True, but there may be other organizations so secretive that no one even knows of their existence. Or at least no one is able to provide Wikipedia-worthy citations of their existence.
I suppose. There’s no way to know, of course. But people tend to notice organizations of people, even if they don’t necessarily know what they’re up to. Everyone who was paying attention knew about all those math Ph.D’s hanging out at Fort Meade decades before the DoD admitted that there was No Such Agency.
I’d suppose that hiding in plain sight was one of the first chapters in the CIA playbook.
I have a college friend who’s been a satellite photoanalyst with a certain three-initialed agency for many years, and now and then have kidded him that he’s not nearly as close to becoming President as Ryan was in much less time. Slacker!
Not sure about the CIA, but the Army seems to have one.
There are plenty of (Agency-reviewed) autobiographies out there that touch on training in the Clandestine Service. You enter as a Clandestine Service Trainee (CST) spend your time at The Farm, where you receive survival and weapons training (in case it’s needed). But most of our operatives are unarmed most of the time… it looks a little fishy to be caught with a weapon on foreign soil (for the same reason that domestic narcotics officers often won’t carry their sidearm in a holster - cops wear holsters; OG’s don’t). A few interesting reads that come to mind include: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The American Agent, Master of Disguise, and a bunch of others.
The secret is to tell the CIA that you’re deathly afraid of extra-terrestrials and then see if they bring out a Martian to scare you.
The British Government didn’t even acknowledge the existence of MI6 until 1986, even though everyone knew (James Bond had been around since 1953, apart from anything else).
Wasn’t the sky that came in from the cold about a British officer? And also fiction?
“Wasn’t the sky that came in from the cold about a British officer? And also fiction?”
Yes and yes, though the author spent a few years with MI6, and based on his other books appears to have developed and maintained a wide network of contacts around the world with some knowledge of clandestine affairs.
That said, I’ve read “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold” more than once and I don’t remember much if any super-soldier type training in it. The whole book is about how life as a spy is (mostly) sad, tawdry, and boring.
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Yes. My memory failed me on that one, and now I’m trying to remember the actual name of the biography I was thinking of. I might have it in the bookstacks here somewhere, if I haven’t donated it already.
My bad, but good catch!
And one of my friends insists he was a secret sniper during his enlistment in the late 80s.
I knew a former analyst for the CIA. When I asked him about it, he said analyzed things and simply changed the subject.
Some people like telling stories.
I can’t say for sure, but it’s reasonable to guess that there are analysts in overseas postings who get some version (perhaps milder) of the survival training given in SERE-type courses, or at least the ones journalists get before going into a war zone. IOW training not in how to shoot or ford a river under fire, but what to do if you get kidnapped, or a gun battle erupts around you.
The thing about Le Carre’s books is how incredibly mundane and boring (and realistic) he makes spy work sound - but then it is still riveting fiction despite that.
I once told my wife that Le Carre’s genius was that he could make a meeting of bureaucrats into a tense, page-turning scene. She was not convinced. 
If an intelligence operative has to fight for his life, he’s screwed up.
When I interviewed at the CIA out of college in 1985, they definitely appealed to being able to continue by 5 years in martial arts. BTW, back then, they were the only recruiter that cared about my Mandarin language skills and economics degree. (They also said that if I chose not to follow up on the interview, they would destroy the records. 5 years later as I was getting my MBA, I answered a wall street journal blind add for international careers. Got a call from a gentleman who identified himself as a CIA recruiter. He asked, studiously casually of course, “if you had ever applied to the CIA in the past?”)
That said, others that have interviewed said the interviews pitched the opposite. That almost all the black ops folks are recruited from special forces.
Yep. Intelligence operatives aren’t really “spies”. The real spies are the natives of whichever country we are talking about. These are people who legitimately have access to the documents or information the CIA wants to know about, and who have decided to betray their country for money or perks. The CIA field agents are just there to facilitate a transaction. (money/perks for intel).
They don’t need guns or lockpicks or spy cameras, they aren’t going to be breaking in anywhere or ‘neutralizing’ any guards.
With that said, it does seem clear that the CIA can resort to this kind of thing. They obviously have a way to covertly kidnap or assassinate people. If they were desperate enough, they obviously could send agents in to a building with records, killing guards if necessary. This just is extremely high risk and not something worth doing unless the stakes are extreme.
Or, in some cases, because they hate their own government, oppose its policies, or respect the U.S. more. It happens.