A retired British spook once said to me 'the reason American foreign policy is so under-informed and unsubtle in its response to problems is that CIA operatives won't risk getting food poisoning.-
Yes, that is my impression. Decades ago they had only undergraduate knowledge of the Far East. That's all I had, but I was an undergrad in Japan, taking courses and writing papers in Japanese, which counts more. The thing about Japan is, the food is excellent and hygienic so you never need to worry about food poisoning. One of my U.S. profs. told me, "I wanted to study the Far East in 1960 and my father thought Japan was the only safe place to go." So that's how she ended up in the Japanese dept., not Korea or China.
The spooks once expressed interest in hiring me, but I was already married to a non-citizen who would never want U.S. citizenship, so that was out. (I married at age 22.)
My father along with everyone else posted to the Soviet Union during WWII was somewhat involved in intelligence. Mainly looking from the train to see if there was smoke coming a factory, for example, or visiting Stalingrad. Anyway, he had a low opinion of intelligence, which I inherited. He once told me: "If you are ever admitted to the most secret department of the government, and they let you into the most secret room, there you will find a file cabinet. If you open that file cabinet drawer you will find a dried-up apple and an old newspaper."
