If you’re a true crime fan, you probably have watched your fair share of TV and movies featuring FBI and CIA agents doing exciting things like preventing terrorist attacks and trailing international criminals. And yes, these things do happen, but according to real, former agents, there’s also a lot of boring stuff. On Reddit, these agents are sharing some of the things they are allowed to tell — and let’s just say the job is not for the faint of heart or the impatient.
1. Heart-Breaking Work
“I worked with the Australian Federal police with the spider squad doing ‘computer stuff’ for them in regards to pedos and finding trafficking victims – it is the most heart breaking work but when you get them the office looked like NASA after a mars landing.” — dr_m_a_dman
2. Mandalay Bay
“My aunt has been an FBI agent for 25 years. The only thing I know about her job is that she’s an office administrator. But, her information went public somehow when she was part of the team that investigated the Mandalay Bay shooting in Las Vegas. Someone found the name and address of most of the agents that worked that scene and put it up online. Not sure why. She also took me and my family on a tour of the Las Vegas FBI headquarters about 15 years ago. One thing interesting that I remember about the building is that all the doors were floor to ceiling 9 foot doors. Thought that was weird.” — paperpenises
3. Classified Information
“I was an analyst, not an agent / officer. 85% of all classified material is classified because of how it was collected, not because it is juicy / useful. Yes, you boss and co-workers said that sh*t about you.” — ben70
4. Voice Recognition
“My dad worked for GCHQ in the 80s doing voice recognition and he can’t say anything more for a decade more. The way they can recognise you by Siri/Google today was being used in the 80s….Just a bit slower…” — arabidopsis
5. Khrushchev Was Short
“If I can trust that she’s telling the truth, there’s an old lady in town who was in the FBI back in 50s/60s. She said Nikita Khrushchev was a short man.” — roonerspize
6. Animal Abuse
“Not an FBI or CIA officer here, but my sister is a district attorney, and over the years she has prosecuted a number of animal-cruelty cases. This lead to her having an ongoing partnership with the FBI for the last several years. It turns out the FBI started tracking animal abuse cases about 10-15 years ago due to the incredibly high correlation between abusing animals when you’re young and becoming a serial violent offender as an adult.”—TheDongerNeedsFood
7. Kennedy Theories
“Met an old, retired, CIA spook at a wedding reception. Spitting image of Col. Sanders, he was amazing. So I asked him, ‘I don’t want you to tell me anything you can’t, but I’d love to know, when Kennedy got killed, what was the talk around the water cooler in the office?’ He didn’t halt, or pause to think. ‘Hell, we all thought Johnson did it.'” — GlobalPhreak
8. Spy Photos
“My high school girlfriend worked for the National Reconnaissance Office after college. At the time, they were responsible for analyzing the nation’s spy satellite photos. She told me two things: There’s a special garbage chute for classified materials. It’s in the hallway. When you are new, as a hazing ritual they tell you you have to shout your badge number down the chute before throwing in any materials. This is hilarious. She wouldn’t tell me anything about the resolution quality of the spy photos, of course, but she did let it slip that because Russian sailors will sunbathe nude on the decks of their submarines in the Black Sea, several women in the office would pin those photos up in their cubicles as
cheesecakebeefcake photos. So a few decades ago, US spy photos could resolve Russian penis.” —wvpDpQRgAFKQzZENEsGe
9. No Social Media
“We are all told never to use sites like this and social media in general is pretty much a no go.” — Throwaway93ee90299
10. Friends Who Aren’t American
“My dad worked for the government, and he told me that anytime he had a meaningful interaction with someone who wasn’t American (ie going over to my friends house for lunar new year, or going on vacation to Canada) he had to report it all, and if he saw anything suspicious.” — AudiKitty
11. “Hot” Russians
“I negotiated huge deals with the Russian government. I was tailed 24/7. One time I didn’t like the room the hotel gave me (I knew it faced the noisy side bc I stayed there all the time) and instead of just giving me a new room it was a 90 minute wait while they bugged a new room for me. Twice I had bizarro run-ins with very pushy, very ‘hot’ women who allegedly wanted to f*ck me so bad…Even if I was straight, ‘hot’ in Russia is a mix between a Bratz doll and a hooker, so no thanks.” — greeperfi
12. Long Interviews
“If you go through the FBI interview process, it takes a while. Chances are you’re going to have to spend some time working on crimes against children, which is really tough and most people don’t want to do it.” — thermobollocks
13. Sitting At Your Desk
“Not CIA but have worked with and know guys in intelligence. Most of the intelligence we get is from OSINT (open source intel. ie news articles, press releases, news networks and government announcements).
Most people think that everyone in intelligence is some James Bond/ Jason Bourne type of individual when in reality, the majority of analysts sit at a desk and go through news articles all day. That said, that’s not the only method we have to gather intel, but it is where most of it comes from. Even analysts that are using other methods such as GEOINT, IMINT and SIGINT spend their day cropping images for minute details or replaying and monitoring the same signal over and over again.” — brechbillc1
14. Not James Bond
“An ex-Company man once told me Get Smart was more accurate than James Bond.” — spiff2268
15. Losing Sleep
“Worked with a woman who was former NSA. We would always beg her to tell us sh*t, but she never did. The one thing she did say, though, was that during training they show them a video of a bunch of things they’ve found out about and stopped. She said she hardly slept for two weeks after watching that.” — jseego
16. Alcoholism
“I have a relative that retired from the NSA a few years ago. She has talked about a few things in generalities, nothing specific. Among them: You will see things that entirely change your view of the world. People go in there all the time with lofty goals of changing things and within months those goals are mostly gone. Still, if you want to change things, you work for the agency. If you just want to make money, you work for a contractor. No one cares what contractors have to say. Most people that stay long enough will do a tour in counterterrorism. Many people transfer out after a few months, and the average stay is two years because of the visuals. Those who stick around for a long time often change for the worse, and many struggle with mental illnesses, become alcoholics, get divorced, and generally lead miserable lives with their work their only reason for continuing. Alcoholism in general is rife in the agency. When you cannot speak to anyone outside the agency about your work, it becomes nearly impossible to confide in anyone close to you. Even if you have close work friends or family, you have to be careful what you say because not everyone is read into every program. Two people can sit next to each other in the same office, working on the same subject for months, and never talk about it with each other even though they’re close friends outside the agency. So people turn to the bottle. Her husband worked for a different government agency and also had a Top Secret-SCI clearance, but she couldn’t talk about her work with him (nor could he with her, but his didn’t involve the intelligence community).” — NetworkLlama
17. Missiles
“Two family stories even though this will probably get buried…My father’s uncle told everyone for his entire life that he worked at a button factory. It was only revealed after his death that he, in fact, worked at a missile factory and assembled the gyroscopes for the guidance in missiles.” — smurtle-the-turtle
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