Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Coast to Coast AM. I'm your host,
Speaker 2: Richard Vera, our guest. Our first guest tonight is Jason Hanson.
Speaker 2: He's a former CIA spy, an officer, a security specialist
Speaker 2: in recent successful contestant of ABC's reality show Sharknank. He's
Speaker 2: also the New York best selling author of Spy Secrets
Speaker 2: That Can Save Your Life and trains all types of
Speaker 2: individuals and escapes and evasions, self defense, evasive driving, firearms,
Speaker 2: and what I want to talk about is moving off
Speaker 2: the X. He's gonna tell us all about that. Very
Speaker 2: excited to welcome Jason Hanson to Coast to Coast. Hey, Jason,
Speaker 2: nice to meet you.
Speaker 3: Hey, thanks for having me rich I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: I've spent the last couple of days powering three or
Speaker 2: two books, which normally I sit and I read all
Speaker 2: the books and I write all the questions for the show,
Speaker 2: and I think I have like two hundred questions here.
Speaker 2: So we're going to have to We're gonna have to,
Speaker 2: I hope ready. First of all, how does the CIA
Speaker 2: find you or how do you find the CIA.
Speaker 3: Well, you are very blessed and you apply. So there's
Speaker 3: this huge myth out there that you know, everybody gets
Speaker 3: recruited like some movie and everything. Well, guess what, ninety
Speaker 3: nine percent of us apply and go through the very
Speaker 3: arduous process, and probably one percent of people are actually recruited.
Speaker 3: And those were one percent can speak seventeen languages and
Speaker 3: you know, have a connection to a Ryan or North
Speaker 3: Korea or their geniuses or something like that. So I
Speaker 3: was very lucky to apply and go through the long process.
Speaker 2: And in your books, because there's some pretty advanced stories
Speaker 2: and really good details, how do you get the CIA
Speaker 2: to allow you to even share that at a book?
Speaker 3: You have to send the complete manuscripts of the agency.
Speaker 3: There's something called the Publications Review Board. They review it
Speaker 3: and you go back and forth. So they were adapt
Speaker 3: to a few pages here. There are a dact pages here,
Speaker 3: you say, can I say this? Can I say this?
Speaker 3: So that'd be another long process to make sure that
Speaker 3: I'm allowed to put it down. I'm not getting in
Speaker 3: trouble for anything I shouldn't be saying.
Speaker 2: And we should say that your site and all of
Speaker 2: your efforts are connected to us at coast to coast,
Speaker 2: am So enjoy yourself, listen to the interview so you
Speaker 2: don't have to, like, you know, jump on your laptops
Speaker 2: right now. You can listen to Jason and he can
Speaker 2: kind of school us on some stuff. I'm kind of
Speaker 2: wondering as you sit today in an election year in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four, when things seem a little a little
Speaker 2: whack of do what do you feel like is the
Speaker 2: number one safety threat that we as Americans face, like
Speaker 2: right this second.
Speaker 3: Sure, so there's two big ones. One of them people
Speaker 3: might keep familiar with the other one not so. But
Speaker 3: I'm gonna start with the not so much one. Okay,
Speaker 3: I can't tell you my sources, but there is chatter
Speaker 3: among the government and they are very afraid that after
Speaker 3: the election, states are going to try and to seed
Speaker 3: and that is going to lead to a civil war
Speaker 3: where states are literally going to succede and close their
Speaker 3: borders and there's going to be absolute chaos. Now, of course,
Speaker 3: I hope that doesn't happen. I pray that doesn't happen.
Speaker 3: I've got work, guns and Ammo and survival food and
Speaker 3: water than ninety nine percent of people out there, I
Speaker 3: believe you I build. I mean, I've got seven kids,
Speaker 3: so I didn't get married until after I left the
Speaker 3: agency and start having kids. So I've got seven young
Speaker 3: kids to provide for it. So yeah, we got a
Speaker 3: year's worth of food storage for every member of my family.
Speaker 3: So I'm ready. But I certainly hope it never happened.
Speaker 3: So that is that is thing Number one is many
Speaker 3: people in the government, a lot of chatter going on
Speaker 3: that they're afraid that they're going to succeed. There's going
Speaker 3: to be a civil war. States are going to close borders,
Speaker 3: and it's going to be extremely nasty. So that is
Speaker 3: big fear number one.
