Ex-CIA Agent Rates All The 'Mission: Impossible' Movies | How Real Is It? | Insider

Could somebody scale a building and infiltrate using, you know, a laser cutting glass thing? Yes, it could be done, but no a**hole would do that in broad daylight. My name is Andrew Bustamante and I am a former covert CIA intelligence officer. I served with CIA for seven years in the National Clandestine Service and now I'm the founder of Everyday Spy, where I teach spy skills to everyday people. Today we're going to be looking at the Mission Impossible movies and determining just how real they are. So this, I think, is very apropos for the time, because this was how we used to protect information. They're downloading this NOC list, the NOC list. It stands for non-official cover, meaning this is a list of assets and agents around the world that are not protected by any kind of government cover backstopping. You would have it on a standalone server in a standalone computer. So they both have matching gloves on and that's not how it works in the real world. In the real world, each individual part of a team has a completely different set of kit. If they're captured separate from the operation, you don't want them to have matching kit. Otherwise, that gives the police or the local law enforcement a chance to tie the two together. Also, you'll see that Ethan is wearing a pair of glasses and they're just normal glasses that hook over his ears. In the real world, when you're on any kind of field operation, you don't leave anything to chance. His lenses would be custom made to fit his eyes, but then they'd be actually strapped close around his face. When it comes to this specific activity, where Ethan is being lowered into a room from above, we do learn how to belay each other. We do learn how to work as counterbalances and how to use some of these rope and pulley systems in different types of arenas. The other thing that you see happening here is that there's multiple people who are supporting Ethan. You've got one person who's supporting him in the tech van, and then you have another person who's actually belaying him from above. Now, support elements are very realistic in spy operations. You take away some of the little silly nuances. I mean, this is a pretty solidly realistic representation of what a field officer's capabilities are. I would really give this about a 7 on a scale of 10. Rock climbing is 100% a thing that CIA officers get into because being alone is where we gather our energy, we clear our minds, we get creative. We might find ourselves in a position where we would have to do this to escape out of a dangerous scenario. So for those reasons, we do have advanced schools to teach our officers how to do some pretty amazing things. Even Ethan chuckles at that. Look at that. So first, keep in mind that in the Mission Impossible movies, Ethan Hunt works for an organization called IMF, the Impossible Mission Force. And the IMF is actually a contractor underneath the CIA. If he was a full-fledged CIA officer, he would not get a secret briefing or a classified briefing anywhere except inside of a facility that houses what's known as a SCIF, Secure Compartmented Information Facility, and most certainly not delivered through a shoulder-held rocket from some strange guy in a helicopter. That is, in our terminology, called a live drop. You may select any two team members, but it is essential that the third team member be Naya Nordol-4. She is a civilian. The fact that he's being given a team, that is very real. Also, the fact that part of his team includes a professional thief, not a professional intelligence officer. That is also fairly accurate. We oftentimes work with convicted felons because felons and spies really aren't that different. The difference is a spy is trained and given cover and authority to break laws, where a thief learns through the school of hard knocks. This message will self-destruct in five seconds. Nobody can think of Mission Impossible without also thinking of that line that says, this message will self-destruct. Now, in real life, nothing self-destructs because there has to be what's known as an audit trail. In order for the government to be able to demonstrate that they're spending those tax dollars in a judicious and legitimate way, I would give this about a seven in terms of accuracy for how a true field operations officer will go through essentially resetting themselves before taking a new mission. Spy cameras are something that has been well-known about espionage for a long time. But what people don't understand is that the value of a spy camera isn't necessarily in how it's concealed as much as it's about the power and accuracy of the camera itself. The fact that in this clip, we're seeing a hidden camera inside of a beauty mirror, but when you actually see the quality of the camera image, it's relatively low. That's actually the opposite of what I would expect to see in the real world. So instead, what you would most likely see is a very high quality camera inside something heavier. Oh my gosh. We all joined CIA so that we can do what Ethan Hunt does. Let's be honest. It is true that a prosthetic can be created from 3D modeling, but it's not really true that that 3D modeling is gonna come through some sort of custom built piece of photographic equipment, like the powder kit that the agent was using in this. You need to have all of the right angles and all of the right depth of field from each of those angles so that you can create a proper model. That's called a principle or the impersonation of a principle, which is dangerous for lots of reasons. Voice, behavior, tonality. We don't ever impersonate a principle. What we try to do is we try to impersonate someone who's within the circle of trust of a principle. That way, the only person that we're really trying to trick is the principle themselves. Having a full face prosthetic to be that principle, the risk is just compounded. I'm gonna have to give this one about a three out of 10 for accuracy. I mean, everything in this clip is wrong. According to CIA training, during this entire negotiation, Ethan is pleading, which reinforces that the principle is the one in control. Control is an incredibly important thing in an intelligence operation. You always wanna be the one in control. This is called a hostile negotiation. We're actually given a very specific script. We'll repeat our