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