This is one of the things intelligence agencies do: find people predisposed to being convinced to do things for them and them and then sending them to achieve things. A “real” spy with lots of experience has a lot more information to extract and is a much more valuable prisoner than an idealistic kid who knows basically nothing and has at least plausible deniability for the recruiting agency. Also conceivably some plans are pretty stupid like in every industry and for every job and the fact that these things are secret means you very rarely get the actual story about what was going on.