A surprising and revealing portrait of the espionage world from a former CIA inspector general that compares the reality of spying with classic and popular spy fiction. Holding up real-life spies, such as Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames, against their fictional counterparts, and drawing on his own 30 years of experience, Hitz shows readers that even the most perceptive authors fail to capture the profound human dilemmas raised by real-life cases. Proving that truth is often more interesting than fiction, this is a history of a largely misunderstood job.