Speaker 2: And do you feel like that is based on a
Speaker 2: certain outcome of the election or no matter what the
Speaker 2: outcome of the election might be.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they are worried either way. Okay, So they are
Speaker 3: worried that, you know, obviously very divided, very you know,
Speaker 3: polarized nation we live in. Now. Now here's what I
Speaker 3: tell people, okay, is this is this is the the choke.
Speaker 3: But it's one hundred percent true. I don't worry about
Speaker 3: a civil war because it's probably no shank to you.
Speaker 3: I'm a Republican. I own a lot of guns. But
Speaker 3: that's why I tell people you don't have to worry
Speaker 3: about a civil war because guess what, Democrats they don't
Speaker 3: own all the guns. They don't know how to fight,
Speaker 3: they don't do anything. So it's not something we should
Speaker 3: have to worry about. Now. What you do have to
Speaker 3: worry about is they are good at burning things down,
Speaker 3: setting things on fire, righting, and looting. So but either
Speaker 3: outcome of the election, they are worried there's going to
Speaker 3: be absolute chaos.
Speaker 2: Well let's go. I'm going to shift back and forth
Speaker 2: between your two books, if you don't mind, because they're
Speaker 2: both excellent, by the way, and the first book that
Speaker 2: you wrote, I think within the first five pages you
Speaker 2: already had me ordering a tactical pen for me. And
Speaker 2: my daughter just started at college in New York, so
Speaker 2: she just moved. She's eighteen. She lives in New York.
Speaker 2: And she was walking around calling me on nine to
Speaker 2: eleven from the memorial site and I said, you and
Speaker 2: your friends, you guys got your head on a swift
Speaker 2: and she's like, it's actually very peaceful here, and I'm like,
Speaker 2: you guys gotta pay attention. I was telling her about
Speaker 2: reading your book, and I said, you just can't wander
Speaker 2: around without having a goal because you don't have a baseline.
Speaker 2: I've putting your book all over the place. But one
Speaker 2: of the things I worry about with having a family,
Speaker 2: and especially having you know, a wife and a young daughter,
Speaker 2: what do you tell I guess guys too, but what
Speaker 2: are you telling women about paying attention and making sure
Speaker 2: that you're you're pretty certain that you're not being followed?
Speaker 3: Sure? I mean here, Here's what I say is, unfortunately
Speaker 3: you and I both know that ninety nine percent of
Speaker 3: people these days their heads buried in their phone. They
Speaker 3: have no idea what's going on. They're walking and they're
Speaker 3: almost walking into telephone poles or walking into the person
Speaker 3: in front of them. So I say, listen, here's what
Speaker 3: criminals do. They case everybody. They may spend five minutes casing.
Speaker 3: They may case somebody for weeks if they're casting somebody
Speaker 3: to the house. Right. But I give an example. I
Speaker 3: live in a small town in Utah. Walmart's the place
Speaker 3: to go. That's where we go grocery shopping. So some
Speaker 3: crackhead is looking for his next fix. He's going to
Speaker 3: stand in front of wal Mart. Watch everybody coming out
Speaker 3: and say, hey, who's going to be the easy victim?
Speaker 3: Who's going to fight back the least. So if your
Speaker 3: head is up, if you're looking, if you make eye contact,
Speaker 3: the criminals going to say, well, you know what, nine
Speaker 3: hund percent of people are coming out of this walmart
Speaker 3: with their head down, they're gonna be easy. But hey,
Speaker 3: that woman or that mother or that whomever came out
Speaker 3: with their head up and they're actually looking around. I
Speaker 3: don't want to mess with them. So it's actually easy
Speaker 3: not to be a victim these days because everybody else
Speaker 3: is such eedy pickings.
Speaker 2: Can you even tell a story about I think your
Speaker 2: wife in a home depot where she felt like somebody
Speaker 2: was kind of showing up in a lot of aisles
Speaker 2: and she noticed right away that he wasn't shopping for anything.
Speaker 2: He was just kind of appearing in the same place
Speaker 2: as she was, So in that regard, he was kind
Speaker 2: of maybe checking her out as a potential victim. And
Speaker 2: what did she end up doing to kind of get
Speaker 2: out of that situation?
