Or perhaps Bond is actually the comedic, incompetent distraction that allows the real agents to operate undetected. See Goldfinger for an example of Bond’s utter incompetence.
Stranger
He wanted to be a geologist?
No, he wanted to be Michael Caine. 
SAS and Delta do a fair amount of work us common folk would consider cloak-and-dagger spy stuff, and they’re superbadasses by pretty much any definition. Eric Haney’s Inside Delta Force has a pretty vivid description of some of the training they have to go through that sounds straight out of a Bond movie; in addition to the traditional counterterrorist hostage rescue stuff we usually associate them with, they learn high speed automobile chase and evasion, learn lockpicking techniques from imprisoned burglars, have to complete a mock intelligence mission in Washington DC and make it out of town safely with the FBI hunting for them, etc. Fascinating reading.
Maybe they really did base The Unit on that book.
My friend grew up as an embassy brat. They lived in a few different countries where his dad was a high level embassy staffer. I met his dad a few times. He was a frail, quiet unassuming guy.
I told my friend jokingly one day that for all he knew, his dad was really a spy and did James Bond type shit at night. It was a running joke between us for years. At my friend’s wedding, over ten years later, we “confronted” his dad about his spywork. His dad brushed us off and his siblings cracked up laughing over the absurdity of it all.
Some years after that, his dad became very sick. My friend went to visit him literally on his death bed. At one point, his mom left the room and my friend was alone with his father. His dad opened up to him and admitted that he really was a spy! He was employed by the State Dept but did do a fair amount of side work for the CIA. Amazing.
My brother commanded an Army battalion in Afghanistan a couple of years ago, and had some doings with CIA personnel that he pretty much characterized as cowboy hotdoggers. You know, the kind that give fraternities a bad name. He said they always wore shades (even indoors), and made a point of never telling you their first names. When they introduced themselves, they’d shake your hand and say, “Hi, I’m . . . Bill,” as in “I’m in the CIA and so you’re not supposed to know my *real *name.”
Apparently they had a firing range near near where my brother’s battalion was camped, and more than a few stray bullets would go whizzing by. When my brother asked them to practice a little further off, their reply would be very condenscening, kind of like, “Sorry, Bud, no can do.”
So my brother banned all CIA personnel from the commissary. No more stray bullets.
The team I used to work for had an ex-NSA manager as a team manager. The guy was the most arrogant little* dickwad on Earth. Fortunately he wasn’t my Manager.
His Name was Mike, and this is how he introduced him self to me and everyone else.
Mike: Hi, So you are new to our team, where did you come from?
Me: Well I just ended a contract at Un…
Mike: Great I used to work NSA, can’t tell anybody about what I did, top secret government stuff, over your head.
He also did a really assine ‘controlling the meeting’ thing for example.
Big Boss: How are we on the Web Server product, On schedule Rob?
Mike: Rob we are going to need a status report on the web server project.
Rob: Umm okay, well the code is just about ready to be deployed. Ram was working on the physical server, You said you thought you’d have that done this afternoon, didn’t you Ram?
Mike: Ram, We need that server up, can’t have any hold ups now, how is the server?
Ram: 
The server is up and seems fine, I was going to see if me and Rob could get together and set up the config we need.
Mike: Ram, Rob gonna have to set up a meeting for you two to get together. We are waiting on the configuration for the web server.
Rob: Well Joe actually configed it for the POC, He’ll be a better resource…
Mike: Joe, we need that configuration detail from you so Ram can get it prepared and we make the gate on time.
Joe: Sure.
Mike: Big Boss, I think the webserver is undercontrol, once we get these configuration issues solved.
Everybody absolutely wanted to strangle him so they could feel his voice box crush under their fingers.
*He was about 5 foot 2 and had the worst Napoleon complex. Every new male member of the team would get a relentless badgering and needling from Mike until they played Basketball One-on-One with him. So Mike could show off how good he was in a stupid dominance game. He was also the dirtiest player, and would elbow you in the face or nuts to make a shot and then talk shit about it constantly.
From the admittedly little I’ve read about contemporary CIA field work, it’s often surprisingly dull, bureaucratic and routine, with virtually nothing in the way of physical tresspassing and infiltration into sensitive sites and such, although their training does include some defense skills, weapons handling, explosives knowledge, and defensive/offensive driving maneuvers.
Today’s field agent is for the most part entirely focused on cultivating and maintaining intelligence sources. They do this primarily by socially mixing in with promising groups of people – govt. officials at embassy social events, computer engineers at conventions, etc. – and meeting with promising individuals in a social way, repeatedly, over a period of time, in a non-invasive, non-threatening, and above all non-intel-related way. The future intel source is simply meeting this friendly American for drinks, you see… and if he should happen to open up over his vodka or whatever about his dissatisfaction with his officer’s pay, his boss, his government or regime, then so much the better. He feels better for venting (safely) to an outsider, and the CIA agent gets a better feeling for where this person’s genuine interests and sympathies lie.
As for sex and contact recruiting, female agents especially enjoy a certain advantage with respect to cultivating certain male potential recruits from, let’s say, certain more traditional cultures – who often see a liberated American woman as a potential lover, but whether the agent choses to play up that angle (and how, and how far) is up to her. She still has to find a way to convert the source’s interest into a willingness to dance a tango with the CIA, after all. But the sexual angle sometimes comes into play with male agents too, both gay and straight. (Sometimes a potential source will misinterpret a straight male agent’s “social” interest in him as a sexual one – to potentially embarrassing or hilarious results!)
