Welcome to the 'Corey Pearson – CIA Spymaster Series'- Novels and Short Stories of Espionage and Intrigue!

                                               

  

Whether you’re looking for a quick, thrilling short-story read or an immersive spy novel to sink into, Corey Pearson’s world has something for every adventure lover. Buckle up, explore the world of espionage, and join Corey Pearson on his next mission today!   

COREY PEARSON- CIA SPYMASTER NOVEL SERIES: Enter the deadly world of Corey Pearson – CIA Spymaster, where deception is survival and the enemy hides in plain sight in these full-length novels. In Mission of Vengeance, Pearson hunts Russian agents behind a Caribbean massacre. In Shadow War, he uncovers a sleeper cell plot threatening millions on U.S. soil. From covert ops to nuclear threats, these gripping thrillers fuse real spycraft with breakneck action. The line between ally and traitor blurs—and only Pearson’s team can stop the chaos before it’s too late.

COREY PEARSON- CIA SPYMASTER SHORT STORY SERIES: These quick, 20-30 minute reads are perfect for spy thriller enthusiasts who crave high-stakes missions packed with real-world espionage and gripping spycraft. Read them in any order and get whisked away into Corey Pearson’s daring adventures, all in a single sitting!

 

  

 

Why the CIA Needs a Seat at the Domestic Table

 

The New Front Line: Where CIA Tradecraft Meets Your Hometown

     October 2001. Just weeks after planes tore through our skies and hearts, 98 U.S. Senators signed off on something big: the Patriot Act. Its goal? Give the government teeth to bite back against terrorists hiding in plain sight or thousands of miles away. Fast forward, and you’ve got 1,200+ government groups and nearly 2,000 private firms in the business of counterterrorism. Ten thousand locations. Nearly a million Americans holding top-secret clearances. Think about that. It’s not paranoia. It’s infrastructure.

     Now enter the Next-Generation Identification system—NGI. A billion-dollar beast run by the FBI, built by Lockheed Martin. It doesn’t just snap your mug; it reconstructs your entire face from a lousy half-second of video. Every federal agency, including Homeland Security and the entire U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), can access it.

     But tech alone doesn’t stop terror. People do. That’s where Fusion Centers come in. Every state in America now has one. Fusion Centers (FCs) are nerve centers. They tap into over 240 different state, regional, and federal databases. They can monitor security cameras from highways, intersections, stadiums, and retail stores. In Chicago, surveillance cameras—infrared ones—watch the freeways every mile. Footage is stored for over a decade. One FC can access feeds from hundreds of private cameras—rail yards, trucking hubs, arenas, malls. Eyes everywhere. 

The SHADOW WAR spy thriller: Join Corey Pearson and his elite CIA team in hunting down a former KGB spy planning to unleash a deadly virus in New York City! 

     Some scream “Big Brother.” And yeah, there’s a fine line between safety and surveillance creep. But if there’s oversight—and there better be—these systems can stop the next 9/11 before it even becomes a plan on paper.

     And here’s the kicker: the CIA’s in on it now. For decades, the CIA was banned from touching domestic surveillance. That changed when Fusion Centers started operating. And it changed because of one man: Charles “Charlie” Allen.

     Allen is a legend. He gave nearly five decades to the CIA, running global operations. In his 80s, instead of retiring, he joined the Department of Homeland Security and started embedding CIA-trained officers into Fusion Centers across the U.S. Think of it like this—your city or state might have an elite, covert intelligence operator working quietly alongside your local cops. Same playbook. Different field.

     Allen saw a massive hole in America’s defenses. Foreign and domestic intelligence didn’t talk. Not fast enough, not well enough. So he fixed it. He put boots on the ground—his kind of boots—in all 50 states. And he built the Homeland Security Data Network (HSDN), a secure digital artery for classified info. It scrubs the details, protects sources, then shares what needs to be shared with local officials before something bad happens.

     Here’s how that might play out:L et’s say the NSA intercepts a sketchy call from L.A. to Yemen. The chatter mentions Dodger Stadium. At the same time, a CIA case officer in Yemen, who flipped a cousin of one of the suspects, finds a map of the stadium with Farsi scribbled all over it.

     What happens next? That foreign intel gets fed—instantly—into the secure HSDN. A Fusion Center in Los Angeles goes into overdrive. Embedded federal officers access IC systems and push a clean, threat-focused brief to LAPD, state police, and emergency responders. No sources compromised. No time lost. That’s how you stop a bomb before it hits the parking lot.

