26-Year Army Counterintelligence Veteran & Founder of IXN Solutions — on How to Prevent Corporate Espionage, Spotting a Recruited Spy, Insider Threats, Elicitation Tactics & Building a Culture of Trust
Most people think of espionage as something that happens in embassies and government basements — not in the cubicle next to theirs. Ryan Rambo spent 26 years proving otherwise. As an Army counterintelligence veteran who went on to build an insider threat program inside a $43 billion global corporation with 28,000 employees across 165 locations, he has seen, firsthand, how foreign intelligence officers identify, approach, and slowly recruit ordinary employees — and how counterintelligence professionals do the very same thing in reverse: identify, exploit, neutralize.
In this episode of the Be Yourself Podcast, Ryan walks through a real case — a corporate director of cybersecurity who came onto the radar simply because he planned a strange trip to Belarus to meet a "pen pal" from the Russian Embassy — and uses it to unpack how slowly and subtly espionage actually unfolds. From there, the conversation moves into the practical: why happy employees don't steal from their companies, why data classification has to come before personnel security, why the Tesla self-driving-technology theft case should worry every founder, and why the single best elicitation technique in American culture is simply making a wrong statement and letting people correct you.
It's a masterclass not just in protective intelligence, but in understanding people — their motivations, their vulnerabilities, and the quiet signals that, if you know how to look for them, can save a company from losing everything it's built.
Ryan Rambo spent 26 years as an Army counterintelligence professional, working operations and investigations on the defensive side of one of the world's oldest disciplines — espionage, which he describes as "the second oldest profession known to man," with a history stretching back roughly 7,000 years. From government assignments overseas to building a counterintelligence program from scratch inside a $43 billion corporation with 28,000 employees in 165 locations, Ryan has spent his career identifying the people trying to steal information — and teaching others how to spot them too.
Today he runs IXN Solutions — a name that stands for the core of his philosophy: Identify, Exploit, Neutralize. The company works on both the government side, training the next generation of counterintelligence professionals, and the commercial side, where it offers training and awareness programs, fractional insider threat and counterintelligence support, a case-management technology called 351X, and a thought-leadership arm built around the CI Press podcast, where Ryan and his colleagues demystify counterintelligence and share the stories of the "legends" who shaped the field.
Ryan is also a close friend and frequent collaborator of Jim Lawler — a former CIA officer turned spy-recruiter-turned-novelist who appeared on a previous episode of the Be Yourself Podcast. As Ryan puts it, the two of them are "two sides of the same coin": one spent a career trying to recruit spies, the other spent a career trying to stop them.
he defined counterintelligence as the discipline of protecting against adversaries outside your walls while catching the enemies inside. So, it's the cat and mouse game of the intelligence community.
happy employees don't steal your stuff. They don't sell it for money. They don't take it to a competitor... if I can identify a toxic leader, I can almost guarantee you where your next insider threat's going to come from.
one of the the best elicitation techniques that anybody can use is to make a wrong statement... an American must correct you... they can't wait to give you all of the information and show you how smart they are.