Oh hell, I knewd I’d misspelt it. Dang.
If it meant drinking martinis, wearing custom fitted suits, driving expensive sports cars, using ingenious gadgets, and having lots of sexual encounters with gorgeous women, all while delivering witty one-liners, then I say: sign me up!
Sampiro–your friend’s remarks mean that she thinks you like like 007, & she wants you.
TALLY HO! 
Dude, I’d so do it.
Ah, she knows that’s a wrong number. 
I’ve never understood how spy became a cool job. Your whole career would basically consist of telling lies and faking relationships.
The movie Spy Game took a lot of glamour out of the whole thing.
My parents actually think I am a spy. I’m an international aid worker and my niche is operations in post-conflict and at conflict societies, which to my depression era parents sounds like a fake job.
There are actually a lot of intelligence people around and the funny thing is everyone always knows who they are. They are always in better shape than the rest of us and they pretty much just regurgitate whatever they here from the NGO workers. I remember one dinner conversation with a guy from the US military intelligence who was fascinated to learn the high value details I had read in a local newspaper earlier that day.
Gay guys do that all the time to their families and don’t to travel or be paid for it. 
My dad worked with someone who evidently used to occasionally do some ninja stuff for the feds.
He talked about sticking a toothpick in the locks of apartment doors when he went in. If the bug-ee came home early it’d give him a valuable couple minutes to get his stuff and get out as the guy went and got maintenance.
No way. I’m a horrible lier, and I don’t think I could kill in cold blood.
Double-oh, if you’re James Bond.
Two of my friends were invited to an interview with MI6 after graduating - basically, they were asked how they would get information out of their best friends… they both decided that wasn’t the life for them.
(Or so they tell me… who knows!)
Excuse me for being somewhat serious in a very entertaining thread.
As to CIA, if anybody is interested, one should realize that a vast percentage of the employees are not in espionage or counter-espionage or spooks of any kind. The place is chock full of lawyers, cryptologists, janitors, accountants, maintenance people, translators and other non-critical personnel, all of whom contribute to the effort in some way.
And if you suspect somebody is working for CIA, there is no sense in asking, because if they are, they will tell you “No” and if they are not, well, they will also say “No.” And the the former may have to kill you.
My cousin had one of those courses in the Air Force. After it was all done, the instructors asked the class if anyone had any friends about to take the course in the near future. When my cousin said he knew someone about to take it, they asked him if there was something secret that he knew about the guy. Especially something embarrassing but not really serious. So cousin told the instructors about the time his buddy got drunk on base and drove a Generals personal golf cart into the lake. When the buddy was through with the course, cousin asked him how it was. The guy said he handled it well until they suddenly started asking about the golf cart. “Holy shit, Man! they knew about the GOLF CART!” I don’t know if cousin told how they knew.
And no. I’m not in the CIA.
I’d make a lousy spy. I just don’t have the observational or body-language skills, and I’m a lousy liar.
The CIA’s statement on diversity is:
and one of the CIA’s “affinity groups” (voluntary membership groups intended to provide networking and social opportunities for members of similar backgrounds) is ANGLE, the Agency Network for Gay and Lesbian Employees.
Since 1995, when President Clinton signed an executive order prohibiting the denial of security clearances merely on the basis of sexual orientation, the Agency has been proactive in discouraging discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and, in fact, there was a gay pride celebration at Langley in 2000, with guest speaker Rep. Barney Frank being introduced by the CIA executive director.
If you’re interested in working for the CIA, you can check their employment opportunities here:
Bullshit. Yes, some sort of field agent may keep it a secret, but all these regular employees you mentioned are open about it. All their family knows, and also their friends, and I imagine their banks and other organizations they do business with.
I don’t have any firsthand knowledge, but Tom Clancy in his novels is fond of pointing out that spies in general don’t kill people, like in the movies. (Unless they’re named “John Clark”, and I think he’s referred to as a “paramilitary agent.”)
