I bet it would be absolutely amazing to be a secret agent.
It’s understandably a hard gig to get. From my extensive
research of five minutes of Internet searching and reading one fifth of a
Blackford Oakes novel, as far as I can tell the only way to become a spy is to
either be born to wealthy parents in New England or be a petty criminal who is
good with knives and amorality. But I’m firmly of the belief that it could be
done even if you don’t know/kill the right people. It’s a tough slot to fill
and the skill set, as it were, is in demand. It’s also occasionally amusing
that you’ll hear recruitment ads on the radio, mostly to a listening audience
assuming they are going to be assassinating dissidents in Moscow when in
reality they will be sitting in a gross dimly lit pale blue room listening to
100 hours of audiotape each day trying to pick out someone saying the phrase
“dirty bomb” in Arabic.
One would think that they heyday of the superspy is over.
Gone are the days when Soviets and American spies crossed each other, planting
double agents and running safe houses and toppling third-world nations. No more
playing the Great Game, fussing about the colony system and easily penetrating
nations where you have a plausible historical justification for showing up at a
Turkish barbershop talking in a British accent and getting away with it. With a
new international enemy that doesn’t recognize governments or borders or the
normal rules of play (MUSLIM TERRORISTS. I’M TALKING ABOUT MUSLIM TERRORISTS),
how can the old system of espionage survive? I don’t know the answer, but I’m
pretty sure the answer is money.
Still, the world needs spies. And just what are the perks
for becoming a secret agent? Believe it or not, there are plenty:
You get all the
power: One of the best parts about being a secret agent is that you’re
pretty much on your own. Sure, you get a mission objective and there are rules,
but once you’re dispatched to the field and your boss initiates plausible
deniability, you can pretty much do what you want. That bodyguard getting on
your nerves? BOOM! He’s gone. You want to use C4 or ram a diesel-filled truck
through a concrete wall? Depends on whether you want precision or drama. That stop
sign? You can’t read Bosnian! Optional traffic law it is! If anyone ever
questions you after the fact, you can just claim that the pressure of meeting
the objective required snap judgments and they can’t know because they weren’t
there. Just keep within the fiscal quarter's budget and the possibilities of your freedom are
endless.
You get all the
technology: The childish things you see in the James Bonds movies are just
props and toys. Any task that requires a real-life remote control car or a
car-battery-run heart re-starter is a mission that only exists in XBoxistan. But
that doesn’t mean that you’re not first in line to use the latest and greatest
from whatever major industrial corporation the government pays to invent things
that let us find people and kill things more efficiently. I have no idea what
is out there these days, but I bet they are less like poison-dart cufflinks and
more like FourSquare for terrorists.
You get full license
for cultural insensitivity: Sure, you need to respect the culture in order
to infiltrate it. And anymore, when your enemy is of a different, ah, complexion as yourself, you may need to
dip your hand in the sad-looking local pool of talent to get recruits, and they
are probably not OK with violating the local laws and customs they’ve grown up
with. But that doesn’t mean you have
to! You want to take a shortcut and desecrate the local spiritual grounds so
you don’t have to walk an extra three blocks to the local “masseuse”? Have at
it! You want to eat a double-stack hamburger in Madras or a ham on rye with a
snootful of whiskey in Medina? Go for it! The world is your oyster, which, by
the way, Orthodox Jews and Seventh-Day Adventists can’t eat.
You get all the
chicks: If there is one thing that ladies love—and I am basing this off of
a Harvard study that watched all of the episodes of The Prisoner, in order—is that they love mystery,
they love power, and they love being heartlessly used and tossed aside by
mysterious powerful men. (Although, apparently, secret agents no longer hold a
monopoly on being mysterious and powerful; the same thing now applies to
advertising executives.) So what secret agent wouldn’t use such benefits to his
advantage? Female and homosexual spies, that’s who. I think the allure of the mysterious and
powerful applies to them, as well. But
who knows? After all, we all have our secrets.
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