Fictional characters like James Bond and Michael Westen portray secret agents as combining the skill-sets of a master criminal and a special-forces soldier. But I wonder if spies really need all that, to do what they do.
Spies mostly excel at not getting noticed. Just about everything Bond tends to get in the way of that.
Plus, he’s always telling people his real name. This is MI6’ best man?! :rolleyes:
This dude looks like a bit of a badass, would probably not be fun to fight. Or have lunch with.
George Smiley or Harry Palmer are probably more realistic than James Bond.
I would guess that most real-life spies are never discovered at all. They never have to kill anyone, they never have to escape from hitmen or police in high-speed auto chases, they never have to perform any kind of physical stunts or commandeer helicopters in-flight by jumping off of a motorcycle or anything. In fact I don’t think in real life there are such things as “spies” as we know them from the movies, i.e. people whose only job it is to infiltrate other people and spy on them. Most of the time, the spy is someone already working for the enemy who is “turned”. A typical spy is someone like John Anthony Walker. A nondescript office drone who passes information to the Soviets through a liaison, and who ideally is never found out.
Just don’t order the tea.
When I did some work for an agency I can’t mention regarding a place I can’t mention about a topic I can’t mention several years back, I met two honest-to-God female intelligence officers. Two things about them I can share:
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They looked like ordinary, everyday 30-50-something minivan driving moms. Normal glasses, normal hair, JC Penneys clothes, normal attitude…nothing whatsoever that would make you look twice. Totally relaxed average attitude.
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When we got behind closed doors and the briefing began, they were like Pit Bulls. Very physical, with body language and tone that told you “I mean business”. The thing I noticed most was their eyes - they suddenly became sharp, focused, sizing up everyone and every piece of evidence which was presented. They barked out orders and questions rapid-fire, direct and to the point, no extraneous verbage. They knew their shit and they knew what to do with it.
When we left the room and went out to lunch, they reverted right back to their previous attitudes.
That was a fun, interesting, and unique job. Wish I could have done more.
“Palmer” I don’t want to be Horrible Harry Palmer.
Passport Guy: Who do you want to be then?
“Palmer” Hunter. Rock Hunter.
Passport Guy: You’ll be Harry bloody Palmer and you’ll like it.
For about five years I did Habitat builds with a Maryland chapter. A regular crew that I became friendly with worked for NSA. Turns out they don’t solve crimes on their days off by finding patterns 
They were great to talk to about all sorts of esoteric math though, kind of like how much fun it is for us math novices to follow/ask questions in GQ. Rather than what you’d expect from the movies, they were much more like what I’d expect the typical XKCD fans (the ones who really get the math) are like. They weren’t socially inept, weren’t lost in the clouds, and had a wide range of physical abilities (we were building houses after all).
Read up about Sidney Reilly:
The TV miniseries Reilly: Ace of Spies was Sam Neill’s first big international success, and absolutely worth your time to track down and watch. Fantastic stuff.
I knew/worked with a couple of low level spooks back in the day. Ordinary dudes. Kind of nerdish. They didn;t carry guns, knew no martial arts, etc. They were very very good at distilling info from mundane sources, spotting little things on the web in newspapers, etc. They did speak a couple languages each, including Russian.
However, if you read about some of the exploits of the OSS back in WWII, you can see that some few did get into occasional exciting action. I suggest You’re Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger, not only for it’s realism, but for some great humor at times too.
Thus, I expect every agency has a few “superbadasses”, and a lot of drones, desk jockeys, and computer nerds. Likely a number of “detective/ interrogator” types like Una ran into.
I have known three people “of interest.” One is in her ninties and her mind has deteriorated. I have no idea what she did in WWII. I just know that she can not to this day tell her surviving family about it. She was brilliant.
Another is deceased. He was in naval intelligence. Very handsome and smooth. But not a playboy type. More of a tweedy sort. I won’t say more.
The third person is the very last person in the world that I would suspect. He looks a little like the actor Wallace Shawn.