A friend of mine who grew up in Williamsburg near Camp Peary, VA, which was “secretly” the site of most CIA training, said the “secrecy” was a major joke in the area. The government would not confirm or deny that Peary was used by the CIA, everything having to do with the Company presence there was strictly hush-hush, and tourists who asked any cab-driver in town to “take me to the CIA training center” would be dropped off there without the cab driver ever having to ask “where’s that” because it was the most well known secret in the state.
Same friend also tells a story that I haven’t been able to confirm or refute (though I haven’t tried recently or that hard) that is funny regardless of its truth value. Supposedly (and again, this is anecdotal and probably stretched), there was a major number of “paranoia” cases among Williamsburg residents and Wm & Mary students for years, people stating that they had the delusion they were “being watched” or “being followed” even though they weren’t doing anything remotely illegal or interesting or the type who’d usually attract a stalker (for instance, very few 45 year old accountants or retired schoolteachers have stalkers). Supposedly, as the dubious but entertaining story goes, these people were the targets of Camp Peary CIA employees who were being trained in surveillance but weren’t yet Larch level experts in “How Not to Be Seen”.
(Trivia that most probably already know: the reason the CIA is called “The Company” dates to the Bay of Pigs era. The Spanish word for company (as in corporation) is compania and it’s abbreviated, in much the way we’d use Inc., as Cia. The Cuban agents began referring to the CIA as compania and it just sort of stuck.)
I’m very well aware of that fact.
You’re very quick to call “bullshit.” If you will look very carefully at the end of the last paragraph, you will see a little icon. That little icon is called a smiley. It means that is a joke. If you don’t know what “joke” means, you can Google it or look it up in a dictionary. If you don’t know what a dictionary is, I can’t help you.
As an aside, growing up in N. Va. meant we all knew about Langley-even if the highway dept chose to label the exit to their site “Fed Highway Administration” (I believe the sign has been updated). And the CIA learned very early on that there were some secrets that just weren’t going to be kept. According to an early history, soon after the CIA was established after WWII, it used some warehouses and non-discript buildings in Alexandria Va. for their HQ. Of course no signs or identifying marks. Everything was very hush-hush. One day the director himself got curious about buses that would drive by and stop for a few minutes in the middle of the day. No one got on or off, it was very puzzling. So he went up to them and asked. They were tourist tour buses showing the DC tourists where the super-secret CIA had their base. I don’t think the CIA tried to worry about keeping their location secret after that…
When I was a teenager I had a job in DC one summer. The public transit bus I rode in to work on had a regular stop at the entrance of the main CIA building in Langley. Anyone with 50 cents could ride right up to the front door and knock. I imagine that standing on sidewalk waiting for the next bus would get kind of boring so I never got off to look around. 
The best cover for any agent is to at first hint that he is not all that he seems,then on a future occasion be a little bit more forthcoming and drop some plausible pointers to the fact that he is a spy and then apparently get drunk and come out with the most implausible Walter Mitty bullshit.
Pretend to get drunk on a future visit and inform everyone that you are Roger Moores secret love child ,cool it for a little while and then when “drunk” again tell everyone how you single handledly beat off a gang intent on rape and then found that the woman you had saved was Princess Di and after that you credibility will be so shot that you will be able to say and do whatever you like in the line of business and no one will pay you any attention whatsoever.
I suspect that wearing expensive suits, driving flash cars and going around shooting people could somewhat draw peoples attention to yourself which in some quarters might not be considered very helpful to your mission if your a spook who I believe prefer to play the “grey” man.
As to shagging beautiful women I think that Iread somewhere that the preferred female targets for subborning are those of the plainer persuasion who enjoy the male attention and who even when they eventually realise whats going on carry on being helpful though I have no cite for this.
By the way five minutes ago I wrestled a stampeding Aberdeen Angus bull to the ground to stop it running into a crowd .
Imagine my amazement when I discovered that amongst the people whos lives I had saved were Jennifer Aniston AND Anna Kornikova ,both of whom have insisted on sleeping with me to night to show their gratitude.