Just because a person works for an intelligence organization, it doesn’t necessarily mean SPY!!! There are far more office drones than James Bond-types. Someone has to maintain files, sort thru data, formulate plans, keep the computers running, and do all the other mundane chores required anywhere.
Chances are if someone hints at being a spy, it’s more along the lines of stolen valor than reality. Nobody wants an operative who’s a blabbermouth.
I’ve met somebody who worked at the CIA. I’m pretty sure that her job wasn’t secret, because she didn’t beat around the bush.
My family knew members of her family for several years, so I’m confident that she actually did work there.
What’s a 1% biker? A billionaire Harley owner?
I worked for the State Department, so I met U.S. agents both overt and covert and probably foreign covert agents that I wasn’t aware of, especially on my trips behind the (then) Iron Curtain. While contact with Soviets was discouraged, there were friendly embassies who all spied on each other, I’m sure. Pretty much every foreign national employee at the US embassy in Moscow (and other SSR countries) was a KGB agent, right down to the person who cut the ambassador’s hair. The general order of business for DOS OPSEC is to treat every friendly stranger as a possible security risk.
According to the spy I knew best sorting through the data is how most of the good intelligence is gained. The only person I knew well enough to really believe them when they said they had long career in international espionage was a female friend from the former Yugoslavia. She lived on a nice farm in rural Montenegro which she described as the reward of her actions.
I am acquainted with a former KGB agent. He isn’t the kind of guy who would answer any questions about his time with that organization if I presumed to ask.
My father implied he had done some intelligence work during World War 2.
His brother said it wasn’t true. Since my mother had already died, we really didn’t have anyone else to ask.
Maybe. How would one know?
Not spies as such, but through my Dad, I met a bunch of undercover cops who had infiltrated drug gangs and the mob back in the 70s (and in Kansas City in the 70s, the mob was particularly ugly. Lots of car bombings.)
A former neighbor’s brother who described himself as ‘non-uniformed military’ worked for the CIA until he retired at age 55. He was never able to talk about what he’d done, where he’d done it, or anything else related to his career. I figured he had to have either been a spy himself or worked with them in some capacity. No confirmation on this one, just a gut feeling.
In my father in laws case he definitely wasn’t a spy. He didn’t even know he was working for the CIA. It was some sort of CIA funded cover organization to root out Marxists and Socialists in Europe. He was a liberal hippie - he’d wouldn’t have been working for the CIA knowingly.
But its funnier to imply something cloak and dagger.
I don’t know if he quite qualifies as a spy, but I met Buzzy Krongard while I worked for Alex. Brown and Sons in the late 90s. How did he go from CEO of an investment bank to Executive Director of the CIA? Maybe he was a spy on the side before he changed careers.
I was hoping for a story about someone who say worked in the military who would have known say a Soviet mole or another spy who was gatheirng secrets or maybe an American who was being paid to spy for the Soviuets.
Also maybe someone who worked for a company who was a spy for another company and was wrking to get comapny trade secrets.
The closest I ever knew to the 2nd was a woman who worked for a toy company (which believe it or not, they keep a tight lid on upcoming products) and they had all kinds of safeguards to keep spies out.
The closest I came to any of those was the case of Felix Bloch, an American diplomat who was highly suspected of passing information to a KGB handler. He had been compromised by a prostitute who entertained his S&M fetishes, but that wasn’t likely the reason he sold out his country.
He was the ambassador to Vienna, Austria at the time of the above dalliance, and the FBI had been onto him for some time. They decided to move forward more aggressively at that time. I was part of the team that tore apart the Vienna embassy trying to find any electronic surveillance evidence. Unfortunately, Bloch had been notified about the FBI investigation by his handlers and was able to cover his tracks sufficiently to avoid prosecution. He did, however, lose his clearance, which is tantamount to being fired in the DOS, and was eventually dismissed. He ended up driving a bus in North Carolina somewhere, as I recall.
I might be whooshed, but a 1%er refers to the American Motorcycle Association (AMA), apocryphally, making a press release in the wake of the July 4th Weekend 1947 Hollister, CA riots, that 99% of motorcyclists were law-abiding. As scholars have later pointed out, the AMA never made such a claim, but it was a good enough tale that outlaw motorcycle clubs/gangs took the idea that they were 1 percent of all motorcycle riders, and turned it into a badge of honor.
I suppose most if not all of us former Peace Corps volunteers were asked/accused of being a spy for the USA. I always laughed it off and said, why on earth would I be living in this tiny town?
Interesting enough, on more, than one occasion, I met American government employees visiting the Peace Corps office in Quito. They certainly were not volunteers and were somewhat evasive concerning what they were up to in Ecuador.
Ecuador does not have strategic importance for the USA, nor does it have thaaat much oil. Us volunteers just gossiped amongst ourselves that they were operatives combating the “Shining Path” in Peru. {Shining Path was big news in Ecuador in the 1980’s}
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There were always those types at foreign posts: officers who just didn’t seem to fit the Diplomatic Corps mold, or who really didn’t seem able to discuss things that were second nature to a DOS employee. While most everybody understood who they really worked for, nobody mentioned it in public.
I did know one woman who was a CIA administrative type, who had been presented as such to the host country, and who was about as far from being an actual agent as you can get in the CIA. She liked to pretend to people that she was more important than just a functionary. It was pathetic, really.
Some years ago, I was on Lufthansa bzns class Frankfurt > Moscow. There was a fairly old man next to me, dressed utterly communist-ly, with horrible bad breath, who was obv. somewhat famous as many men came up to him and bowed and said Hello Professor. If I want to speak with a neighbouring psgr., I prefer to wait until just before landing so the conversation will not be unlimited. Luckily in this case, we had to circle for half and hour.
I spoke to him, said I was from Toronto, he loved to speak of his beloved Dacha, and somehow he morphed into one to the most breathtaking personal stories I ever heard.
He was an Econ. prof, but did work for some Govt dept. and was so trusted that he was allowed to travel to many countries. Every thing he said pointed to the standard spook operative and I think he was not even attempting to disguise it.
Despite his international travel, he continued to believe the USSR was a successful socialist nation and the U.S. a dismal capitalist failure with starving people locked in special zones and many people dying of syphillis in camps or on the streets, that the goods shown in store windows were all fakes unsupported be actual merchandise. Then, he one sunny day, flew from NY to LA, Seated at a window, he saw what we all see and are astonished by, the incredible number of swimming pools across the entire U.S. shining back at us in summer as well as the massive crops. He said, “I was lied to all my life, and in turn I lied to all of my students, and I was a fool, and I did all those things for my country too and I was wrong, wrong, wrong. Then I went to your Vancouver city, surely the most beautiful place in the world and I was so sick at myself I could think of nothingk else and could not sleep.”
There was much more to the story, but it was the vague and mysterious reasons a Prof. of economics would have been allowed to travel to so many countries in the first place that made me listen so carefully to him. He was - like many Russians - utterly Nobokovian and charming despite his withering bad breath.
Hello.
My name is Fish. Bill Fish. I like my prune juice shaken, not stirred.
You gentlemen and gentleladies have now meet a spy. Congrats.
My work here is done.
Time to go bag Phyllis Diller (God what I won’t do for my country).
Two.