Speaker 3: Sure, So that is called a surveillance detection root SDR
Speaker 3: for short, and what it means is in the spy world,
Speaker 3: if you're going, let's say you're a Russian or you're
Speaker 3: over in Russia. You're trying to crew rushing spine. You
Speaker 3: don't just simply get in your car and go straight
Speaker 3: to out. Just make the s McDonald to meet with him, right,
Speaker 3: because if you're followed a McDonald's both or exposed. So
Speaker 3: you run a surveillance detection route, which means you might
Speaker 3: go to Walmart, then you might go to the gym,
Speaker 3: then you may go to the dry cleaners, then you
Speaker 3: may go get gas, and in each of those locations
Speaker 3: you're seeing if you have any surveillance on you. So
Speaker 3: that's an SDR. Now in the real world, we don't
Speaker 3: have to hide it, we don't have to blend in
Speaker 3: because we're not overseas being spies. So my wife, she's
Speaker 3: in the home depo as you mentioned, she's in the
Speaker 3: gardening session. Some guy's kind of acting weird. She goes
Speaker 3: over to lumber. About two minutes later, the guy shows
Speaker 3: up in lumber She goes and looks at washers and dryers.
Speaker 3: Same thing. Two minutes later, guy shows up in Washington dryers.
Speaker 3: She goes to one more place and guy the guy
Speaker 3: shows up. So by this point she knows she is
Speaker 3: being followed. Now at the time, I was actually in
Speaker 3: Las Vegas doing training or else that would have gone
Speaker 3: over there. But I just told her, Hey, go to
Speaker 3: a manager, tell the manager to walk you to your car.
Speaker 3: And that's exactly what she did. And I said, run
Speaker 3: an SDR bone, which means check your mirror and make
Speaker 3: sure you're not being followed home, and you'll go around
Speaker 3: the block and if the same car is with you
Speaker 3: after you've gone in a circle, will obviously you know
Speaker 3: you're being followed. So my wife did that, she was fine.
Speaker 3: I have no idea who the person was, if they
Speaker 3: knew who we were, or they just picked my wife
Speaker 3: at random. But anybody can run a surveillance detection room.
Speaker 3: It takes five minutes.
Speaker 2: What about if you're in your car, if you're you know,
Speaker 2: a man or or whatever or whoever, driving in your
Speaker 2: car and you feel like you know that car has
Speaker 2: been around me for a long time. Do you tell
Speaker 2: people not to go into their you know, the subdivision
Speaker 2: or the area where they live.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely not. I would not. I mean I would
Speaker 3: just start taking random terms. Because again, the beauty of
Speaker 3: us being civilians here is when you're overseas and you're
Speaker 3: a spy, you have to blend in. If you start
Speaker 3: teeing random terms, they're going to know that you're a
Speaker 3: spy trying to pick up on surveillance. But here we
Speaker 3: don't care because we're not doing anything we should. So
Speaker 3: if you start taking a bunch of bizarre random turns
Speaker 3: and that car is still on you, you run your
Speaker 3: very quick surveillance detection route, and then you again call
Speaker 3: nine one one. You can drive to the police station,
Speaker 3: drive to the fire station, but obviously don't go home.
Speaker 2: I think there's a part of us too, And I'm
Speaker 2: not trying to be funny here, I'm just being practical.
Speaker 2: I wonder if your wife is upset that she didn't
Speaker 2: get to pick up what she needed at home depot
Speaker 2: because she had to run. She had to get off
Speaker 2: the X.
Speaker 3: As you say, my wife does so much shopping. I'm
Speaker 3: sure she went back the very next day, so I
Speaker 3: think she's fine with all the Amazon packages coming.
Speaker 2: In with I think that's right. I said, it's the
Speaker 2: same thing to my wife. She's like, why would I
Speaker 2: be in a home depot. I'd order her online exactly.
Speaker 2: She's like, why are you doing that? You just make
Speaker 2: sure now let's talk about that. As a former CIA guy,
Speaker 2: how often do you answer your front door if you're
Speaker 2: not expecting somebody?
Speaker 3: Never? So I don't own my home in my own name.
Speaker 3: It's owned in an LLC rather than a trust. Because
Speaker 3: being that I'm at CIA, crazy has come out of
Speaker 3: the woodwork. I probably get a couple of death threats here.
Speaker 3: I want to say a couple is probably like four.
Speaker 3: It's not like a hundred or anything. But I do
Speaker 3: get a few death threats here. So I have nothing
Speaker 3: come to my home, meaning no Domino's pizza, no mail.
Speaker 3: I use ups stores for my mailboxes. I use mailboxes,
Speaker 3: et cetera for my mailboxes. So nobody should be coming
Speaker 3: to my door that I don't know about. And if
Speaker 3: somebody comes, you know, I'll just go look. We have
Speaker 3: a window where I can see and they can't see me.
Speaker 3: And okay, is it you know some guy who's loss?