     And that’s exactly why the CIA has to work hand-in-hand with the FBI and local law enforcement. Because today’s threats don’t fit neatly into borders. Terrorist cells don’t care about zip codes or jurisdictional turf. They operate transnationally. They’re ideologically driven, globally funded, and they’re aiming for chaos—nuclear, chemical, biological, radiological. Not pipe bombs. Apocalypse.

     The CIA’s strength lies overseas. But that expertise, those networks, those assets? They mean nothing if they can’t be deployed here—now—when threats emerge from across the ocean but land right in our backyard.

     Allen knew that firsthand. In 1984, satellite images captured mock-ups of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut being rehearsed in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Oil drums, barriers, tire tracks. Suicide runs in the sand. Allen passed it to the Marines. He still wonders if that intelligence made it up the chain in time. Not long after, the embassy was blown apart.

     That lesson stuck. Intel not shared fast is intel wasted.

     Fusion Centers are Allen’s answer. They’re the front lines in a war that isn’t fought by uniforms alone. It’s won by connectivity, speed, and collaboration.

     So yes, someone is watching. And in this case, we should be grateful.

     Because if something wicked is coming—from a cave in Yemen, a server farm in Russia, or a condo in Dubai—it’s going to be CIA-trained eyes inside your local Fusion Center that see it first.

     And they’re not watching you.

     They’re watching out for you.

 

Robert Morton is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) and writes about the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). The Corey Pearson- CIA Spymaster series blends his knowledge of real-life intelligence operations with gripping fictional storytelling. His work offers readers an insider’s glimpse into the world of espionage, inspired by the complexities and high-stakes realities of the intelligence community.

'Corey Pearson – CIA Spymaster Series: Novels and Short Stories of Espionage and Intrigue!

 

Whether you’re looking for a quick, thrilling short story read or an immersive spy novel to sink into, Corey Pearson’s world has something for every adventure lover. Buckle up, explore the world of espionage, and join Corey Pearson on his next mission today!   

 

COREY PEARSON- CIA SPYMASTER NOVEL SERIES: Enter the deadly world of Corey Pearson – CIA Spymaster, where deception is survival and the enemy hides in plain sight in these full-length novels. In Mission of Vengeance, Pearson hunts Russian agents behind a Caribbean massacre. In Shadow War, he uncovers a sleeper cell plot threatening millions on U.S. soil. From covert ops to nuclear threats, these gripping thrillers fuse real spycraft with breakneck action. The line between ally and traitor blurs—and only Pearson’s team can stop the chaos before it’s too late.

 

COREY PEARSON- CIA SPYMASTER SHORT STORY SERIES: These quick, 20-30 minute reads are perfect for spy thriller enthusiasts who crave high-stakes missions packed with real-world espionage and gripping spycraft. Read them in any order and get whisked away into Corey Pearson’s daring adventures, all in a single sitting!

 

Cold War Tricks, Modern Targets: The Dead Drop’s Relentless Comeback

Think spycraft is all cyber hacks? Think again. Dead drops are making a quiet but powerful comeback.

     The thing about spycraft is this: no matter how slick our digital world gets, the old tricks never really die. Take the dead drop. Sounds quaint, right? Like something out of a Cold War flick. And you'd be right — James Bond himself stashed messages and gadgets in dead drops more times than we can count. But here’s the kicker: it’s still happening today. Same game, different players.

     Take the case of Xueha “Edward” Peng. For nearly three years, starting in 2015, this 56-year-old Chinese-American tour guide lived a secret double life. Every few months, he’d quietly check into a specific hotel — first in California, later in Georgia — but he wasn’t there for sightseeing.

     His real mission followed a simple but sneaky routine. Peng would bring along $10,000 or $20,000 in cash. He’d hide the money somewhere in the hotel room — tucked in a dresser drawer, or taped under a desk or TV stand. Then he’d leave.

     After Peng’s drop, undercover FBI agents — posing as his Chinese intelligence contacts — would come to the room. They’d collect the cash, and in exchange, they’d plant an SD card in the same room. The card would be hidden in a similar spot, sometimes tucked into an ordinary object like a cigarette box. These SD cards contained what Peng believed were classified U.S. secrets.

     Once Peng retrieved the card, he’d board a flight to Beijing and personally hand it over to his real handlers in China’s Ministry of State Security.