name. We'll repeat our social security number. We'll repeat our cover. We'll repeat whatever core truths are relevant to us in that operation, which is actually what happens when you threaten somebody. They really do oftentimes fall to this base level repetition. I didn't do it. So we're trained to mimic that repeating pattern so that it protects us from giving away information. None of that is being used here by Ethan in this example. The only way you're gonna get what you want is for you to- The trick to any negotiation, you always wanna cause as much stress as possible to the other person because the person under stress is going to make poor strategic decisions through the process of that negotiation. And unfortunately, as I watched this clip, I'm rooting for the bad guy because he's the one doing this right. It's not what I would expect from a trained intelligence operative. But in terms of reality, I mean, I'm gonna give this an eight in terms of what a true hostile negotiation between violent people would look like. I really like the disguise in this much better than some of the other disguise work that we've seen. A simple prosthetic nose and mustache piece is exactly what we would use and prefer to use because it reduces the amount of what can go wrong unlike a full head prosthetic. He doesn't speak, which is very wise. That is actually very accurate when you're wearing prosthetics or when you're trying to appear as somebody with an advanced disguise, you're not going to speak because there's no reason to add that extra layer of potential risk into your operation. That kind of tech is extremely difficult to make. It's just not realistic. The cost, the time, the risk is all too great to create tech like that. And then surprisingly, the thing that holds most tech back in the field is actually just the availability of battery power. The larger a piece of tech is, the more battery it requires. So as nice as it is to fold the whole thing up into a briefcase, the battery that would be required to run that thing would be a second like wheeling suitcase. Now what you see Ethan do is he goes from his disguise, he rips away parts of his disguise and essentially now he looks like a tourist instead of looking like a Russian general. That technique is called a gap act. Now the difference between how Ethan did it and how we do it in the field is Ethan did it in like plain sight. That's a very high risk place to transform. In the real world, you would find a place where you have 15 to 30 seconds with nobody observing you at all. You wouldn't just discard your hat and fake nose on the corner like you saw him do. He just ripped it off and threw it off to the side because that leaves evidence. Instead, your kit would include everything is reversible, including a reversible bag so that you would leave no trace behind that you ever changed in the first place. Insolidated insurance. How may I help you? A lot of really interesting stuff. He picks up that phone and he calls a number. That number is what's known as a backstop number. When you hear the phone pick up and say such and such insurance company, that is also what's known as a verbal parole. That's how Ethan knows he's talking to the right phone number. He gives his paroles or what's known as bona fides. That makes sure that the person on the other end of the line knows that they're talking to the right person. And then he disposes of the phone here in this little sewer grate where nobody can retrieve it. The verbal parole, the bona fides and the disposal is all very accurate. The first half of the clip with all the tech and the disguise stuff up front, I would give that more like a 3 out of 10 in terms of reality. But the back end of the clip, that's a much more realistic clip. I would give that closer to a 6 or a 7 in terms of reality. 50% of his tech fails him and he still has to figure it out anyways. That is so awesomely real. Now, when he takes the glove off and he throws it over his shoulder, again, we've talked about this, Tom. We don't discard our equipment in the field because it leaves a trail of evidence. When the tech fails, what he would really do is he would stash it away in his belt. Could somebody scale a building and infiltrate using, you know, a laser cutting glass thing? Yes, it could be done, but no asshole would do that in broad daylight. A spy's best friend is the concealment of night. And the fact that he's executing this operation in broad daylight in the United Arab Emirates, it's just not accurate. It's really important to understand that all of espionage is illegal. What happens is your government sanctions you to carry out illegal acts. Ethan could very much be prosecuted by an Emirati judge or any neighboring allied country if they were to capture him engaging in the act of espionage on behalf of the United States. So what you see Ethan doing here is he's breaking into a server room, most likely because he's sabotaging the server itself. Now, this is an example of what we call a human-enabled technical operation. So here, Ethan is using human skills to enable a technical operation that otherwise would have been much harder or potentially not feasible at all without a human element. So I'm going to give this about a five out of 10 for accuracy overall. Action sequence here. Okay. One of the things I love the most about car scenes is having been trained in how to actually tactically and offensively drive a car. We're taught at the agency to use our vehicle as a weapon as much as we use it as a defensive tool. Whenever it comes to any kind of vehicle, you're never using the front of the vehicle. When Ethan runs over the motorcycle directly in front of him, a real combat driver would have moved to one side of the alley in the hopes that they'd be able to nick or push the rear tire of the motorcycle out of position so that the motorcycle would tumble without blocking the car itself. There are a number of not natural vehicle movements. Handbrake turns are real and handbrake turns are very useful things. However, to do a handbrake turn, you need to be moving on gravel terrain or on terrain that is loose or with bald tires. You have to loosen the whole car's grip with the ground. Not only that, but you need to actually have compression on one side of the car or the other so that you would actually get the spinning motion that you see them have there. Driving in reverse is a super powerful