it's probably not that hard.
But I'm just guessing here. So it's not the world's most difficult thing. We can't say too much, Jackie. We've got Peter. Peter, you're on. You're on with our CIA man, Jason. All right, quick question. In this day and age, we're 2025, how does someone stay under the radar, communications-wise?
Yeah, because there's tracking devices, there's phone, there's signals, there's... Directing and triangulating. Yeah, great question, Peter. Jason, how do you fly under the radar with all this tech? So I use a flip phone. Like right now, I'm talking to you on a flip phone. I'm not on a smartphone. I don't have my apps tracking me.
But as you said, it can still triangulate you, even though I'm on a flip phone. So I do a lot of secret meetings with companies that I work for, and I leave my phone at home or I put it in a Faraday bag because if my phone goes to those secret meetings, then they can see where I'm at.
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Chapter 6: What are some of the scariest moments in a CIA agent's career?
I had to sign a secrecy agreement. All I will say was that the men and women of the CIA do amazing work. I love them for all those listening from the agency, tapping all our cell phones right now, but not mine because I'm on a burner phone. Ali's rung through. Ali's got a great question. Ali, you're on with Jason from the CIA, well, ex-CIA. What's your question? Hi, Jason.
I was just wondering if you have any of those like fancy gadgets that they have on in the movies, like the laser watch or the... Oh, yeah. Or the ring that has a poisonous needle in it or a phone in your shoe. Is there any of that shit exist, Jason, or is that all part of the fantasy? It's a fantasy because low tech is the way to go.
For instance, what I usually have on me is I have a gun, I have a knife, I have a tactical pen, which is just a pen that can smash somebody's face if it needs to. So that's typically what it is. You're not going to have a bunch of fancy gear or any of that. And when you're communicating too, doing dead drops. You're not using a bunch of fancy equipment.
You keep it as simple as possible, and that's how you end up not getting caught. Hey, talking about dead drops, do you guys have those caches? It looks like an electrical box for a set of traffic lights on the side of the road, but only you guys have the key, and you open it up, and it's full of hand grenades and lethal weapons? Yeah. I wish.
That's what the telephone company has, but we just do simple dead drops where you find the location, you put the information in there, then you've got to signal the guy that the drop is loaded so you can put a chalk mark on a mailbox, you can put a thumbtack on a park bench, then they know to go to the dead drop and retrieve it. But really, low-tech is the way to go in the spy world.
Wow, low-tech, eh? So all these Apple smartwatches and everything, they're not a thing in the spy world. That makes sense. Shannon. Yeah, I have no Alexa, nothing in my house that can track me. Yeah, you know what? My security lead, he doesn't let me have Wi-Fi on. I'm not allowed to have my Bluetooth on, no email, no apps at all on my phone, none whatsoever.
This is the safety protocol, right, Jason? If you don't want to be monitored, you can't have all that stuff on your phone. Correct, 100%, but nobody wants to do it. I'm like the 1% who still uses a flip phone. Yeah, I get it. Okay, Shannon, you're on with the spy. What's your question? Hey. Hey, guys. I've got a kind of two-part question. First part is casualties.
What happens if there's any fallout in casualties and it needs to sort of all stay behind the scenes? Do they sweep some unintentional casualties under the carpet? Is that what your question is? Yeah. Jason? Yeah. Casualties rarely happen. Now, we're not talking about the military. We're talking about a spy world where you want to go do your job, blend in, and nobody knows you were there.
You're basically hiding in plain sight. Right. But if something did happen, yes, there's always cleanup teams who can take care of any problems, but that's more movie stuff. Gotcha, gotcha. Okay, last call for our CIA man. Anna, hi, you're on. What's the question? Hey. Hey, guys. I just want to know, like, do you actually sleep with one eye open? Because, like, you'd always be on guard. Yeah.
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