Speaker 3: Is somebody sketchy? But I think the thing people mistake
Speaker 3: is they open their door, meaning I have no problem
Speaker 3: talking to somebody through my door saying hey, can I
Speaker 3: help you can? People don't like that societal awkwardness. It
Speaker 3: doesn't bother me, so I say don't open the door,
Speaker 3: just talk to them through the door and then you
Speaker 3: can find out what's really going on.
Speaker 2: Well that seems kind of old school, I'm wondering about
Speaker 2: now that I've seen your sort of you don't really
Speaker 2: trust technology, So you're not a ring camera guy, then,
Speaker 2: are you.
Speaker 3: No? I am very low tech. Low tech is better.
Speaker 3: So people always asking me like, hey, I've got one
Speaker 3: of those keypads. Why FID connected on my front door?
Speaker 3: So I have to have my key and I say, listen,
Speaker 3: I don't do anything. I have good old fashioned launs.
Speaker 3: I use schleg or Medico because those are higher quality brands,
Speaker 3: so I don't have to worry about people picking my
Speaker 3: lungs on that. But yeah, low tech is the way
Speaker 3: to go to stay out the radar. I mean when
Speaker 3: I travel and I, you know, stay someplace and I
Speaker 3: can barely figure out the thermostat because it's got like
Speaker 3: twenty seven million different settings. Like what a pain in
Speaker 3: the body.
Speaker 2: My father was in the army in the fifties and
Speaker 2: he did well, I can't exactly say what he did,
Speaker 2: but he did surveillance. And I remember when email came out,
Speaker 2: he told me He's like, don't leave anything in a voicemail.
Speaker 2: Don't send anything in an email that you don't that
Speaker 2: you wouldn't be okay with being broadcast throughout the entire world,
Speaker 2: Because he was saying, even back in the late fifties,
Speaker 2: they had the technology to really look in and spy
Speaker 2: on things, and pretty much any transmission was up for grabs.
Speaker 3: You're one hundred percent right. When I joined the agency
Speaker 3: back in the day and I started ordinal, I was like,
Speaker 3: holy smokes, you know, I had no idea and my
Speaker 3: eyes were open. So yeah, I can't remember who's got
Speaker 3: the famous quote, but you know, don't say anything in
Speaker 3: email or on a voice that you wouldn't mind seeing
Speaker 3: on the front page of the newspaper the next day
Speaker 3: kind of thing. And so I do some very we
Speaker 3: saturs phrases. I do some consulting for people, and it's
Speaker 3: very very very private consulting, meaning no phone calls, no emails,
Speaker 3: and we meet in person. And when we meet in person,
Speaker 3: we leave our cell phones at home because if somebody
Speaker 3: triangulates us, meaning somebody triangulates my phone in their phone
Speaker 3: and says, wait a minute, Jason, and I'm just making
Speaker 3: the names up. Bob and John and Tom. We're all
Speaker 3: at those location together. Oh, we know something's going down,
Speaker 3: so we want to make sure that even our cell
Speaker 3: phones can't track where we're meeting and everything. And it's
Speaker 3: like nothing whatsoever electronic has bought these meetings. Everything's left
Speaker 3: at home. And that's how we know that, Okay, we're safe.
Speaker 3: We're gonna actually talk about what we need to talk about. Now.
Speaker 2: Your first book, I think you talked about that you
Speaker 2: don't even have a smartphone. You had a flip phone,
Speaker 2: and I wonder, like, in twenty twenty four, are you
Speaker 2: still a flip phone guy?
Speaker 3: I am. It's what I am on right now. I
Speaker 3: love flip phones. I have never sent a text message
Speaker 3: in my life.
Speaker 2: Believe it is not really it's almost hard to believe.
Speaker 3: Trail never to take the text message in my life.
Speaker 2: And explain to me why this is being prepared in
Speaker 2: not paranoid. Walk me through why that's like, why we're
Speaker 2: not Give give me a reason why we should still
Speaker 2: relax while we're being prepared and not paranoid.
Speaker 3: Sure, so I don't do it because for security reasons,
Speaker 3: but also for time reasons, meaning I work a lot,
Speaker 3: I've got seven kids, my business keeps me incredibly busy,
Speaker 3: so I don't want anybody texting me and bothering me
Speaker 3: in addition to the security reason, So if somebody needs me,
Speaker 3: they call me my number, I know they've actually got
Speaker 3: something to tell me about, to talk to me about.
