30 CIA and FBI Agents Spill (Some) Beans About Agency Secrets

1.

When the government shut down hooker sites on backpage and Craigslist the section responsible for hunting human traffickers got pissed. I perused backpage/Jacksonville for six months flagging individuals that matched the description of missing persons. Found a lot of missing girls.

2.

I have a relative that retired from the NSA a few years ago. She has talked about a few things in generalities, nothing specific. Among them: You will see things that entirely change your view of the world. People go in there all the time with lofty goals of changing things and within months those goals are mostly gone. Still, if you want to change things, you work for the agency. If you just want to make money, you work for a contractor. No one cares what contractors have to say. Most people that stay long enough will do a tour in counterterrorism. Many people transfer out after a few months, and the average stay is two years because of the visuals. Those who stick around for a long time often change for the worse, and many struggle with mental illnesses, become alcoholics, get divorced, and generally lead miserable lives with their work their only reason for continuing. Alcoholism in general is rife in the agency. When you cannot speak to anyone outside the agency about your work, it becomes nearly impossible to confide in anyone close to you. Even if you have close work friends or family, you have to be careful what you say because not everyone is read into every program. Two people can sit next to each other in the same office, working on the same subject for months, and never talk about it with each other even though they’re close friends outside the agency. So people turn to the bottle. Her husband worked for a different government agency and also had a Top Secret-SCI clearance, but she couldn’t talk about her work with him (nor could he with her, but he didn’t involve the intelligence community). The agency employs psychiatrists who are cleared to be read into almost any program. Going to them, though, is often seen as a mark of shame among other agency employees, so they are not used nearly as often as they should be. She told me most of these things while trying to recruit me. She believed that I should go in knowing what to expect. I eventually declined to apply.

3.

My spouse is an FBI agent. One of the things they had to do at the FBI Academy was going to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. The lesson was what can happen if you blindly follow orders without ever questioning the morality/intent behind them. I found that pretty compelling, and I was glad to hear that it's part of their training.

4.

There is a book called Moscow Rules. It was written by 2 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. The movie Argo was based on one of the writers somewhat.

5.

While in College (1978/79), this textbook in my Poli Sci class told of a time when Nixon was in office and demanded to leave the White House to go to a musical. Unplanned no prep for anything. Major s**t storm for the Secret Service. Eventually, They got Nixon to calm down and they never went out. One of our close new neighbors happened to work for the Secret Service. His family came over to our Family home for dinner one evening. Eventually, it came out he worked on the Nixon Detail a few years back that's when I shared the story I read in my textbook. He actually almost dropped his fork and say there with his mouth wide open. Apparently, the story was not only true but was supposed to be a secret. I showed him my book and he notated the author. I have no idea the outcome but it made the night more interesting.

6.

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

7.

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.”

8.

My SIL is involved in these organizations. She can't tell us much about what she does, but she has a large backpack with a radiophone on top. If the phone rings she's told us you don't answer it. You just drop everything and get out of town faster than ASAP.

9.

A friend applied to work at the FBI. He was required to tell them anything illegal he had done so he told them he had illegally downloaded a bunch of media and they laughed and said if that disqualified you, no one would work there

10.

My dad worked for the government, and he told me that anytime he had a meaningful interaction with someone who wasn't American (ie 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.

This is anecdotal and years old, but our family still gets a kick out of it... I had a great uncle who was in construction years ago, he did high-quality rendering and plasterwork - he did some jobs for some security stuff in Australia. In his later years, he would rave about the CIA and FBI and Australian secret services being in the country, with technology we'd never seen nor would see for decades. In so 60s and 70s, we're talking about in-ear communication devices, wristwatches with video and audio, small portable computer tablets, and super small/thin screens in full high-quality color, delivering information worldwide in seconds. His ramblings got to the point where it was conspiracy theory level, and was before smartphones and pads were really a household item... now though, what he described was VERY accurate.

12.

I negotiated huge deals with the Russian government. I was tailed 24/7. One time I didn't like the room the hotel gave me (I knew it faced the noisy side bc I stayed there all the time) and instead of just giving me a new room it was a 90-minute wait while they bugged a new room for me. Twice I had bizarro run-ins with very pushy, very "hot" women who allegedly wanted to f**k me so bad... Even if I was straight, "hot" in Russia is a mix between a Bratz doll and a hooker, so no thanks.

13.

My grandfather was CIA.. we all knew better, no one asked. Over time as his assignments became unclassified, he would slowly tell little stories. Was eating dinner. He asks my mom you remember that time y’all dropped me off at Dulles airport? I actually flew to Camp Perry. And was then helicoptered overseas. My mom replied which time. Turns out he was a demo expert. Defused bombs. Spent 30 years all over the world. His claim to fame Toyko Rose used to call him personally. Every time he landed in Japan. Man never traveled under his real name.

