system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What are field-agent spies really like in real life? How close or unrelated to their film portrayals are they?

Obviously, field agent spies aren't like 007, who openly give out their names, bed women, use fancy gadgets, and are alcoholics.  I also don't think they're like Jason Bourne or David Webb, who can parkour all the time, play spider-man and climb up walls, have impeccable instincts and reflexes, and have clean hand-to-hand combat with candlesticks and books (or hand-to-hand combat at all).

**But *do* we have *any idea* what field agents are like?**  Are they mostly just sleepers?  I've never watched *The Americans* (a TV show created by a "former CIA officer"), but it seems like the premise revolves around a KGB-based married couple that poses as an American family, and occasionally has to do spy-like things like acquire intelligence.


**Bottom line: I'm pretty sure Hollywood dramatizes what spies do -- but does anyone have any idea what *actual, real-life* spies do?  Do they have missions?  Do they carry out "quiet" assassinations?  Do the have gadgets?**
gpt
Intelligence Officers are the people who are actually employees of the CIA, KGB(now the FSB/RVS), etc. Their primary job is to recruit *agents*. Agents are citizens of other nations that are used to gather information and give it to whichever nation is trying to get it.

Example. Bob is a CIA Intelligence Officer assigned to work out of the US Embassy in Moscow. Dimitri is a Russian citizen who also happens to be a Colonel in the Russian Army. Maybe one day Dimitri realizes he's broke and needs some real money bad, or maybe he's fed up with Putin and wants to undermine him. Bob gets wind of this and approaches Dimitri. Bob offers Dimitri some American currency in exchange for bringing some documents on Russian weapons out of his office and hands them over to Bob.

Bob is an *Officer*, Dimitri is his *agent*.

Officers fall into two categories: Legals and Illegals. Basically a Legal is someone who is actually a member of a nation's diplomatic mission to another nation. He's got diplomatic immunity and if gets caught spying, he gets booted out of the country. Illegals are people who do not have immunity. If they get caught they can get anything from booted out of the country to a bullet in the head and anything in between. But the mission of both is to gather information they're not supposed to have, from people who aren't supposed to give it out, and bring it back to their home nation so that it can be used. 

Do they have gadgets? Sometimes. Not like in movies, but there are a few. Back in the days of the cold war, the camera company Minox produced a very tiny camera that *agents* would use to take pictures of documents, maps, blueprints and so forth and then pass the film off to their control *officer*, which was much easier than carrying the documents themselves.

Do they conduct assassinations? Very, very, very rarely. And none that we know of for a very long time. And the reason is simple. The purpose of an Intelligence Agency is to collect intelligence. If a Russian spy in the US kills one of our people, then we might have one of ours kill one of theirs. It starts a back and forth that gets in the way of the real mission, which is finding out stuff other nations don't want you to know. So it's not really done anymore. It happened a few times back in the "glory" days of the Cold War in the 50's-70's, but as far we know right now, it's a thing of the past. Of course since the whole point of secret intelligence operations is to keep them secret, we wouldn't really know for sure if it did. Most assassinations are actually when a nation kills one of their own citizens who defected to an enemy nation after spying for them, such as when the Russian Alexander Litvinenko, (who had been spying for the UK before defecting to the UK and living in London) was poisoned with Polonium and died shortly after. But when that sort of thing is done, if ever, it is almost always farmed out to locals or other groups to do the actual killing. The Intelligence Officer would never be the one to actually do it himself.


The average Intelligence Officer who is actually carrying out the job of spying on another nation will likely spend 95% of his time just blending in, pretending to be just another boring office worker, and not spying. The other 5% he might spend picking up a microSD card full of stolen documents that one of his agents left under a park bench, or trying to recruit new agents. No killing, no parkour, no lasers, karate, guns, or rappelling at all. Office work and trying to convince other people to tell them something they're not supposed to.