The critical moment is when the CIA agent presents an opportunity to the source to offer information for pay; when successfully staged, this step results in the turning of a contact of interest into an intel source. This is the turning point in the CIA-source relationship and requires a certain skill to pull off, given the universal taboos and laws against treason. A surprising number of sources who are persuaded to sell the U.S. information do so from the mindset that they are not in fact betraying their country, but sticking it to some other group (a dictatorial one-party regime or theocracy, say, or their army brass, or a third country or corporation that has sensitive dealings with theirs, as in the context of WMD or nuclear plant development deals or an important alliance).
As for maintaining sporadic or regular contact with an intel source, that’s a little more cloak-and-daggery, and still uses old staple techniques like leaving chalk marks and instructions at pre-set drop points. A more sensitive process is the eventual physical extraction of a source and his family; the CIA takes pride in offering a new and better life in the USA, including a financial settlement or perhaps a stipend, to its more valuable sources; I don’t recall if its relocation program is the same Witness Protection Program used by other agencies [like the FBI] or if they do it all in-house.
Depending on the milieu and laws of the country in question, a CIA agent whose cover is blown can have reason to fear anything from extrajudicial torture and disappearance to a very bureaucratic forced deportation.
And BTW, our agents never refer to themselves as “spies”. That’s the other guy, the mole (or traitor) who sells us (hopefully valuable) information. CIA field men and women are called agents, officers, or operatives.
One of my favorite haunts in Washington is the Spy Museum (800 F Street NW; the building used to be the headquarters of the American Communist Party). They celebrate lots of sneaks, couriers, seducers, code breakers and masters of disguise. The only real-life badass I recall from the display was Chevalier d’Éon, a two-fisted duelist and a transvestite.
Oh, and Julia Child. She didn’t have a Walther PPK, but you did not want to mess with her when she had a chef’s knife in reach…!
In the first Bond movie I ever saw–the Halle Berry one–he is described by his antagonists as an assassin. Of course that’s from their point of view, but it strikes me as a much better description of him than spy.
I knew several CIA station chiefs in the Foreign Service. Most of them were obnoxious drunks. The agents who were working undercover were assigned as Foreign Service Officers, and we usually knew who they were, since they were dismally ill-prepared to interact with FS personnel. They usually knew nothing about the FS system, benefits, chain of command, etc., so were easily spotted by the rest of us. I’m sure there were agents who were much better at avoiding identification, and perhaps the less apt folks were plants to throw the rest of us off.
I worked for a former Military Intelligence officer (naval) at a USIS center in Colombia. He wasn’t a “badass,” but he ran the place as an authoritarian, would summarily fire people seemingly at whim, was secretive about his past (though loved to tell about his antics around the world), and drank in the office most of the day.
Yes, the State Department is a prime haunt for agents.
Well, that’s because Bond has a “license to kill” (as though such a thing existed).
CIA operatives rarely do things like breaking into places or killing people. They recruit natives of the foreign country (sympathizers, people wanting the money, or susceptible to blackmail), so the actual agent can’t be connected with the action.
Hm… Possible link that people whose job it is to drink and mingle come out of it as alcoholics?
OTOH, you’d have to be very good at holding your liquor to manage that sort of thing.
Joe Turner: Listen. I work for the CIA. I am not a spy. I just read books! We read everything that’s published in the world. And we… we feed the plots - dirty tricks, codes - into a computer, and the computer checks against actual CIA plans and operations. I look for leaks, I look for new ideas… We read adventures and novels and journals. I… I… Who’d invent a job like that?
CMC fnord!
Jesus. Did this dude used to work for EDS? Sounds like a guy I “knew”.
His cube was COVERED in Asia pictures. Not the country. The band. Weird guy.
My ex-father-in-law was in the Air Force, but got picked up by the NSA. His job? Sit in a shack out on the flight line, and listen to a certain foreign countries radio traffic, translate important bits, and submit it. Pretty boring.
the CIA officers who jump into places like Iraq and Afganistan probably are. These guys go in before the Combat Controllers do.
I think you’re the first person I’ve run into who has also read this great book. I’ve read it a number of times, just for the humor. I was going to make remarks about how old we must be to know about it (published in 1957, though I found my paperback later), but I see it’s been reprinted.
I just can’t imagine that paramilitary experiences in WWII have much if any resemblance to normal spy work today. I’m sure 99% of it is, as said, staying invisible and acting as little like James Bond as humanly possible. The other 1% may involve rough stuff. We have apparently kidnapped, I mean, detained suspected terrorists off foreign streets, though it’s not clear whether special military units did this or civilians. The whole spy industry has undoubtedly transformed entirely since the old days like 1929 when, honest to Og, Secretary of State Henry Stimson:
Well, this dude was unforgettable. I worked with hum till 97 or so, and left the place after that, so I don’t know where he went. But he was 5’2’’ and his name was Mike something-Italian. I’m not trying to be coy, I just can’t remember his name. But I would not be surprised if his resume got him into a lot of places, and his personality got him kicked out of them.