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In my head, I think I'd make a perfect spy, but in reality, I don't think I'd fare very well.

I wasn't a spy. I'd have been spotted in five seconds. Yes, I was in intelligence, but that covered a multitude of things.

Throughout my career, I had the great fortune to experience firsthand as well as to witness what it means to be a CIA officer.

I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation's largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations.

Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.

I've always wanted to be a spy, and frankly I'm a little surprised that British intelligence has never approached me.

I spent over ten years in the Central Intelligence Agency as an undercover operations officer serving overseas after 9/11 where I carried out covert operations against al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, as well as other countries who are 'hostile to liberty,' as I like to say.

I wrote 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.