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Comment by GreeniFi | Hacker News Reader

For reasons I can’t quite remember, in the late 90s I once had a drink at an army club in London. I’m not very army at all, so it was not somewhere I’d expect to go as a rule. My overriding memory was an old paratrooper at the bar telling me in a very old-fashioned and serious voice, “never be a spy”. I must have not been 20 at the time, and it seemed like very good advice.

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That makes sense, given that people who would be paratroopers and people who would be spooks are very different types of people (generally).

Doesn't say much about the profession of espionage/intelligence broadly though.

And did he mean a spy or an intelligence officer. And remember that the more traditional army/navy types look down on intelligence.

I mean how nitpicky do we need to be here because spy isn't a real title.

Just HUMINTers? Or are SIGINTers and GEOINTers also spies? Pick from the list:

Paramilitary Operator, Non-Official Cover Agent, Clandestine Case Officer, Technical Operations Officer, Case Agent, Operations Officer, Desk Officer, Analyst, Imagery Analyst, Counterintelligence Officer, Field Officer, Military Intelligence Analyst, Linguist, Airborne Linguist, Reconnaissance Pilot etc...

That’s quite an exciting list of job titles. Although follow the advice of the old fellow in the bar, who could quite well have served during the war: “never be a spy...”.

That said there was a CIA job ad in the Economist a few months back, looking for “adventurers, travelers and entrepreneurs” (or similar). Far more romantic sounding than “full stack developer”...

I knew a girl in college who interviewed with the CIA but didn't get the job. I was so happy then and even happier now, though I haven't seen her for over 30 years. She was very pretty, Irish, Catholic, so fit the mold for the CIA. They are vile people though. The paratrooper was right.

Asking for a "full stack son of a bitch" would be a bit too direct.

the paratrooper probably meant anything undercover, analyst should be fine. anything where your country can abandon you/deny you work for them, for the greater good.

>And remember that the more traditional army/navy types look down on intelligence.

Those people are ignorant of the fundamental principles of modern warfare, then.

I doubt very much anyone but some irrelevant dinosaurs are dismissive of intelligence and the decision superiority that it enables.

> Doesn't say much about the profession of espionage/intelligence broadly though.

Espionage/intelligence is a very thankless and at times very depressing job, there's not that much glamour into it, I'd say the state of mind of the people involved in such a field are better described by John le Carré's books than by Ian Fleming's books or even by what it's written in the post linked to by the OP.

I'm from a country located on the East side of a Wall and I used to have an uncle (my grandpa's brother) who used to be an "embassy attaché" in East Berlin in the mid '50s (there's where his daughter, my aunt, was born). In other words: he was a spy. He didn't do anything fanciful like you can see in the movies, afaik he didn't wear any disguises nor did he do anything "spy-ish" as described in Dulles's document because he wasn't a Yale graduate (he used to be a boot-maker's apprentice when the communists came to power), the only "spy"-worthy thing that he did was to be a driver for his boss when one day they crossed into West Berlin (the Wall hadn't been built at that time). Down there they both met with a dissident from our country who had escaped when the Soviets had come "to liberate" us just after WW2.

My uncle's boss had first "maimed" said dissident back in Istanbul by promising him a business opportunity which (the boss said) they should have continued talking about in West Berlin. Said dissident was trustful enough, so that he decided to meet with my uncle and my uncle's boss in West Berlin. I'm not sure of the exact circumstances but at some point during said meeting my uncle and his boss immobilized the dissident and "I just pushed him in the car's trunk", as my uncle told my father a couple of decades after the event. After that my uncle drove the car through the checkpoints back into East Berlin, the dissident hidden in the trunk and then sent packing back to our country (he wasn't killed, after a couple of years he even got back his former job as a university professor, but I suppose the first years after his "forced repatriation" weren't the best for him).

