John le Carre had a baby with one of those earnestly confessional 'smart young modern lady' memoirs, and it's a fun and interesting read.

Lindsay Moran was a 'Real Spy', a CIA case officer running around the Balkans in the late 90s doling out hundred dollar bills to the human wreckage thrown off by collapse of Yugoslavia. But as it turns out, being a real spy is far from romantic or fun. Moran chronicles how the Agency's obsessive secrecy destroyed her social life and moral center of balance, making her paranoid and cagy, trapped in destructive relationships with local losers, and ultimately spinning her wheels doing nothing in the lead up to 9/11.

The best parts of the this book are the descriptions of training at The Farm. The CIA training course seems like a lot of fun. Actually being a spy involves meeting assholes in smoky low-end diners and convincing them to lie to you for money. Moran quit the agency in 2003, disgusted by its inability to meaningfully do anything about Al Qaeda or the coming invasion of Iraq (fun fact: Case Officers were prohibited from meeting with people with terrorist ties in the 90s.) The picture of HUMINT that she paints is broken boys playing a pointless game with their foreign counterpoints. For a book published in 2004, there is some foresight about the CIA's transformation into a secret army (see The Way of the Knife), but overall, the biggest sense is that the whole CIA is crazy, and only does its job by accident.