In reality, the FBI had set up the entire operation to catch him red-handed. It was a textbook dead drop — no face-to-face meetings, just hidden exchanges through secret drop points. Old-school spycraft, still effective in the modern era.

     Now, if you’re thinking this sounds ripped from the pages of a spy thriller, you’re not wrong. In fact, this very dance of cloak-and-dagger maneuvering mirrors scenes straight out of Shadow War, where CIA spymaster Corey Pearson and his team depend on dead drops to stay ahead of a Russian sleeper cell. In one nail-biting sequence, Pearson orchestrates a drop in a grimy New York alley, slipping critical intel into an innocuous package, right under the enemy’s nose. It’s old-school tradecraft, but in this line of work, that’s what keeps you alive.

     The beauty of a dead drop is its simplicity. No risky face-to-face exchanges. No digital footprints for some NSA analyst to follow. Just you, a secret location, and a carefully timed pickup. FBI special agents call it a “method of spycraft used to pass items or information between two individuals using a secret location thus not requiring them to meet directly.”

     It’s not glamorous, but it works. Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen — two of the worst traitors in American intelligence history — used dead drops religiously. Hanssen, for instance, would tuck classified documents and disks into a trash bag, hide it beneath a footbridge in a sleepy Northern Virginia park, and signal his Soviet handlers with a simple piece of tape slapped on a signpost. Elegant in its paranoia.

     Security pros like Runa Sandvik still vouch for the method. Sure, encrypted emails and burner phones are great, but they come with risks. You send something through the mail, you’re trusting a third party. You meet in person, you’re risking surveillance. But a dead drop? That’s control. Control over timing, control over access. Sandvik herself once helped arrange a dead drop between a reporter and a confidential source. Because when it comes to sensitive info, sometimes analog beats digital.

     And let’s not kid ourselves — this isn’t just relics of the past. The Shadow War spy thriller nails it: in today’s high-tech chaos, Pearson and his team still rely on dead drops as lifelines. As they race to stop a catastrophic biological attack, every hidden package becomes a vital link in a chain of survival. In a world where a misstep means disaster, dead drops provide a whisper of certainty.

     So, yeah, Peng’s little hotel room errands might seem like espionage for the nostalgic. But there’s a reason why, in the ruthless game of spies, the old tools still find their way back into play. Dead drops may be out of sight, but they’re far from obsolete.

 

Robert Morton is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) and writes about the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). The Corey Pearson- CIA Spymaster series blends his knowledge of real-life intelligence operations with gripping fictional storytelling. His work offers readers an insider’s glimpse into the world of espionage, inspired by the complexities and high-stakes realities of the intelligence community.

The U-2 'Dragon Lady' outlived the Cold War, outflew the satellites, and now she’s back on the front lines.

 

She was built for secrets, born in silence- and she's still watching from 70,000 feet up.

     James May figured he was just hitching a ride. He’d handled high-speed chaos behind racing car wheels for years, but this? This was different. Strapped into a U-2 spy plane, sealed in a pressure suit made for the edge of space, he wasn’t just going for a flight—he was stepping into a shadow war that never really ended.

     The aircraft? Lockheed’s U-2. The brass called her Dragon Lady. Sounded elegant. Almost graceful. But that name wasn’t poetic. It was a warning.

     She was built during the Cold War, when paranoia ran the Pentagon. The CIA needed eyes above the Iron Curtain—higher than radar, higher than fighters. So they built a jet that didn’t exist. It flew alone, unarmed, and dared the world to catch it. They didn’t. Not at first.

     And here’s the twist: that same ghost of an aircraft? Thirty-five are still flying. No drone, no stealth craft, no satellite can quite do what the Dragon Lady can. Satellites fly by. Drones get jammed. But the U-2? She just cruises quietly, watching.

     She flew over Ukraine last year, snapping crisp images of Russian tanks before most people even knew the war had started. Later, she drifted above the Pacific, capturing that Chinese spy balloon with so much clarity you could count the bolts. Compared to her, satellites draw with crayons.

     She’s not a relic. She’s a high-altitude truth machine. And she still pulls secrets from the sky.

     Flying the Dragon Lady isn’t your average assignment. It’s not just a job—it’s a test of everything you’ve got. You don’t just learn to fly her; you survive her. Landing that plane? It’s like threading a needle in a hurricane. One wrong move, and she’ll take you down hard. Most pilots don’t make the cut. The few who do earn a call sign… and then disappear into the classified world they trained for.

