From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big, bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.'
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Well look, CIA is an agency that has to collect intelligence, do operations. We have to take risks and it's important that we take risks and that we know that we have the support of the government and we have the support of the American people in what we're doing.
It's pretty well known that the CIA has been installing friendly dictators around the world for years.
In much of the world, there is a sense of an ultra-powerful CIA manipulating everything that happens, such as running the Arab Spring, running the Pakistani Taliban, etc. That is just nonsense.
The world has changed, the CIA is having to change, and again, the challenge for someone like me as a spy novelist is to write realistically about where they're actually going.
I was with the CIA for only three years. I worked in the Directorate of Operations, which is now called the National Clandestine Service. It's the part of the organization where the spies live. I didn't have much experience beyond the training.
Let's remember, the CIA's job is to go out and create wars.
I don't think anybody ever thought about the CIA meddling in internal affairs. The shock of the President's death called for an immediate investigation. It actually lay in the jurisdiction of Texas.
People in the CIA, they marry each other. They're like actors! We have to travel without much warning to far-flung places, and it's very hard to communicate what our experiences are like to those in the outside world.
The men and women of the CIA are a national treasure.
The CIA in real life, we know, is looking for new kinds of cover. It's looking for new platforms, as they like to say, and it's trying to use the revolution in communications technology, the ability to use all sorts of corporate entities in ways that are hard to detect to get our spies in the places where they need to be.