A runt of a Shetland pony named Socks helped teach me how to overcome adversity. We lived on a remote cattle ranch in Wyoming, and my grandfather bought him for me when I was four years old. Socks had a hard and dry little heart; he only wanted to terrorize his rider....
For almost twenty-five years, I studied the habits and mindsets of foreign spies assigned to the U.S. to steal American classified and proprietary information. I needed to find ways to get these people to talk to me and understand how they thought about themselves,...
COVID, a troubled economy, and a violent rise of nationalism worldwide have ushered in a modern version of the Dark Ages. Doom and gloom scenarios assault us at every turn. There are days when we need to be Pollyanna on steroids to remain positive. Much research has...
I grew up with a strong sense of right and wrong, and those values impacted my deepest beliefs about my behavior. They guided my decisions, including the one to become an FBI agent at the age of twenty-five. While values and morals are related, they differ because...
The four years I worked as the spokesperson for the FBI in Northern California were the busiest of my career. I’d spent the previous twenty years as an agent investigating counterintelligence and espionage cases. But, when I entered the world of public relations, I...
As an undercover FBI agent, I had to learn how to lie to people. This is ironic because if an agent is less than honest in their investigations or their behavior toward others, it’s a legitimate reason to be fired from the FBI. I’d been raised to be honest with people...
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