21 Former CIA and FBI Employees Reveal What It Was Really like Working There

1.

“An ex-Company man once told me Get Smart was more accurate than James Bond.”

2.

“I was an analyst, not an agent/officer. 85% of all classified material is classified because of how it was collected, not because it is juicy/useful."

"Yes, you boss and co-workers said that shit about you.”

3.

“My dad worked for GCHQ in the '80s doing voice recognition and he can’t say anything more for a decade more."

"The way they can recognize you by Siri/Google today was being used in the '80s. Just a bit slower.”

4.

“Somewhat unrelated but my great uncle was an FBI agent. Every time we would ask him if he had any interesting stories but he would say he was sworn I to secrecy."

"After 10 years of hearing this, my sister asked 'Really?' and he responded with 'No, I just don’t remember anything interesting happening.'”

5.

“Not CIA but have worked with and know guys in intelligence. Most of the intelligence we get is from OSINT (open source intel. ie news articles, press releases, news networks and government announcements)."

"Most people think that everyone in intelligence is some James Bond/Jason Bourne type of individual when in reality, the majority of analysts sit at a desk and go through news articles all day."

"That said, that’s not the only method we have to gather intel, but it is where most of it comes from. Even analysts that are using other methods such as GEOINT, IMINT and SIGINT spend their day cropping images for minute details or replaying and monitoring the same signal over and over again.”

6.

“Worked with a woman who was former NSA. We would always beg her to tell us shit, but she never did."

"The one thing she did say, though, was that during training they show them a video of a bunch of things they’ve found out about and stopped. She said she hardly slept for two weeks after watching that.”

7.

“Met an old, retired, CIA spook at a wedding reception. Spitting image of Col. Sanders, he was amazing."

"So I asked him, 'I don’t want you to tell me anything you can’t, but I’d love to know when Kennedy got killed, what was the talk around the water cooler in the office?' He didn’t halt, or pause to think."

"'Hell, we all thought Johnson did it'.”

8.

“Not an FBI or CIA officer here, but my sister is a district attorney, and over the years she has prosecuted a number of animal-cruelty cases."

"This lead to her having an ongoing partnership with the FBI for the last several years. It turns out the FBI started tracking animal abuse cases about 10-15 years ago due to the incredibly high correlation between abusing animals when you’re young and becoming a serial violent offender as an adult.”

9.

“We are all told never to use sites like this and social media, in general, is pretty much a no-go.”

10.

“My dad worked for the government, and he told me that anytime he had a meaningful interaction with someone who wasn’t American (i.e. going over to my friend’s house for the lunar new year, or going on vacation to Canada) he had to report it all, and if he saw anything suspicious.”

11.

“If you go through the FBI interview process, it takes a while."

"Chances are you’re going to have to spend some time working on crimes against children, which is really tough and most people don’t want to do it.”

12.

“My great uncle told us late in his life that he didn’t work for GE as an engineer his whole career. He actually worked for the CIA and that’s all he would say.”

13.

“I don’t know if I’m allowed to say it but a mentor who definitely wasn’t supposed to tell me used to be a white hat for the FBI."

"Apparently, all he did was search for pedophiles by tracking child pornography. He said he didn’t stay for very long because it was messing with his mentality.”

14.

“I have a few friends that are CIA officers. First thing is that the people that work for the CIA are not CIA agents, they are officers. The people they recruit to spy for them are agents."

"Also, going on a tangent, I am 90% sure I have been one of those agents when I was dealing with a Mexican logistics company while working at General Motors."

"The logistics company we were dealing with was owned by a multi-billion dollar Mexican clan, and all the ultra-wealthy clans in Mexico all have ties to various cartels, so some federal agencies got involved."

"Mainly FBI and I believe a few DEA, but one guy was specifically not wearing any badges, was not willing to identify what agency he was working for, and questioned me on a lot of specific details of what the company’s capabilities were."

"Though getting back on track, anyone who is a U.S. Citizen can apply to join the CIA, it isn’t that hard. If you have any kind of degree in computer science, statistics, engineering, or accounting and don’t have anything that would fuck up you getting a clearance getting a job would be relatively easy there."

"Working at the CIA is far more boring than you would think. Lots of tracing manufacturing capabilities. From what I described with that Mexican logistics company to finding out how China sources the components they use to manufacture their satellites.”

15.

“Operation Ivy Bells was a plan to tap Soviet communication lines. The cover story they used was that they had divers diving down to recover fragments of a new soviet supersonic anti-ship missile."

"The communication line tap was a failure due to a spy, however, the dive teams successfully recovered all fragments of the missiles from the soviet weapons tests."

"The U.S. was able to reverse engineer one and subsequently learned they were radar guided only and the assumed IR guidance did not exist.”

16.

“There is a book called Moscow Rules. It was written by two CIA people, all about, well, disguise."

"The CIA had all these agents in Russia, but the Russians were insane about following literally every single American in Russia, 24/7, looking for spies. So a huge part of their job was trying to shake off the KGB. They had crazy quick-change disguises, all sorts of stuff.”

17.

“I’m not one but my friend is. She went off the grid after she graduated college, got recruited by the CIA. She told us she was interested and majored in political science. I hope she’s doing well!”

18.

“When I applied for a (clerical) position with the FBI, someone on the subway unaccountably sat next to me and asked if I’d write her son and persuade him to apply to a school for the deaf (I’m deaf myself—how could she have known I was?)."

"So I wrote a letter, she and I met for dinner, then we went our separate ways. I’ve always wondered about this.”

19.

“My ex was married to an FBI agent and was told many times about the insanely long interview period. She mentioned they went back to even interview his kindergarten teacher."

"She also told me if there truly was anyone in your life that was a CIA agent, you would never know. They would truly be sworn to secrecy and there would never be an instance of them causally mentioning or bragging, 'Hey, I used to work at the CIA,' those people don’t actually work for the CIA.”

20.

“I wasn’t FBI/CIA, I was NSA. But was integrated with both for a few assignments and the biggest thing is that it’s all way more Office Space than Tom Clancy."

"Also, every cafeteria has a buffalo chicken salad day, and it’s usually the best thing they serve.”