For anyone is into this kind of thing I would suggest checking out The Team House on YouTube which has a lot of very in-depth interviews with some very recently retired CIA folks talking about their experiences in the field.

Given a lot of the crazy shit I hear come up in the comments here every time the CIA tends to get mentioned in almost any context this might actually be a good resource for a lot of folks here to start separating fact from fiction.

I’ll drop a couple of my favourites here but they must have at least 20 of them by now.

Doug London https://youtu.be/aV9HdJtPbZA

This guy had a really long career at CIA in the particular job that you all think of when you think of a “spy” that spanned around 30 years from memory with 9/11 occurring right in the middle of his career.

He talks a lot about not only how that changed the face of the agency but about all the mistakes that got made along the way and how the wheels fell off the truck with things like the rendition programs etc. Overall, it’s a great self reflective and critical look at the agency from a very senior person on the inside.

Jim Lawler https://youtu.be/AFnfTDbcPOA

This guy is probably the most “spooky” kind of CIA guy I’ve ever seen them interview. You can immediately see why he was so good at his job almost from the start. Like Doug he was also VERY senior and at the pointy end of the spear as they say.

The later stage of his career was focused on nuclear non proliferation and its very interesting to hear him talk about things like the decision to invade Iraq for example and once again where things went completely off the rails.

Holden Triplett https://youtu.be/0NSGOJs150w

On the other side of the fence Holden was working to actively catch foreign spies in the US while working at the FBI where he left in mid 2020.

Covers a lot of interesting topics and stories that I think folks would be interested in.