     Up there, they eat tube food. One an hour. Chicken à la king. Chocolate pudding laced with caffeine. You don’t blink. You don’t pee. You endure.

     Back in the day, the CIA ran everything. Pilots were “sheep-dipped”—they resigned their military rank, vanished from records, and reappeared as civilians flying unmarked jets. If they got shot down? The U.S. could say, “Never heard of him.”

     These jets weren’t tracked with standard serials. Each had an “Article Number,” referenced only in vault-locked memos typed on machines older than the men flying the planes.

     That legacy hasn’t gone anywhere. Especially not in the world of Corey Pearson.

     In the Corey Pearson–CIA Spymaster Series, the U-2 isn’t just a background relic—it’s front and center. Pearson’s CIA team doesn’t rely on satellite feeds or AI. They work from old-school black-and-white prints rolled out in Langley’s war rooms. A heat signature here. A camouflaged truck there. Signs of something the rest of the world missed. The Dragon Lady catches it first.

     Pearson trusts the U-2 like an old blade—scarred but still sharp. Maybe even sharper.

     There’s a book, Remembering the Dragon Lady, filled with gritty, first-hand accounts from the 4080th Recon Wing. Cold War flights. Near-miss decompressions. Missions authorized with a nod and a lie. The kind of stories that only got told once the danger had passed. Barely.

     One pilot wrote, “In 1951, modified bombers began overflights of the Soviet Union, and a number of border flights were shot down. At that time, the planners imagined a high-altitude aircraft hard to detect and impossible to shoot down.”

     They imagined it. Then they built it.

     And today? She still flies. Because sometimes you need a human in the sky. Someone to make a judgment call in real time. To see the difference between a decoy and the real deal. A pilot who understands that in the fog of war, you don’t always get a second shot.

     When the world quiets and the tech goes blind, she’s still up there—cruising above it all. Watching. Waiting.

     The U-2 spy plane plays a critical role in the Corey Pearson–CIA Spymaster Series, and in scenes like this one, it’s easy to see why: Hours later, deep inside Langley, the lights were low and the air was thick with the buzz of quiet urgency. Corey Pearson stood at the head of the table, sleeves rolled up, eyes locked on the black-and-white prints just flown in from 70,000 feet.

     They weren’t ordinary satellite shots. These were sharper, closer. Alive. The Dragon Lady had just passed over a ghost airstrip in Central Asia. What she saw? A buried convoy. Missile tubes. Heat signatures where none should be.

     Pearson leaned in, traced a blurred figure with his finger. “Zoom in,” he said.

     The screen sharpened. A face emerged. Familiar. Half-turned.

     He hadn’t seen that man since Caracas.

     The intel officer beside him whispered, “Confirmation?”

     Pearson nodded once. “Yeah. That’s him.”

     That single photo—snapped by a jet older than half the agency—had just changed the next chapter of American espionage.

     He tapped the table twice. “Alright. We move. Tonight.”

     Outside, the world slept.

     But high above, the Dragon Lady kept watch…and under her shadow, a new mission had just begun.

 

Robert Morton is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) and writes about the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). The Corey Pearson- CIA Spymaster series blends his knowledge of real-life intelligence operations with gripping fictional storytelling. His work offers readers an insider’s glimpse into the world of espionage, inspired by the complexities and high-stakes realities of the intelligence community.

CIA Assassinates the Ghost: Inside the Covert Operation to Eliminate Mugniyeh

 

Tracking a Ghost: How the CIA Took Down Mugniyeh

For more than twenty years, Imad Mugniyeh was the guy no one could touch—not the CIA, not Mossad, not anyone. He slipped through cracks like water in a busted pipe. The Agency had fat files on him, stuffed with grainy photos and half-burned intel from guys who usually didn’t live long after talking. Mugniyeh wasn’t just some terrorist—he was Hezbollah’s ghost. Smart. Vicious. Untouchable.

     He pulled the strings on the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut—sixty-three dead. Then he went bigger—the Marine barracks bombing, two hundred forty-one American servicemen lost in a blink. After that, his name was poison. A whisper in backrooms. A curse in war rooms. Everyone wanted him, and no one could find him. He always stayed just ahead of the bullet.

     Until he didn’t.

