Too much sex and gunfights, far too little paperwork … espionage shows aren’t exactly a masterclass in realism. Ex-agents reveal what they get right and wrong
For Cortese, it’s particularly annoying when protagonists fail to handle firearms correctly – one of the most common complaints. “Characters often make the mistake of having their finger on the trigger while clearing a room, or even just holding the weapon,” he says. “In real life, your finger is along the barrel and you don’t touch the trigger until you plan on squeezing it. This is probably the single most irritating thing to those of us in the business. We always notice this one.
For that reason, some veterans avoid the genre entirely. Tracy Walder is a former FBI special agent and a five-year covert operations veteran in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center – where she took on aliases and visited black sites to debrief captured terrorists. “I made it through one episode of Homeland and couldn’t watch any more,” she says. “What’s misleading is that our capabilities are viewed as omniscient. They certainly are not. Things take time. That can mean years.
“We do carry weapons in certain areas of operation, but that’s not the norm,” Walder says. “We are not law enforcement; therefore, it is actually not part of the job. Yes, we have weapons training and I did carry in some countries I served, but that’s it. Obviously, as an FBI agent I carried all the time.”
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