I’m not a natural athlete. This sad fact became evident at a very inconvenient time—my first day of new agent training at the FBI Academy. New agents are tested in physical fitness and required to accumulate certain points in different areas. I landed at the bottom in...
I worked as an FBI counterintelligence agent for twenty years and loved the challenge of being a spy catcher. However, when I was offered the position of spokesperson for the FBI in Northern California, I jumped at the chance. It felt like the next step in...
The ability to accurately interpret body language is a tricky business. A shrug could mean a person doesn’t know what’s going on, or it could mean they don’t care. When someone crosses their arms, it could mean that they are shutting you out of the conversation or...
The first thing I learned as an FBI agent was that I would need to be emotionally intelligent if I planned to live long enough to spend my retirement pension. Agents who are emotionally intelligent have the ability to read the emotions of others before a gun is drawn...
Popular movies and books lead people to believe spies are coerced to work for the U.S. government. To be successful, the FBI agent resorts to either sheer force or extortion to goad the foreign spy to be cooperative. Once beaten into submission, the free world is...
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