     The operation started the way most covert missions do—quiet and off the books. A scrap of intel here, a hushed tip there. Nothing solid. But one sharp-eyed analyst at Langley spotted a pattern buried in hours of grainy surveillance footage—something only someone who’d spent half their life hunting ghosts would catch.

     That was the break.

     The CIA brought in the Israelis—Mossad’s best hitters—and together they set up shop in Damascus, Syria. That was Mugniyeh’s backyard. He felt safe there. Too safe. And that arrogance was their way in.

     They watched him for months. Didn’t move, didn’t blink. Just studied him. What time he grabbed his coffee. Which alley he used to cut across the block. How he walked. Who he met. Every step, every stop, they logged it all. The guy became a puzzle problem—and they were solving it, piece by piece.

     The bomb was custom-built. Not too powerful—just enough to kill the man without collateral. It was placed inside the spare tire of a parked SUV along his nightly walking path. The trigger? Remote. The observation? Real-time, high-definition surveillance and facial recognition. On February 12, 2008, as Mugniyeh neared the car, the confirmation was given. The CIA operative on the console pushed the button. And the Ghost disappeared in a flash of fire and twisted metal.

     The world never knew the details—at least not officially. The operation was buried, and only whispers made it past the curtain. But for those who live in the world of shadows, it was a message: no matter how far you run, no matter how deep you hide, justice finds a way.

     It’s no surprise then that when fiction dares to brush up against truth, the sparks can be electrifying. In Mission of Vengeance, CIA Spymaster Corey Pearson is handed a case that, on paper, looks like a simple tragedy—a murdered American family in the Dominican Republic. But Pearson doesn’t do “simple.” As he unravels the thread, the crime unfolds into a conspiracy with fingerprints that trace back to ex-KGB agents and Russian interests using Hezbollah as proxies. The deeper Pearson digs, the darker it gets.

     That fictional mission hits close to home because it's not all that different from the real-world op that took down Mugniyeh. In both stories—one fictional, one painfully real—the targets are buried deep. They don’t wear uniforms. They don’t wave flags. They hide behind diplomatic protection, criminal networks, and friendly governments that pretend not to see.

     And the agents chasing them? They don’t get headlines. They work in the shadows, using old-school spy tools most people have never heard of—fake names, secret drop points, silent foot chases through packed streets. Even the kill switch might look like a car key.

     Corey Pearson understands that world. He lives in it. Just like the real CIA operatives who hunted Mugniyeh, Pearson knows how to blend in, to disappear in plain sight. He also knows that in the spy game, trust is rare—and betrayal is just another tactic. In Mission of Vengeance, when a former KGB agent switches sides and hands Pearson a piece of the puzzle, it’s a reminder of how real intelligence work often hinges on loyalty breaking at just the right time.

     What makes the Mugniyeh story remarkable isn't just the precision of the kill—it’s the patience. It’s the years of watching, waiting, infiltrating. The agents who hunted Mugniyeh had to become invisible. Some lived fake lives for so long they risked forgetting their real ones. They blended into cities they couldn’t claim and made friends they couldn’t keep. It’s that mental toll—the psychological trench warfare—that Mission of Vengeance captures so well. The long hours. The uncertainty. The fear that you’re either two steps ahead or already dead.

     In the aftermath of Mugniyeh’s assassination, Hezbollah and Iran howled for vengeance, but they couldn’t pin it. There were no fingerprints. No trace. It was the perfect ghost kill—something even Corey Pearson would admire.   The fictional operatives in Mission of Vengeance may be composites, but their challenges are drawn from real-world shadow wars. That’s what makes spy thrillers so haunting: they feel imagined, until you realize how much of it could be, or already was, real.

     For readers of espionage fiction, knowing a story like Mugniyeh’s doesn’t diminish the tension—it amplifies it. It tells you that somewhere, someone sat in a safehouse, fingers trembling above a detonation switch, listening to the voice in their earpiece confirm the target. And when the signal came, they didn’t hesitate.

     They never do. 

Robert Morton, a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), writes with the precision of an insider. His Corey Pearson- CIA Spymaster series fuses real-world intelligence tradecraft with edge-of-your-seat fiction, pulling readers deep into the shadows of espionage. For anyone fascinated by spy games, global intrigue, and the secrets behind the headlines, Morton is a voice worth following.