14.

Worked with a woman who was a former NSA. We would always beg her to tell us s**t, 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.

15.

My high school girlfriend worked for the National Reconnaissance Office after college. At the time, they were responsible for analyzing the nation's spy satellite photos. She told me two things. There's a special garbage chute for classified materials. It's in the hallway. When you are new, as a hazing ritual they tell you you have to shout your badge number down the chute before throwing in any materials. This is hilarious. She wouldn't tell me anything about the resolution quality of the spy photos, of course, but she did let it slip that because Russian sailors will sunbathe nude on the decks of their submarines in the Black Sea, several women in the office would pin those photos up in their cubicles as beefcake photos. So a few decades ago, US spy photos could resolve Russian penis.

16.

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."

17.

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...

18.

Any gadget with a microphone that connects to the internet is always listening. Odds are good a human won't ever hear anything said because they are collecting data to sell to other companies. But they are listening, cataloging, and collating it all into databases. I won't get in trouble for that because you already gave permission for your devices to do that. You just clicked accept without reading your terms of use.

19.

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

20.

I talked with some CIA recruiters towards the end of college and almost applied earnestly after a large group Q&A and then a much smaller one. The thing that stuck out to me was that the guys said most CIA agents are out of shape and have limited combat training with guns or hand to hand. They made it clear that it’s the military that uses force. If confronted they were trained to immediately surrender or to drop their bags and run if possible.

21.

Not either of these, but I've had a clearance so I can weigh in a little. Two things: Firstly, most secret s**t happens right in front of people's faces under the guise of being normal everyday stuff. Secondly, properly secret programs and operations are never named in any way that indicates what they actually are about. They're generally just two words chosen at random and that would rarely come up in normal conversation, stuff like "Cracked Gorilla" (which I just made up off the top of my head.) So when people talk about classified stuff and its name is super topical, it's either very very old or a nickname at best. Only public programs and operations have topical names as a PR motive, like "Desert Storm."

22.

I was an analyst at the NSA, AMA. Most of the time when people see on my resume that I worked there, they want to know what I did or what it's like to work there. (btw, if you're HR and you see someone with this on their resume, please don't make it everyone's business) What I tell people is that no matter how smart you think you are, or what your view of what's possible is, working there will redefine both of those concepts. There are offices there that worked on unimaginable things--literally stuff you would never think of. Obviously, I can't share anything about what I learned, but I always tell people to imagine an office so specialized that their job is to measure the grease spots on satellite photos outside of foreign military bases. By analyzing the size, shape, color, and position of the grease spots, they can extrapolate all kinds of information about what goes into and out of the base (ops tempo, manning, equipment, etc.). People talk about the 'uberization' of things, like making use of untapped assets (spare room for Airbnb, downtime for driving for Uber, etc.), but intel agencies mastered it long ago. The world around you is absolutely brimming with collectible intelligence that if leveraged and analyzed smartly, can tell you (or an adversary) a ton. I am not special. I worked in a very compartmented area of the intel side, but I also did a night job where I cleaned up offices (because they couldn't just hire any old janitor, they needed people with clearances to empty garbage cans, etc.), and often I would talk to the people in the offices about what they do, or you'd just see it since, well... it's an office and some workspaces it is impossible to not have an idea of what's going on.

23.

I applied for a job as a computer programmer for the CIA in the 1980's which required a top-secret clearance. The application was 17 pages long and wanted to know the exact dates of any illegal drug use, your sexual proclivities as well as every place you have ever lived as well as other things. The second interview would be conducted while taking a polygraph test. I noped out on that one.

24.

95% of individuals can be uniquely identified using as few as 4 spacio-temporal points

25.

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.

26.

Intelligence work is really boring most of the time.

27.

If you apply for a job at GCHQ/MI5/MI6/Fylingdales/etc. they will talk to every member of your close family and if any minor red flags come up you might not get the job. And also if you are Chinese/Russian/North Korean/etc. (I think that it probably goes to a grandparent or great grandparent being from that country) you will not even be able to apply. Source: Stepdad was in MI6 and fun-fact; if he wants to go to certain countries (eg. Israel) he has to ask permission from the MOD to travel there

28.

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 Edit: if you guys were wondering, he left to join the Navy. Became a nuke EM but they pulled him out of the program because of his cybersecurity skills and before I left our command, he was helping our CMC connect his computer to a projector. Sorry to put you in the spotlight EM1

29.

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.