You're listening to The CyberWire Network, powered by N2K.

Hi and welcome to Spycast from the Secret Files of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC.

I'm Dr. Andrew Hammond, the Museum's historian and curator.

Every week, Spycast brings you conversations with practitioners, authors and scholars who live in the world of global espionage.

If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please reach out to us at spycast at spymuseum.org.

If you like what you hear and even if you don't, please take a minute to review us on iTunes or whatever platform you listen to.

We're always looking for ways to make Spycast better and you can help.

And you mentioned the US Air Force counterintelligence course is the only members of the OSI that do that course.

Well, very interestingly, it started out that way as a course that after fighting a decade, you know, focusing on care and terrorism, we needed something to be able to turn towards counterintelligence activities inside the United States and technology protection in particular.

And we started out with just OSI individuals. However, we brought in the broadening to add seats for NCIS agents to attend and then Army MI agents.

It was very neat to be able to bring their perspective inside the course.

So we've had individuals with the IA attend and we really appreciate that diversity, especially this is a people business and being able to have good broad discussions in and outside the classroom on counterintelligence really made everyone much better professional.

Most of the people that go through the class, the first off is important to note that everyone who attends that class, they're already a special agent with OSI.

They've already received just certain amount of counterintelligence training in their basic training prior to becoming a special agent.

Later on in their career, they have the opportunity to attend that class.

And yes, the vast majority of the seats are set aside for our OSI people, but we do have a limited number of seats that we share with other services.

And that's also the case kind of in a collegial way across this community, we often have people that get to sit on other people's courses.

So for example, I I've had the opportunity to attend training from other agencies and for example, I had the privilege of being a guest speaker at the FBI Academy.

So I think there's a good cross pollination in the training environment because we work so closely together out on the streets.

And where does the best training take place and how long as a, you know, how is it, how is it orchestrated?

Yeah, so if I can, I'll tell you the basics of how OSI people get trained.

So after someone is selected to come into the organization, they go down to the federal law enforcement training center, which is in Glincode, Georgia.

...