I met a guy once who worked for the CIA in the past. I did not ask him what he did for the CIA and possibly he could not tell me anyway . His son played soccer with my son. His shirt had a Russian phrase on it so I asked him about it and he said he had worked for the CIA. I know most of them are not spies so my guess is he was not .
This. A real spy would never talk about it. Otherwise, he’d have to kill you.
CIA has a division called the Directorate of Operations. Those are the spies. They are under cover. If you knew one, you would not know he’s a spy and probably would not know he works for the CIA. I have heard that a lot of CIA spies have cover as State Dept. employees, but I don’t know that for a fact.
All new DO officers joining the elite team are required to live and work under cover. Training provides you with the skills needed to live and work under cover, but only you can decide if hiding the truth from others (including many family members, friends, and close acquaintances) is a commitment you can accept.
One of my college roommates worked for the CIA for many years, but he was* an analyst, not a spy (though we always joking called him a spy).
*- That said, I’ve fallen out of touch with him, and have not heard from him in at least a decade. Maybe he did wind up becoming an actual spy. 
One of my best friends worked for The Company for his entire career.
He always called himself an analyst, but I know he was stationed on Europe with the “State Department” on a number of occasions. I’ve never asked him exactly what his duties were.
Sorry, wrong reply to wrong thread
In uni I worked for a company that provided entertainment for company outings, LARP-dinners, medieval tournaments, etc. One of the “companies” was the Dutch MIVD (millitary intelligence and security service). Does that count?
I’ve known a few people who had been on both sides of the intelligence game in the South African struggle. Either Apartheid-era government operatives, or anti-government operatives. I only met them all many years afterwards, though, long after the various cats were out of the bags.
My sister did have to go into hiding from the government, but that was for organizing clandestine meetings and surreptitiously printing propaganda leaflets, not actual undercover work.
I’m a little surprised your friend told you this. The CIA recruited at my college (they even had ads in the student newspaper) and someone who went for an interview was told not to tell people they were even applying for a job there. Perhaps it’s only for the actual spies, but my understanding is that they give you a cover story to tell people when asked where you work.
In college in 1987-8, we had a scheduled presentation by someone from the Soviet embassy speaking on nuclear disarmament. We chatted with the guy after, and he told us that he was given a very clear route to take when driving upstate from Manhattan. (Now, perhaps he wasn’t a spy, but the US intelligence agencies were apparently taking no chances.)
After college, I worked for a small company in Westchester County where we had very low-level security clearances. Because of this, we had regular visits from a Defense Intelligence Agency rep, to verify that we were keeping up with the correct procedures. He seemed bored, so he hung out at our office, and so I’d ask him for spy stories, some of which were amusing.
Possibly. Living in Thailand for 25 years, I met all sorts. While I dismissed out of hand the Bozos who liked to brag they were, I did meet quite a few who quite possibly could have been.
In fact, I have a friend in Boston who travels the world as a US Defense Department adviser. He was in my Peace Corps group back in the 1980s, and we lived and worked in the same northern-Thailand province. He too married a Thai, except he met his Thai wife in Boston when she was already an American. But we’ve kept in touch, we always visited when he hit Thailand every so often, and a couple of times he’s even crashed on our couch here in Waikiki. The last time he was here, a year ago, he crashed on our couch for only one night, moving over here from his expensive hotel room only after a week of meetings at Camp Smith here on Oahu. Then we had a night of catching up, after which he headed on to the South Pacific and Thailand. I strongly suspect he has some sort of intelligence role, but I would never ask, and I doubt would tell even if I did. He did say he advises on missile systems.
This is not really a spy situation, but another friend who was also in my Peace Corps group, after PC stayed on to help build a communications tower in northeastern Thailand near the border with Laos. Ostensibly to transmit the Voice of America beyond the Thai border, it was an open secret that the tower was and probably remains a listening device targeted at southern China. But I don’t think that made my friend a spy per se. (After that, he ended up with the US Department of Agriculture on the Big Island here in Hawaii and today still works for them but in Saipan. Has a Thai wife too.)
Couple of FBI agents and a college buddy worked for the NSA for a while, but I don’t think any of them count as being “spies” exactly.
