He Helped Save Thousands of Abused and Exploited Kids

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Jim Cole spent two decades as a Homeland Security Investigations special agent, working child-exploitation cases.

Early in his career, he saw a problem. Investigators were focused on the people making, possessing, and distributing child sexual abuse material. But the children in the images often went unidentified.

Jim helped change that.

In 2010, he founded HSI’s Victim Identification Program from scratch, including the first dedicated Victim Identification Laboratory at HSI’s Cyber Crimes Center. Its purpose was to answer a different question: Who is the child in the image, where are they, and are they still in danger?

Sometimes the answer begins with a clue most people would never notice: a window, a label, a piece of furniture, a blanket, something in the background that can lead investigators to a child.

The program has helped identify and rescue thousands of children around the world, and it continues to operate today. When Jim began tracking victim identifications at HSI in 2011, the agency rescued 262 child victims that year. The following year, after the program’s methods and technology were put in place, that number rose to more than 1,000.

This is not an easy subject for a podcast. But given the scale of this crime, and the people most affected by it, it is an important conversation to watch and share. In 2025, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline received 21.3 million reports of suspected online child sexual exploitation. Those reports contained 61.8 million images, videos, and other files.

In this episode of The Hidden Third, Jim takes Mariana back to his early years, from his time in the U.S. Army to becoming a patrol officer and then a detective on a Native American reservation in Oregon, investigating everything from narcotics to violent crime. He explains how a series of seemingly accidental turns led him into the work that would define his career.

Jim tells the story of one victim, abused by her father, whose case changed the course of his career and made him determined to focus on identifying children. He also tells Mariana about the schoolteacher who abused children for years before Jim’s team uncovered what he had done.

They discuss the tactics offenders use to groom children and why the people posing the greatest danger are often not who a child or famil