Spy story

A man who worked for the CIA for 15 years tells us what it was really like to have a top-secret job

As a kid, Brian Goral was fascinated with the CIA.

"I started keeping a journal and a folder of news articles on US and Soviet forces," he told Business Insider. "I would copy terms and acronyms from the backs of military-spy novels and try to understand the World Book Encyclopedia's explanation of how nuclear weapons worked.

"I remember at one point during a math class my sophomore year in high school, my multi-year unrequited crush, Denise, and I decided we should go work for the CIA."

Denise, he says, pursued a different career path. But Goral realized his dream when he landed an internship with the CIA — the civilian foreign-intelligence service of the US federal government — as a college student.