I’ve known plenty of military intelligence officers, and a few special operations types who got “loaned” to the Mossad from time to time, but I’ve never met an actual full-time spy - at least, not as far as I know.
Gina Haspel was based in the London Embassy. I don’t remember what her job title was, but it wasn’t “CIA Station Chief” as now shown on her resume’. In fact, there is a story she used to tell about being introduced to QE II. She introduced herself with her job title, and the Queen said something like "Oh? I thought you were CIA station chief 
" By convention, British people do not repeat conversations that they had with the Queen, but I guess CIA managers aren’t that diplomatic.
Anyway, there’s a definition problem. Are people who read newspapers and write reports spies? What about people who do liaison with local government agencies?
Taking the next step, what about people who do long road trips through the farmlands and then write crop reports? That’s sort of actual spying, and that’s why their travel is restricted, but it’s not clandestine and they are unlikely to be expelled for it.
Some ‘state department’ employees may even have clandestine conversations, or receive clandestine reports. They can get expelled for that, so I guess that is spying – except that they aren’t doing the actual spying, so I find the term ‘spy’ a bit misleading.
That, in fact, is pretty much exactly what my old roommate did. He worked for the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which was a department of the CIA. As he described his job to me, he analyzed Soviet (and, later, Russian) news broadcasts and newspaper articles, and used what he learned into those to help the Agency reverse-engineer Soviet/Russian foreign policy.
And, no, despite what we jokingly called him, he did not consider himself to be a spy, and none of us did, either.
It’s a fact. I worked with many of them. They were pretty obvious to State Dept. personnel, as they had no in-depth knowledge of the department. Most of them in the West are likely analysts under the guise of, say, an economics officer. But in the old SSRs, many were active spies. Questioning one of them, or even hinting at what you suspected was true would likely result in an audience with people you’d just as soon never have to talk to, or even in your expulsion from the country.
An amusing aside: my siblings and parents always assumed that I was CIA, despite my protestations to the contrary. I was, at one point, attached to Diplomatic Security and did some electronic surveillance stuff, but most of my time with the DOS was as a facilities manager. Never could convince them, though.
Not me, but my wife, and he was an honest-to-goodness spy. He had a legit cover job* that allowed him to travel the world openly to do his spying.
The only story we know is that he was involved in the defection of Svetlana Stalin.
*not super model, or import-export, or tennis pro. But the last one was close.
I’ve met quite a few over the years that were retired but still had contacts. CIA and NSA types. Most were open about part of their past. One was a professor as USF, another was the China President of a multinational corporation you would have heard of (were were alumni of the same grad school), etc.
Plus all the blowhards that claimed to have been.
When I worked at Lehmans, there was one guy that I suspected was truly an active spy using his investment banking title at Lehman’s Hong Kong in 1996 as a cover. Being a spy would have explained his very special cover role that being an ordinary investment banker would not. Then again, it could also have been explained if he had been the nephew of the CEO. (He didn’t seem to report to anyone, expenses were never questioned, travel was never authorized, he spoke really good mandarin, he visited all sorts of dodgy Chinese military/government tied companies, etc. We went drinking a couple of times, shot the shit, traded some innocuous China stories, and I always wondered…)
I can tell you a personal story. In my senior year, I attended a job fair at university. Back then, when dinosaurs still walked the earth, the only company that had much of anything international much less to do with China was the CIA. So, I followed up and had a job interview. They went big time to try sell me on the macho part, doing martial arts, etc. Only thing was I needed to sign up for 2 years in langley before anything, and I wanted to have an adventure. In hindsight, I should have gone for a Langley interview to sell them on sending me to China back then just to wander around with a backpack for ancedotal evidence gathering. My interview was in SF and I was kinda no thanks. At the end of the interview, the woman said that “should you not decide to move forward with us, then all records will be destroyed.”
Fast forward 5 years, I was finishing my MBA and answered a blind ad in the Wall Street Journal for “international careers.” I get called by a CIA recruiter. And he asked “Have you ever applied to the CIA before” and I immediately thought “you motherfuckers” and didn’t pursue it that time either…
Me! Yeah, right.
I only knew one person who worked for the CIA as an analyst. He had gone on a Mormon mission to Taiwan in the late 60s then law school, a much less combination back then.
Oh, sure it was!