CIA Teaches Officers to Cleanse Travel Routes to Avoid Detection by Foreign Governments

What was said

"If you leave the United States in your alias name and you land in Turkey and the Turkey authorities ever go look for you, now they see that your alias came from the United States. So you have to have a way of cleansing your route. So what we'd go over in Shadow Cell is how you might leave the United States and go to Mexico. So you leave the United States in one name, arrive in Mexico in that name, and then you swap identities."

Bustamante revealed sophisticated CIA tradecraft for obscuring travel patterns, explaining how operatives use third countries to prevent target nations from tracing aliases back to the United States. By traveling through intermediate locations like Mexico and switching identities between legs, officers create false trails that protect their American origins. The technique exploits lack of cooperation between foreign intelligence services to maintain cover.