Season 1 - Episode 4

You want to blend into a new city, you better be up on local sports.

Covert Ops has its perks.  You travel, make your own ours and expense most of your meals.  The down side: lots of people want you dead.

If it looks like you are about to get into a fight that could get you killed, try starting another one.


When booby trapping your home, it's important to keep it simple.  Make it easy to setup, easy to disable.  One more thing about booby traps: make sure your friends know not to drop by unannounced.

You can learn good self defense fighting with students in a class, but great self defense... that you pick up fighting with your family.

Spies go to bars for the same reason people go to libraries.  Full of information if you know how to ask.

The key to a good knife defense is to control the knife hand and strike with everything you've got.  Fighting is often about tactical retreat.  It's like running away from two knifes.   It's also like make the body count unacceptable.

Pimps are all about show.  High end or low end, they like to stand out.  Compulvise gamblers get a lot of practice seeing people bluff, so the good news is they can usually pick up on people's tells.  The bad news is when they are wrong the consequences are very expensive.

Any good operative is careful not to leave much behind.  Everyone gets careless, though, and even the littlest things can turn out to be useful.  A receipt, a paperback, room service records, every bit helps.

A rescue attempt is hard enough when it's someone who actually wants to be rescued.  It doesn't matter if it's a brother with a compusilve gambling problem or a girl who thinks she's about to launch her modeling career.  So, you eliminate escape options, keep a low profile, but no matter what you do you'll still have somebody screaming bloody murder in the back of your car.

Some situations just come down to probabilities.  The chance that an assassin with a handgun can you hit you at 50 yards, the number of shots he can get off - he might have a 1 in 5 chance of hitting you with a bullet, maybe a 1 in 10 chance of dying - or a 100% chance of being blown away by a shotgun wired to a door.  A ricochet is usually not deadly, but it sure feels that way.

Spend a lot of time in countries without hospitals, you pick up a few things.

Running an operation you can't let personal feelings get in the way.  It's about planning and execution, not about being angry.  Although, occassionally you may get a little angry.

There's a reason family is always a good source of leverage.  Whether it's a brother that always owes people money or a brother stuck in the trunk of a car, you can't really turn your back on them.

The drive home is often a grueling experience for somebody you just rescued, especially if they were unaware of their situation.  They ask a lot of questions, you fill them in on the answers, and then it dawns on them - the truth.  It can be overwhelming.