What's your job? JJ Brun, former spy / corporate advisor

Jean (JJ) Brun has an aversion to calling himself a spy.

But it has nothing to do with some secretive gag order imposed by an equally clandestine Canadian spy agency.

Brun will readily reveal the time he was stripped naked and interrogated, the countless meetings with warlords and all around bad guys in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav Wars of the nineties and the heart-pounding moment he put a bullet in the chamber while being confronted by a group of angry Serbo-Croatian youth.

Simply put, the communication consultant just thinks “spy” is a bit of a misnomer.

“We didn’t view ourselves as spies, we viewed ourselves as professional intelligence officers – it’s a profession,” says Brun, his inflection betraying a slightly hidden French-Canadian accent. “People label what they don’t understand. On TV you'll see somebody who retired and they'll brand them as a spymaster and I’m like ‘hey, how come I've never been on the course to becoming a spymaster.’”

But after a 20-year career in the Canadian armed forces – which included 15 years in the intelligence branch with several human intelligence-gathering tours of Bosnia and Herzegovina – and a decade of consulting business leaders on communicating, it seems Brun is ready to embrace the spy moniker in his personal brand.

As “The Retired Spy” Brun travels the world applying his experience of connecting with the different disparate stakeholders in hostile environments and working with a multinational task force to the business world, teaching people how to communicate and earn the trust of others regardless of the situation.

Despite the obvious differences, for Brun, there’s a similarity between the techniques to building a genuine rapport with warlords in conflict riddled regions and the relationships built by salespeople and execs in the business world. Both rely on a high level of relate-ability.

“When you hit that mark, that’s when they say yes to your proposal, that’s when you get hired,” he says. “That’s when the person that you've been cultivating puts on the team Canada jersey.”

We sat down with Brun for an overt conversation on why he’s ready to be The Retired Spy, how his past relates to his life as a public speaker and why James Bond-like gadgets aren’t part of the job description.

Googling “retired spy Canada” brought you up pretty quickly as JJ Brun – The Retired Spy but technically the job description is analyst or intelligence officer. Why the label now?

I never wanted to be or become “The Retired Spy”. Due to a medical condition – I had three knee surgeries after my second operational tour – I was no longer fit to serve in the military so I was released. People kept on introducing me to their colleagues as "oh this is, JJ he's a retired spy." I had been shying away from that branding but the message there is that your brand is what people say it is. So I’ve adopted it over the past three years and it is one of the best moves. This year is a breakout year, after 10 years of consulting I'm busier than I’ve ever been. I'm asked to go speak around the world and really make a difference in people’s lives.

What’s it all about?

Well, we work with organizations that want to learn how decoding human capital and thinking like a spy can optimize their results in business and their personal life.

And this is based on skills you learned in your 20-year career in the armed forces. Why did you enlist?

I had a fight with dad when I was 18. I left university and joined the military. It was my temperament; I had a hard time with somebody having control over me. I have a great relationship with my dad today but I just didn't understand myself then. I had to take an inventory of what I call your human capital – as in your traits, your temperament style and your character. I was “one without a clue” so I just left university. I became one of the youngest Master Corporals at that time and one of the youngest ever Sergeants in three years and ten months – it tends to take eight years to get that rank.

Your French background led you to the Quebec regiment for five years before you worked your way into the intelligence branch. Why pursue intelligence?

It started with understanding my traits and taking a job that fits how I’m wired. I was sent over to the U.K. to get trained as an interrogator. How can you be an interrogator if you've never been interrogated – makes sense right? I didn’t know about this, but in the first hour I got stripped naked, thrown into a cell and interrogated by a very pissed off British gentleman and it had an effect. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced that but it's like ‘okay, this is not in the curriculum’.

 What happened after the interrogation?

