Daniel Lee (@siabaaLee) Texas native, disabled U.S. Army veteran (SGT, 35L Counterintelligence Special Agent, 2004–2012 with Iraq deployments), BS European History (Cum Laude), and Orthodox catechumen ☦️. After his time with the 504th, 500th Military Intelligence Brigades and USARPAC, Daniel has been building as the Texan Spy Historian: channeling CI pattern recognition, source work instincts, and a fusionist lens (liberty + moral order/faith) into analysis and storytelling. Find more about Daniel on X.
I. A Homily That Found Me
There are moments when a word spoken in a liturgical setting lands differently than it was perhaps intended; not because it is wrong, but because it is too precisely right. When Fr. Thomas Colyandro preached on wholeness and the danger of serving two masters, I found myself not simply listening to a spiritual exhortation. I found myself looking at a map of my own interior ruin.
He drew from Matthew 6:24 “No one can serve two masters” and identified five dimensions of the self that require clarity, stability, and wholeness: physical, intellectual, emotional, relational, and spiritual. The spiritual, he said, undergirds and supersedes all others. Without it rightly ordered, the rest collapse.
I had spent years serving a master that operated in exactly those five dimensions. Not healing them. Weaponizing them. And I had been trained to do it with professional precision, rewarded for doing it with excellence, and encouraged to see it as honorable service. What the homily illuminated was something I had not yet had words for: the cost of that service was not simply moral. It was anthropological. It was a dismantling of the self.
II. The World I Came From
I served as a military intelligence professional during the Global War on Terror, trained in the disciplines of Human Intelligence (HUMINT) and Counterintelligence (CI). The pipeline ran through Fort Huachuca, where the curriculum in source handling, interrogation, behavioral analysis, and threat assessment was thorough, demanding, and professionally serious.
The creeds we memorized were not cynical documents. The MI Creed called for physical fitness, professional competence, and above all, integrity; “for in truth lies victory.” The Soldier’s Creed placed the mission first, framing discipline and toughness as virtues in service of something larger than oneself. These were not hollow words. We believed them.
But doctrine is also a moral frame. And the frame we were handed quietly redefined integrity away from the wholeness of the human persons we worked with, and toward the accuracy of our reporting as reflected in the competence of our tradecraft. A source could be manipulated, fragmented, rebuilt around loyalty to the handler; that was professional excellence, not ethical violation. The mission was the master. Everything else served it.
The distinction between HUMINT and CI is worth naming here, because it shaped how the toll manifested. HUMINT operators in the GWOT era were often focused on immediate collection; extracting actionable intelligence to build target packets. The manipulation was intense but transactional, measured in sessions rather than months. CI work was different. To penetrate a network, you did not merely collect from a source; you molded one. You mapped their relational world, their fears, their loyalties to God and tribe and cause, and you systematically rebuilt those loyalties around yourself. That required something closer to intimacy. And intimacy, when weaponized, leaves marks on both parties.
III. The Five Levers — and What They Do to the One Who Pulls Them
FM 2-22.3, the governing manual for HUMINT collection during this period, codified approach techniques targeting precisely the same five dimensions Fr. Thomas identified as the architecture of the human person. This was not coincidence. It was doctrine built on a sophisticated, if unacknowledged, anthropology. To understand how to break a person down, you must first understand how they are built.
What the doctrine did not address; what I had to discover in the years after, is what happens to the person doing the breaking.
The Physical: The Body That Cannot Rest
Operators learn to read bodies: micro-expressions, stress indicators, the physiological signatures of deception or compliance. They manage a source’s physical environment as an operational variable: sleep, comfort, isolation. The body of the source becomes terrain to be controlled.
What I carried home was a nervous system that had been trained for perpetual threat assessment and would not stand down. Hyper-vigilance is often discussed in the context of combat exposure. It is equally a product of years spent reading human beings as threat environments. The body, meant to be a stable dwelling, becomes a hardened instrument that does not know how to be still.
The Intellectual: The Mind That Cannot Trust
Doctrine taught us to construct false realities for sources; legends, controlled information environments, cognitive overload. The technique called “We Know All” was designed to make a source believe the handler already possessed what the source was withholding, collapsing resistance through manufactured certainty.
Spend enough time dismantling other people’s grasp on reality, and something corrosive happens to your own. I found myself reading every conversation for hidden motives, every relationship for potential deception, every kindness for its operational utility. The mind trained to dismantle trust cannot easily receive it. Cynicism is not a personality flaw in this context; it is a professional residue.
The Emotional: The Heart That Cannot Feel
Chapter 8 of FM 2-22.3 is explicit: amplify fear, deploy pride, exploit love and hate. These are not crude instruments. They require genuine empathy to use effectively. You must feel what the source feels; not to accompany them in it, but to move them through it toward your objective. This is what I would call coerced empathy: compassion retrained as a targeting mechanism.
