My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is everyday espionage.

Freedom! Freedom! Freedom Freedom I recently got a call from a friend of mine who was in his final days undercover with CIA.

It was an awesome phone call because he was going through all the same mental and emotional processing that I went through and the Ghee went through when the two of us chose to leave CIA also.

It's a common experience for anyone who chooses mid-career to leave CIA.

It's a completely different response, a different reaction, a different level of risk

taking than those officers who are retiring after 25 or 30 years with CIA because we're leaving

in our youth. We're leaving in our prime. And more importantly, we don't have a career's worth of

networking throughout federal government

and contracting to lean on to help us after we leave the agency.

Now, when I talked to my buddy, he was in transition planning the final days at the agency,

but also planning for a big move away from the Washington, D.C. metro area.

So not only was his career changing, not only was his lifestyle changing, but he was also

physically changing his location. And he was getting ready to start up a new business,

which is something so many of us do when we leave. We go into corporate

security, corporate due diligence. Some of us keep our kind of cover identity and we don't

ever admit our CIA affiliation. Others of us kind of wear our CIA affiliation with

pride and move forward and are very open about it. But here's the thing that got tricky for him. And this is why

I think it's so important to talk about my conversation with him today with you. CIA, since I left in

2014, has been going through a revolutionary high level of attrition. Attrition is a fancy way of saying people are quitting, people are leaving, people are terminating, self-terminating themselves out of CIA because they've had enough. They don't want to be there. They don't want to work there. There's something about the federal intelligence life that they no longer want to invest their career and their well-being

in service to CIA. Now, for me, when Ji and I left in 2014, we were like, we were one of

the first to ever make that decision. We were shamed. We were guilted. Nobody understood

after the shame and the

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