![]() ![]() “I feel bad because people often want the misconceptions to be true. But no, Emily hasn’t killed anyone, and no, she hasn’t used sex as a tool to get information out of people. Thanks to the likes of James Bond, Mission Impossible and Atomic Blonde, there are a lot of misconceptions about what it means to be a spy. Or, if a particular job means going undercover, the CIA will disguise you with fake facial hair or a wig.” If you’re a woman in the Middle East who shouldn’t be driving alone in the middle of the night, you’re given the profile of a man with a baseball hat and padding in the shoulders. “The job sometimes means protecting your identity. The CIA will say, ‘Where are there gaps in information? Where do we need more intelligence?’, and you’ll have to figure out a way to meet somebody with that knowledge, and make yourself interesting to them so they want to meet you again. It can feel a bit like dating – what you’re trying to do is find people who have access to information your country needs, and recruit them to work for you. “An Operations Officer goes into the field to meet potential assets. Her job involved meeting and recruiting people to be spies – she wasn’t technically the one doing the spying, but instead finding people with information to do the front line work for her. It takes a person who doesn’t mind living a double life.”Įmily landed landed the job - which involved creating disguises for spies - but then quickly transferred departments to work as an Operations Officer. Often, they are looking for people who can speak a hard second language like Arabic or Russian, or someone with oversees experience or a military background. ![]() “The agency (the A in Central Intelligence Agency) usually looks for a very specific type of person, and while I was an anomaly in the sense I didn’t fit the mould of what they would usually hire on paper, they obviously saw something in me. For someone who does improvised comedy for a living, being there just didn’t feel real.”Įmily admits she wasn’t an obvious candidate for the CIA (“all my peers had very traditional routes into the CIA, working in international relations or studying foreign languages – I was doing improv at the Funny Bone Comedy Club!”), but her employers spotted something promising in her. ![]() It was intense, and probably the first time I realised the magnitude of the job I might possibly get. “For the next round, the CIA flew me to their HQ for an interview with the people who were going to be my bosses. By question 400, you have no idea what you’re even answering – you’re just trying to get it done. Asking you if you preferred your mum or your dad, or whether you liked S&M. It was a thousand questions long, and designed to make you second guess yourself. “I was then flown to Washington DC to complete a lie detector test, before taking a mental assessment questionnaire and having my answers torn apart by a CIA psychologist. It felt very top secret – manila envelopes would arrive in the post with no return address, and people would phone me without leaving a full name", Emily tells us. “At first it involved filling out pages and pages of personal information about my upbringing, background and possible foreign connections. Start to finish, the process took 12 months, and was as much a test of stamina as it was about mental ability. And to her surprise, she found herself getting through rounds of applications, questionnaires and interviews, before eventually landing the job. It was less sexy dinners at the casino, and more wearing a disguise to protect herself from a potential asset – but she loved every second of it.Īfter her spy-obsessed mum found a CIA opening online, Emily applied for the job on the promise of living at home rent-free. Trading laughs for lies, she immersed herself in the underground world as an Operations Officer, and for multiple years, kept her true career a secret from everyone she knew. In reality, Emily Brandwin - with a background in improvised comedy and a totally unrelated university degree - is the one doing the spying.Īs a twentysomething theatre graduate, Emily went from doing ad lib comedy at the local dive bar to working at the CIA. When you hear the word 'spy', your imagination likely conjures up images of James Bond in a sharp suit, wielding weapons and seducing everyone in the room over a martini. ![]()
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