The long-term effect is a kind of emotional desensitization that does not announce itself. You do not stop feeling. You stop trusting what you feel, because feeling has been so thoroughly codified as a tool of influence. Genuine grief, genuine joy, genuine love begin to feel suspect; as if emotion itself is something being performed, even when no one is watching.
The Relational: The Handler Who Cannot Be Known
CI source operations required building relationships of dependency; making a source emotionally reliant on the handler while guiding them toward acts of betrayal against their own network. The bond had to feel real to the source. In some operational sense, it was real. And then it was used.
You cannot practice controlled betrayal professionally without it reshaping how you inhabit your own relationships. When you know precisely how a bond is manufactured and how loyalty can be engineered, trust becomes something you extend cautiously, almost reluctantly. You begin to manage people you love rather than simply be with them. Intimacy, which requires a kind of vulnerability and unknowing, becomes nearly impossible for someone who has been professionally rewarded for having the other person completely mapped.
The Spiritual: The Abyss That Looks Back
This was the most powerful lever, and the most avoided. Psyops doctrine explicitly targeted beliefs, values, and ideological commitments. Advanced source handling included assessing a source’s spiritual and ideological architecture (their relationship to God, their tribal loyalties, their ultimate meaning) and applying pressure there. Creating or exploiting a spiritual crisis could produce the deepest compliance. It could also produce the most durable damage.
Fr. Thomas teaches that the spiritual dimension is the seat of the nous; the eye of the soul, oriented toward God, the faculty through which we receive divine light. When that dimension is weaponized in another person, something is committed that secular language struggles to name adequately. Theologically, it is a form of sacrilege: treating the place where God meets the soul as operational terrain.
Nietzsche’s warning (that staring into the abyss invites the abyss to stare back) gestures at this. The Christian account is more precise. When a handler positions themselves as the arbiter of another person’s ultimate meaning, something spiritually real occurs. Not metaphorically, but actually. The tradition would call it a demonic foothold: an opening created by the act of inverting the sacred order of the human soul, one that affects both the one being manipulated and the one doing the manipulating. This is not language I would have used in uniform. It is the language I find most accurate now.
IV. The Hammer
The deepest truth of the handler’s paradox is this: you cannot break a soul without using your own soul as the hammer.
The military intelligence professional is offered a moral frame in which this is not breaking but service: not fragmentation but precision, not spiritual violation but professional competence. The MI Creed’s “integrity” and the Soldier’s Creed’s “mission first” provide a language in which the systematic dismantling of human wholeness is honorable work. I believed that language. I was good at the work it described.
What the homily names, and what I am still learning to receive, is that this is precisely the condition Matthew 6:24 describes: serving a master that demands fragmentation as its currency. The mission (force protection, network penetration, actionable intelligence) was not an evil master in any obvious sense. It was a real responsibility, and many lives depended on it. But when operational utility becomes the supreme arbiter of how human beings are to be treated, the spiritual core of the operator is quietly subordinated to the same logic applied to the source. You are not exempt from your own tradecraft.
I came home carrying what I had used on others, turned inward: the hyper-vigilant body, the cynical mind, the deadened emotions, the managed relationships, the spiritual disorientation. I did not have a name for it then. The homily gave me one. Fragmentation. Brokenness. The condition of a person who has been serving two masters for a long time.
V. Seeking Wholeness — Theosis as the Path Back
Fr. Thomas ends his homily not with diagnosis but with direction. The spiritual life, rightly ordered, undergirds and supersedes the other four dimensions. Theosis: the understanding of the soul’s progressive union with God; is not a reward for those who were never broken. It is the destination toward which broken people travel when they stop serving the wrong master.
I am not at the end of this journey. I am, in some ways, still mapping the damage; still learning which responses are mine and which belong to the tradecraft, still learning to inhabit relationships without assessing them, still learning that emotion is not a lever but a gift, still learning that silence does not have to be a threat environment.
What I don’t yet know is how to walk back through each of these dimensions. I suspect the body will need to learn to be a temple again rather than an instrument of perpetual vigilance; but I don’t know what that actually looks like for a nervous system trained never to stand down. The mind will need to recover some relationship with truth that is not tactical; but I don’t know how to stop reading every room and every conversation for hidden motives. The emotions will need to be allowed to be real rather than useful; but I don’t fully trust them yet, and I’m not sure they trust me. Relationships will need to become mutual rather than managed; but I can’t always tell the difference from the inside. And the nous, the eye of the soul Orthodoxy describes, will need to be reoriented toward the One it was always designed to behold. That reorientation is what I am bringing to You.
This is not something I can accomplish through discipline or professional competence. The very faculties that would be needed are the ones most thoroughly trained for other purposes. What is required is repentance; not mere regret, but a turning of the whole person, in all five dimensions, back toward God. And what makes that possible is not my will but His mercy.
I offer this to You, Father, not as a finished account but as a beginning. It has done what a testimony should do if it has made the hidden visible. What comes next, I leave in His hands.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