way to drive because it protects your front engine and it turns all the space behind you into essentially weaponized space. However, there's only one gear when you drive in reverse. So you really max out at about 25 miles an hour. So you see them collapse on their trunk and that's when their airbags deploy, which isn't how it would work. There are high-speed chases in foreign operations overseas. In reality, they would have been driving much, much slower than that. High speed is really more like 25 to 30 miles an hour. Vehicles around the world are basically built so that those front airbags will deploy when there's a collision between 12 and 25 miles an hour. So when they rear-end that motorcycle, that would have been the end of the scene because the airbags would have deployed. That was not very accurate. So I would give that probably like a two or a three out of 10. This is out there. Oh my gosh. Could an assassination be scheduled in an opera? Absolutely. It wouldn't be the way that it's portrayed in this scene. You've got this weird sort of triangle of shooters. So you generally don't try to get multiple weapons smuggled into an access-controlled area because if one of them is captured, then the security is increased for all the others. Usually you would just try to have one person in there or even better, you would pre-place one weapon and have one person be in charge of capturing or liberating that pre-placed weapon. The fact that each of these weapons was individually crafted to look like something else, that is completely unrealistic. When you create a weapon, especially a high-accuracy weapon, even just aligning your targeting elements with the actual barrel of the weapon is extremely difficult. So for that reason, we would prefer to actually smuggle in a fully functional weapon. I would also say that, you know, the CIA experimented with these weapons back in the 60s, the 50s, the Cold War era. Umbrellas that have been fabricated to fire bullets, pens, lipsticks, that's supposed to be carried out in a natural course, right? Like an umbrella is something you would naturally point on the way to, you know, deploy it or open it. You can see that they're trying to cover some of the noise that's coming from these suppressed rifles. Now it is possible to suppress rifles up to a certain caliber, but then there becomes such a high caliber that it just isn't feasible to suppress it. There's an incredible amount of complexity here that is well outside of the norm. This is probably the worst performing of all the clips that we've seen so far. I'm going to give this one a generous 1 out of 10. I owe CIA an eternal debt of gratitude for teaching me how much it honestly hurts to get punched in a vulnerable spot. We're trained in, not even in mixed martial arts. We're really trained in a very simple kinetic fighting system that's designed so that we don't get captured. So one of the things I really enjoyed about this scene is that they highlighted those vulnerable spots. We saw a throat punch. We saw using a briefcase to hit somebody across the temple. We saw solar plexus punches. We saw solar plexus kicks. Now some of the places where it didn't really work, how quickly people recovered really only takes one or two key strikes before you are done. The other thing I didn't really like was both Ethan and his co-fighter were taking turns. We're specifically trained not to take turns when you're two on one an opponent. That's something that happens in the movies. You both attack at the same time to overwhelm your opponent. Ethan just grabs the guy and runs him into a wall. There's the struggle over the handgun at the end and there's this resisting. We're taught that whenever there's a moment of resistance like that, you change tactics, right? You steer the muzzle away from yourself. You use that as a chance to break out of those locked moments so that you can get back to a place of tactical dominance. I would give this probably a four out of 10 for reality. This is an interesting scene. If Ethan is undercover and the police officer is not associated with his cover operation, he's not going to save her. When you're undercover, your mission takes priority over everything. So there's a couple of things here. When the scene first starts, how many weapons are pointed at Ethan? None of them. He would do a quick draw and then he would actually go in order of the other drawn weapons. So he would shoot the gentleman close to him. He would shoot the guy on the right, the guy on the left, and then the guy with his hand on his waistband last. Not only that, but when Ethan actually attacks, he does one majorly wrong thing as he continues to fire. One, two, three, all without moving. Movement is the first thing that we're taught in any kind of counter-attack situation. So Ethan would have actually moved more like four to five feet. So he would have shot, shot again, continued to move, shot again, shot again. So the fact that Ethan waited so long to shoot and then shot all four folks from the same, essentially, one foot area kind of shows how this was made for a camera and not made for reality. A really solid seven in terms of reality. And this is why nobody talks about Mission Impossible. You know, Tom Cruise did that stunt and he didn't just do it once. He did it multiple times to get everything right. CIA teaches us how to ride a number of different types of vehicles, right? From four-wheel vehicles, two-wheel vehicles, motorized vehicles. And the idea that, you know, you would drive a perfectly good motorcycle off a cliff, that's not something we're trained to do. And then to be able to deploy a parachute and essentially base jump from a motorcycle, the battery is just thick and it's awesome. I would give this a 10. That is a real man riding a real motorcycle off of a real ramp into the air. In the real world, there is no Ethan Hunt. For the most part, a lucky CIA career will have one moment of excitement that even comes close to what Ethan does. One explosion, one high-speed car chase, one border crossing where your disguise works. My favorite spy show is actually season one of The Americans because season one of The Americans was really an excellent example of what true espionage looks like. They kind of built that foundation around real tradecraft, real relationships, deep cover. If you enjoyed this video, make sure you click on the link above to get the next.