Real Life CIA Life?

Question

If you are a Clandestine Operations officer in the CIA, what does your job consist of? How do you get the intelligence? No Hollywood answers, and don't tell me you'd have to kill me if you told me, because frankly...the CIA has their own website. But hey.

Answer 1

There are books on past activities and one of my teachers met some in the field when he had a diplomatic post. It depends. Some are agents and some work with agents. generally the people that work with agents are field oriented. For instance they would give a set of parameters required for a sub base to a geologist and then the geologist does his own field work looking to see if the area he is working in could be made into a sub base.

Then there are basic jobs for CIA agents:
1. Code breakers
2. Satellite surveillance
3. Electronic evesdropping
4. translating non encrypted material such as foriegn books and newspapers (also called white spying since the material isn't secret). They also supply data you can find on the online CIA world fact book.
5. black ops (spying inside enemy territory, putting in moles, sabotage, making the natives restless so they rebel)
6. going to diplomatic parties as a diplomat and trying to get information out of foreign diplomats or trying to supply a known spy with false information (this is where my teacher spotted them since they easily stood out as CIA agents and not the people they were posing as).

Answer 2

Honestly I haven't a clue outside of Hollywood. I would guess though that much of their life is classified.