Inside the CIA’s Secret War for Informants in the World’s Darkest Corners

CIA recruits spies online—secrets traded in shadows. 🕵️‍♂️💻🌒

      The world of espionage is shifting. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is ramping up efforts to penetrate the inner circles of the globe’s most secretive and authoritarian regimes—China, Iran, and North Korea. These are some of the toughest targets in the world, but the CIA is determined to unlock their secrets.

     In an unusually bold and very public move, the Agency has gone digital. It launched a wave of recruitment messages across social media—messages written in Mandarin, Farsi, and Korean. These weren’t your typical Facebook ads. They were carefully crafted signals, aimed at people living under brutal regimes. Think of them as encrypted lifelines, designed to reach out to potential informants who are ready to speak the truth—despite the risks.

     “We’re open for business,” a CIA spokesman declared, unapologetically. It’s the kind of line that sounds like something out of a spy novel. Except, this is real.

     And if it were a novel, it would read like something from the Corey Pearson- CIA Spymaster series. You know the one—where CIA spymaster Corey Pearson and his elite team of operatives navigate the world’s most dangerous regimes, slipping into cities wrapped in surveillance, building trust with informants, and orchestrating high-stakes extractions. It’s fiction, sure, but just barely. Corey Pearson’s world isn’t far from today’s headlines.

     Here’s the play. This week, the CIA scattered its digital breadcrumbs across the internet—X (that’s Twitter’s new face), Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, LinkedIn… even the dark web. Yes, that dark web. They didn’t miss a beat. It was like watching a spy drop coded messages in plain sight—except the message wasn’t for you or me. It was for the bold, the desperate, the ones trapped behind iron curtains and itching to talk.

     And this wasn’t some half-baked “click here” ad. The instructions were precise, surgical. Use an encrypted VPN. Install the Tor browser and connect to the Agency’s hidden .onion site. It’s the new-age brush pass. Forget trench coats and midnight rendezvous in back alleys—today, it’s all encrypted links, ghost servers, and shadows cast by firewalls instead of flickering lamplight.

In the old days, you had to look someone in the eye and hope they weren’t KGB. Now? You’ve got to trust your browser won’t betray you.

     The CIA’s new cyber-outreach isn’t without precedent. After Russia rolled tanks into Ukraine, the Agency began a targeted campaign to recruit disillusioned Russians. By their own account, it worked. Dissidents, insiders, and even career officers reached out from within Putin’s regime.

     Now, Langley’s setting its sights on the new Big Three—China, Iran, and North Korea. It’s a bold move, no doubt about it. But it’s the kind of high-stakes play that could’ve been ripped straight from the pages of a Corey Pearson novel.

     Picture this: Corey, undercover as a humanitarian worker in Pyongyang, quietly slips a burner phone into the jacket pocket of a North Korean nuclear scientist looking for a way out. Or his team, deep in Tehran, passing a coded message to a cleric’s aide through an innocuous prayer post on Instagram. Sounds like fiction, right?

     It’s not.

     This is the real spy game—subtle, risky, and unfolding right now. The CIA’s not just watching from the sidelines anymore. They're in it, making contact, flipping assets, and playing the long game inside regimes where a wrong move can mean death. It's cloak-and-dagger with a digital twist—and Corey Pearson would feel right at home in the middle of it.

     But here’s the kicker: this isn’t your granddad’s Cold War spycraft. The battlefield has changed. Firefights have become firewalls. Safe houses have morphed into anonymous drop sites online. And CIA operatives? They’re more likely to carry encryption keys than silenced pistols. It’s espionage for the TikTok era—and the CIA knows it.

     Still, the stakes haven’t changed. For those inside North Korea, China, and Iran, reaching out isn’t just risky—it’s potentially lethal. One wrong keystroke, one moment of surveillance sloppiness, and the price is unimaginable. That’s why the CIA’s message is both invitation and warning: we want your secrets, but your safety is on you.

     As the world watches authoritarianism flex its muscles, the CIA is betting that somewhere behind closed borders, truth still burns like a beacon. And with every message, every whisper on the dark web, every story like Corey Pearson’s—they're fanning that flame.

     Because in this spy game, information is power. And someone, somewhere, is about to flip. 

Robert Morton is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) and writes about the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). The Corey Pearson- CIA Spymaster series blends his knowledge of real-life intelligence operations with gripping fictional storytelling. His work offers readers an insider’s glimpse into the world of espionage, inspired by the complexities and high-stakes realities of the intelligence community.