Speaker 3: But as far as paranoia, I'm gonna I'll tell you
Speaker 3: a quick story. So woman gets pulled over in her
Speaker 3: car place. Officer walks up to this woman and says, ma'am,
Speaker 3: do you have any weapons in your car? And she says, well,
Speaker 3: I've got a gun on my head and he says, okay,
Speaker 3: you got any other weapons? Is like, well, my other hip,
Speaker 3: I've got another gun. He says, okay, any other weapons.
Speaker 3: She says, well in the back seat, I've got a shotgun.
Speaker 3: Says geez, okay anymore she's well, in the trunk I
Speaker 3: got in AR fifteen. And he goes, ma'am, what the
Speaker 3: heck are you worried about? And the woman says, not
Speaker 3: a damn thing. That is how I feel like people are, like,
Speaker 3: why do you have a year's supply of food storage?
Speaker 3: Why do you have water storage hundreds of gallons, you know,
Speaker 3: in your garage in your basement? Why do you have
Speaker 3: a budg got location with a well because it gives
Speaker 3: me a peace of mind, Like when COVID hit and
Speaker 3: everybody freaked down, even my small town, like the Walmart
Speaker 3: sholves went empty. I mean, I got enough survival, but
Speaker 3: I don't care. I don't need anything. So it is
Speaker 3: that peace of mind. I'm not you know people say
Speaker 3: in paraidam whatever. I mean, it just allows me to
Speaker 3: sleep tonight. I don't have to worry about like my
Speaker 3: lights go out. I've got generators, so I've got solar
Speaker 3: gas propane, whereas in I got a buddy in Ohio
Speaker 3: his lights go out, it's the end of the world
Speaker 3: that he's freaking out my generator. You know they're not
Speaker 3: that expensive these days, So peace.
Speaker 2: Of mind is why I do it. Let's talk about
Speaker 2: some CIA stuff. The book that you just came out
Speaker 2: with great it's linked at Coast to Coast am dot com.
Speaker 2: And I'm kind of interested in the planning of when
Speaker 2: you do a CIA CIA operation. How long does that
Speaker 2: plan take and how fast do you have to be
Speaker 2: ready to move the plan B when things go sideways?
Speaker 2: Is I assume they do a lot?
Speaker 3: Sure depends what this meaning. What is the tasking. The
Speaker 3: requirement is it, Hey, we've got this two week window too.
Speaker 3: There's a I'm just making this up. Obviously, there's a
Speaker 3: European professor we need to talk to. He's going to
Speaker 3: beet this conference in Europe. We've only got a two
Speaker 3: week window. Well that one you've got to act very
Speaker 3: very fast. Or hey, there's this general in a foreign country.
Speaker 3: We need to recruit him because he's got plans and
Speaker 3: we need to do within the next two years. So
Speaker 3: everything is obviously different timeframe. But going back to me
Speaker 3: not being paranoid, Well, now I'm gonna sound paranoid, is
Speaker 3: we have backups, to the backups, to the backups. So CVC,
Speaker 3: yeah exactly. I mean people always are like Cason, why
Speaker 3: do you have so many water filters? Well, what them
Speaker 3: may break? Or why do you have as I mentioned,
Speaker 3: three generators, Well my gas goes down, I still have
Speaker 3: my propane. I so I'm back. I have redundancy like crazy,
Speaker 3: And that's one of the biggest things that the kind
Speaker 3: of the agency pounded into my head.
Speaker 2: Have you seen a spy movie or a TV show
Speaker 2: that you think gets the act of spying down right?
Speaker 3: There was a television show called Quantico, and it was
Speaker 3: a it was an FBI show, but I believe in
Speaker 3: season I think I watch the first two seasons, and
Speaker 3: in season two they went to the agency's super secret
Speaker 3: quote unquote facility at the farm and they did some
Speaker 3: training there. I think it was like CIA FBI joint
Speaker 3: training and whoever the technical consultant on that one was
Speaker 3: obviously an agency guy, but they did a good job
Speaker 3: with that. Some of the things were okay, they were
Speaker 3: talking about SDRs. It was more realistic. However, of course,
Speaker 3: most of the shows are very, very facetious because I
Speaker 3: tell people, like listen, a lot of this stuff in
Speaker 3: the spy world is totally boring. It's ninety nine percent
Speaker 3: normal work and one percent hang on for dear life.
Speaker 3: So if the movie showed it was really like, nobody
Speaker 3: want to go see those movies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't want to watch a paperwork show because
Speaker 2: I'm sure there's a lot of that to.
Speaker 3: You don't want to watch a show where I'm running
Speaker 3: at two hour SDR just walking around the streets. I mean,
Speaker 3: that's not exciting.
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