> Doesn't say much about the profession of espionage/intelligence broadly though.

Espionage/intelligence is a very thankless and at times very depressing job, there's not that much glamour into it, I'd say the state of mind of the people involved in such a field are better described by John le Carré's books than by Ian Fleming's books or even by what it's written in the post linked to by the OP.

I'm from a country located on the East side of a Wall and I used to have an uncle (my grandpa's brother) who used to be an "embassy attaché" in East Berlin in the mid '50s (there's where his daughter, my aunt, was born). In other words: he was a spy. He didn't do anything fanciful like you can see in the movies, afaik he didn't wear any disguises nor did he do anything "spy-ish" as described in Dulles's document because he wasn't a Yale graduate (he used to be a boot-maker's apprentice when the communists came to power), the only "spy"-worthy thing that he did was to be a driver for his boss when one day they crossed into West Berlin (the Wall hadn't been built at that time). Down there they both met with a dissident from our country who had escaped when the Soviets had come "to liberate" us just after WW2.

My uncle's boss had first "maimed" said dissident back in Istanbul by promising him a business opportunity which (the boss said) they should have continued talking about in West Berlin. Said dissident was trustful enough, so that he decided to meet with my uncle and my uncle's boss in West Berlin. I'm not sure of the exact circumstances but at some point during said meeting my uncle and his boss immobilized the dissident and "I just pushed him in the car's trunk", as my uncle told my father a couple of decades after the event. After that my uncle drove the car through the checkpoints back into East Berlin, the dissident hidden in the trunk and then sent packing back to our country (he wasn't killed, after a couple of years he even got back his former job as a university professor, but I suppose the first years after his "forced repatriation" weren't the best for him).

So, nothing fancy about it at all, just some minor deceit and then pushing someone into a car's trunk. After this whole affair my uncle got pretty high up in my country's spy ranks, at some point he was the chief of some foreign intelligence Directorate (like I told you, this is more like John le Carré's books than Ian Fleming's), he even received his nomenklatura house, nothing big or shiny, just something that would keep all the people (and their families) on which the system depended physically close to the local dictator. All was relatively well until at some point in the late '70s the big boss of my country's foreign intelligence services decided to defect to the Americans. Not long after that my uncle was found hung-up in his nomenklatura house. Like I said, a very thankless job (at least his wife, my aunt, a salt-of-the-earth type of lady, got to keep the house).

And this story involving my uncle happened when this whole spy thing still had something like an ideological tinge to it, when the East vs West thing was not about money or hidden off-shore accounts but about who was right when it came to the future of the human condition (Marx vs Adam Smith, to use a lousy metaphor). My grandpa's generation (and that includes his brother, my spy uncle) really believed that the communists were right and the capitalists were wrong and were exploiting the normal people. Nowadays (and I think it has been that way since about the late '70s - early '80s, again, John le Carré's books really capture this transition really well) the spy thing is almost all about getting an economic advantage over your "adversary", there's no ideology, there's no perceived right and wrong, it's just a fight over some resources (protecting/stealing IP, some things that need to be dug out from somewhere in Africa etc etc). Which is to say that the spy job has become even more sinister.