When popular action heroes like James Bond and Ethan Hunt have dominated what most people think of as the spy genre, it’s understandable that most people have no clue what spies actually do — namely, infiltrate dangerous places and collect intelligence for the government.
It’s also understandable that most people don’t realize that the enemy is not nearly as clear-cut as Spectre or the Syndicate, well-funded terrorist organizations with the motives and capacity to destroy the planet. All too frequently, the actual enemies are more humdrum: drug cartels, mafias, fanatical terrorists, and Marxist and fascist insurrectionists in the Third World.
