By Caleb Campos –
As a child, Andrew Bustamente was raised to be an atheist. His mother reacted against the traditional Catholicism of her upbringing in Mexico. Andrew’s father died of a violent crime when Andrew was young.
By the time he arrived at the Air Force Academy at age 18, Andrew was a staunch atheist.
“I was vehemently anti-religion,” he told Chad Robichaux on the Resilient podcast. “If you were Christian, if you were Catholic, if you were Mormon, if you were Jewish, I didn’t care; you were clearly ignorant and you were clearly stupid because you believed that there was a god.”
At the Air Force Academy, he met and roomed next to a genuine Christian, Meredithe Jessup.
“I treated Meredithe like trash every day, and every day he woke up with a smile,” Andrew says. “Every day he showed a resilience to put up with me and my negative attitude about the Academy and my negative attitude about faith. Every day he demonstrated to me what a faithful Christian kingdom-builder looks like.
“You cannot ignore an example like that,” he adds. “That put me on my faith journey. That’s what made me question everything about my childhood. How can this man be so kind, friendly, capable, and willing to put up with all the garbage I’m putting up with at the Academy and also bear the brunt of my skepticism and my attitude?”
The seed was growing even though after a year he no longer lived next door to Meredithe and lost track of him.
Another Christian cadet named Ian also impacted Andrew. Ian invited Andrew to his wedding, and Andrew could not think of a decent wedding gift for him. He now calls it “divine intervention.”
The only thing he could think of was to journal his observations from Bible-reading and give the journal as a wedding gift. It may seem like an unusual gift, but it was how God rolled the stone for Andrew.
“I read the Bible every day for about nine months, and I would journal my thoughts about what I had read from the Old Testament through the New Testament to the Book of Revelation cover to cover,” Bustamante explains.
Reading through the Bible, by the time he got to Isaiah, he surrendered his life to Jesus Christ as his personal Savior and Lord and got saved.
He gave the journal to Ian at the wedding.
“Thank you for never straying from being my friend even when I was not a man of faith and I was the opposite of it,” he told him.
Ian received the journal with eyes of wonder. He flipped through and read some entries, his eyes growing wider.
“He threw it right back in my arms,” Andrew says. “It was like a hot potato.”
“I am touched,” Ian told Andrew. “You don’t ever let this go. This is something that needs to be with you forever.”
Later when Andrew got married, his wife saw it and thought it was so special that she transcribed the whole thing to a digital file, putting copies in the safe deposit box.
That’s notable because his wife, Jihi, is Buddhist. Inspired by Andrew’s example, she began to read through the Bible herself.
In the Air Force, Andrew got the highest clearance possible, as a nuclear missile officer. It was his job to fire nuclear missiles if given the order by the president.
It was a tedious job, sitting in an underground bunker and waiting for an order that one hopes will never be approved.
Andrew decided to get out of the Air Force.
He got a call from CIA recruitment. Initially, he didn’t know it was CIA. They’re very secretive, very mysterious. The call from caller ID “703” asked: Would you consider serving your government some other way?
In various ways, he fit the profile of a candidate, and the government reached out to him.
He went to the CIA’s Camp Peary, also known as “The Farm”, near Williamsburg, Virginia, for training. Trainees at “The Farm” learn skills essential for espionage, such as: surveillance and counter-surveillance techniques, covert communication methods, weapons handling and hand-to-hand combat, elicitation and recruitment of assets, and how to operate undercover.
Following his training, he worked in Asia, Africa, and around the world to pry information from targeted individuals.
He met his wife Jihi in the CIA.
In 2014, he left the agency and entered private life. He had to keep his cover for a few years and was provided a fake resume, with which he got a CVS job in Tampa Bay, Florida, where he and Jihi started their family.
When his identity was declassified, Andrew began sharing some of his past with the world. He launched a consulting firm, Every Day Spy, bringing his CIA skills into the business environment. He has become a popular guest on podcasts, discussing a range of topics from politics to declassified operations.
To learn more about a personal relationship with Jesus, click here
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About this writer: Caleb Campos studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy near Los Angeles.