It was like, get dressed, get back in the course and then he revealed all the information he was able to capture on me. I was blown away because I didn’t answer any of his questions and he knew exactly what was going though my mind. How is that? He referred to it as BSA – behavioral symptom analysis – and I became a student for life. I had to discover this for myself, I needed to master this and that’s where my passion and interest into that field started – the whole, how do we work? How can patterns be predictable across cultures?

It's interesting to think of you in that first moment – that interrogation – and just the shock of it all to where you are now.

Want to hear something funnier, well not funnier but interesting. I’m leaving this weekend for a retreat with the national sales director for Mary Kay cosmetics in Canada to speak about leadership – I call them my Mary Kay commandos and they're hungry for this information. But everything that I’ve done in the military, the opportunity to travel overseas and communicate and work across cultures with different nationalities is now really paying dividends. It's just amazing. If I take a step back, I’ve had to go through those 20 years of character building moments and then, from there, figure out what’s next.

You’ve found a way to take that unique people analyzing skillset and reframe it for someone like a sales director at a cosmetics company to use. Can you tell me a bit about being in the Allied Military Intelligence Battalion in Bosnia and how you developed the skillset?

We lived in a community called Medjugorje – 6,000 people in the winter, which is the time I was there and it grows to 30,000 people in the summer. It was very stressful living in a villa in uniform because this was pre-9/11. You would never do this today. A British colleague slept with his pistol underneath his pillow it sort of gave me the "maybe I should learn to sleep with a pistol underneath my pillow.”

What was your day-to-day like?

I was the first Canadian. So my biggest fear inside was if I don’t do a good job they may say: “don’t send any more Canadians.” That means I had to outwork everybody. I’d be the first one out of the villa on the road by 7 a.m. and returning after 7 p.m. at night. You have 12 hours of meetings and then you write reports all night. The next day you do the whole thing. At the end I did six months and only had one weekend off because the guys I was interested in were mostly bad guys and they would always do things on the weekend. The biggest challenge is to stay healthy mentally. You can be physically tired and a good night sleep will take care of that but when you’re mentally tired because you're always thinking, reflecting and so forth, it can drain and you need to disconnect. 

Were you worried? Was there a lot of danger involved?

We don’t look at it so much because we're trained for this. You've got the uniform and if somebody has to do it, it's the military. The military is the last resource. It cannot fail. You learn from your mistakes, you adapt and you overcome. 

Outside of that first real interrogation experience was there a moment that really caught you off guard?

When I got there on my tour, they gave me a pistol and ten bullets. I had to sign for ten bullets.

It just didn’t make sense to me to only have ten bullets but there was this one incident where we drove into this area that had been turned into a party or a disco and we were surrounded by these youth and didn’t know where it was going to go. It looked like it was turning hostile and they were all civilians and we stood out because we were in a military vehicle dressed in uniform and I’m stuck - as in I can’t drive my vehicle forward and somebody jackknifed behind me and I’m not ready for this. I couldn’t gun it and ram them, that would have gotten the population more hostile and then it got to the point where the crowd was getting out of the building and coming towards the vehicle and I put a bullet in the chamber. One of the youth started talking in Serbo-Croat and sort of took charge and calmed everybody and directed people to move their vehicles from the road and I just gunned it and got us out of there.

That sounds tense. But for the most part it’s not James Bond-style chase scenes or gadgets, right?

At the military we don’t really use gadgets – it’s a simple as having a little piece of paper, pencil or a pen, establishing a relationship and connection by having a conversation, capturing the thoughts and the ideas of that person and relaying that to your officer to help them make better decisions.

Any organization that would have James Bond-ish tools would have to have a high mandate because the risk would be high if you get caught using recording devices like glasses with cameras, pens with microphones or cameras. You don’t really need it.

I’ve got to ask, would you say you made more in the military than you do now?

Oh no! As a speaker, I'm earning more than a general would be earning. 

So skip chasing the spy dream if it’s about making money?

I think I had to go through the 20 years in the military because you need to have an expertise, you need to have something to say and you need some real time life experience. Now I’m finding myself in a position to make a difference in people lives.