All three were or are exceptionally clever and somewhat quiet.
I guess some spies have much in common with “leaks”. People inside an organisation or govenment, that feel a particular policy is against their personal ethic. They find an outside source to share information in the hope of enabling a counter force.
Yes, yes I am.
Now get off my fuckin’ lawn.
007½ aka chowder
Probably not, at least from the American side.
I think one could argue that the 2007 book Legacy of Ashes is one of the better existing histories of the CIA based upon a very comprehensive review of declassified information at the CIA Archives and numerous interviews with former officers. The book paints a convincing image of the CIA as a dissasterously ineffective organization. Throughout its early years it was essentially held hostage by people transfixed by boyhood fantasies about conducting ass-kicking paramilitary operations. These operations almost universally shared the outcome of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The CIA’s failures in predicting important world events including China’s willingness to involve itself in the Korean War, the fall of the USSR, 9/11, Iraq’s WMD status, etc. are numerous and include most every important national security issue or event over the extent of its history.
Another non-fiction representation of modern CIA officers is available in the 2004 book, The Interrogators, written by a military intelligence officer and it generally paints the CIA officers he had the misfortune of interacting with as bumbling idiots suffused with extreme arrogance that would jet into American airbases in Afghanistan on a Gulfstream for 48 hours without bothering to obtain a real appreciation of the tribal, ethnic, and political factors at play between detainees, universally attempt unsophisticated interrogation techniques that intended to extract information by threatening to kill and/or torture detainees that destroyed many effective intelligence gathering relationships developed by officers from military intelligence.
Basically, cross your local DMV employees with Keystone cops, a touch of Ivy League “polish” and/or arrogance and mix it all up in a paranoid government organization that largely doesn’t know its own history and typically operates shadowed from accountability to either the public or other branches of government to obtain results or utilize resources in an efficient manner, and what do you think is going to happen?
The results probably aren’t going to be superbadass.
Believe it or not, but my own mother worked for the Company during the late 50’s and into the mid 60’s as a courier/bagman running this and that to those people over there. She is as far from a fictional superspy as one can get.
My dad also did a few odd jobs for the same Company during the 60’s and into the 70’s. He too is rather mundane in skills and appearance. Their standing joke was that if one said that they worked for the Agricultural Department and was posted overseas, then they were a spook. My sister and I were even brought into the fold, so to speak, by being instructed to report to my parents if anyone we met was taking an undue interest in the family. At least we got to see a lot of a certain region of the world before it went to shit in the late 70’s.
When I think of a spy, I’m more likely to picture Aldritch Ames than Bond, James Bond.
I knew a spook when I lived in Hong Kong. He seemed to be a freelance intel guy, investigating seedy goings-on on behalf of the police by integrating himself into the expatriate community.
He didn’t do a very good job of things - made a big show of himself, got drunk and told everyone he was ex-SAS, and asked very obviously probing questions. He ended up getting lots of people busted for drugs, but tipped his girlfriend off and allowed her to escape.
Because of all of the above, it became totally obvious he’d set the bust up, and he got attacked a few weeks later and got stabbed in the arm. He broke his two attackers’ arms, one arm each. According to him, anyway. Then he left and I never saw him again.
I got the extreme pleasure this year of going to Bermuda to pick up items from the estate of Sir William Stephenson - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stephenson .
He was a Spymaster in the Second World War. He was also the basis of the character of James Bond.
It was a pretty cool trip and I got to see some very cool letters and documents. He was known as Intrepid.
My sister was an FBI agent and the biggest deal for her was to live as normal as possible without ever drawing attention. Though she wouldn’t say much, she did tell me there are FBI agents everywhere. From homeless people to gangbangers, they have to totally blend in and never get noticed. For instance, my sister was fluent in Russian but never told anyone that because it would call attention to it.
So I would say spies are even more so trying to keep a cover.
One thing I did manage to get out of her was this, she’d say “Mark did you ever notice that some of these criminals seem to cop really plea deals or such and then simply disappear. Those are government agents, not criminals.”