So, nothing fancy about it at all, just some minor deceit and then pushing someone into a car's trunk. After this whole affair my uncle got pretty high up in my country's spy ranks, at some point he was the chief of some foreign intelligence Directorate (like I told you, this is more like John le Carré's books than Ian Fleming's), he even received his nomenklatura house, nothing big or shiny, just something that would keep all the people (and their families) on which the system depended physically close to the local dictator. All was relatively well until at some point in the late '70s the big boss of my country's foreign intelligence services decided to defect to the Americans. Not long after that my uncle was found hung-up in his nomenklatura house. Like I said, a very thankless job (at least his wife, my aunt, a salt-of-the-earth type of lady, got to keep the house).

And this story involving my uncle happened when this whole spy thing still had something like an ideological tinge to it, when the East vs West thing was not about money or hidden off-shore accounts but about who was right when it came to the future of the human condition (Marx vs Adam Smith, to use a lousy metaphor). My grandpa's generation (and that includes his brother, my spy uncle) really believed that the communists were right and the capitalists were wrong and were exploiting the normal people. Nowadays (and I think it has been that way since about the late '70s - early '80s, again, John le Carré's books really capture this transition really well) the spy thing is almost all about getting an economic advantage over your "adversary", there's no ideology, there's no perceived right and wrong, it's just a fight over some resources (protecting/stealing IP, some things that need to be dug out from somewhere in Africa etc etc). Which is to say that the spy job has become even more sinister.

Well said, and that story is very similar to a lot of people's stories who are part of the "diplomatic" spy corps.

There certainly are exciting parts, depending on your job, but generally speaking those end up being around the edges and rare.

“Never be a spy...” :)

Interesting story. Thank you for sharing.

It isn't the "embassy attaché" (official cover) spies who are alleged to be having the cinematic adventures, but non-official cover agents and their in-country sources/freelancers. Of course this part of a spy agency is much smaller and more secretive than the vast army of bureaucrats you are more likely to hear from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-official_cover

>It isn't the "embassy attaché" (official cover) spies who are alleged to be having the cinematic adventures

For James Bond style adventures, yes. But there are tons of adventures, cinematic and in books, for embassy attaché style spies as well, from John le Carré's heroes to Berlin Station...

> All was relatively well until at some point in the late '70s the big boss of my country's foreign intelligence services decided to defect to the Americans

Are you Romanian by any chance and is that Pacepa you are talking about? Ever thought about going to CNSAS and try getting any flies they might have had on your uncle? It would be, I think, an interesting bit of family history.

> Are you Romanian by any chance and is that Pacepa you are talking about?

Yeah, it's about Pacepa.

> Ever thought about going to CNSAS and try getting any flies they might have had on your uncle?

My brother suggested that we should give it a try, I might actually do it at some point. In fact, I got the info about my uncle being a Directorate chief later in his career from a "semi-public" CNSAS document that somehow was leaked on the Internet, document which was detailing the hierarchal structure at the top of the Romanian foreign intelligence services in the 1970s (before Pacepa's defection).

The phrase "more John Le Carre than Ian Fleming" can also be found as a quote on this website https://www.sie.ro/viata-in-sie.html under the first testimony. Don't know if this is a frequently used metaphor.

The quote makes sense, but anyone that thinks James Bond is even 1 percent realistic isn't being serious at all.

Obviously _some_ people do believe that is what spies do. I would even venture the majority of people believe that. The people that write in these threads on HN are more in the know than most of the public, because they had some interest/curiosity about them. Most of the public lack knowledge about these institutions and have a severely distorted image of what they do.

I would guess, some of the commenters in the thread had some brushes with intelligence agencies. At the risk of sounding conspiratorial, you're answering to a throwaway. What better place to talk with people about your job you can't talk with anybody than an anonymous online medium where smart people congregate?

Never think like a spy. Never think of other people just as assets, constantly scanning for flaws and weakness to roll them "downhill", think about all the people you know - your family, your spouse, your kids, your neighbors as individuals you could get to do anything, so entangled in lies and corruption. Never be a spy. Because once you are a spy, can can never stop being one.

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