A lot of people ask me if the spy game is as exciting as it is in the movies. While it is far tamer and less sexy than most of the fictional portrayals, it is nonetheless an engaging and fulfilling career. A life in the clandestine service involves living overseas, learning foreign languages, meeting interesting people, engaging with critical issues, having the opportunity to impact policy, using alias and disguise, and writing – lots of writing. Frankly, stealing secret information from adversaries is challenging and fun.
That said, it would be a lot easier if overseas field officers could steal what we personally thought was most interesting or most available. It would be less of a challenge if we could simply gather low hanging fruit, or recruit those spies that are most amenable to working with the U.S. It doesn’t work that way, however. We are only empowered to collect information that our top policymakers need to make critical decisions, and steal secret information that cannot be gathered by any other means. If nobody else can do it, we will at least try.
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