Also having done this sort of stuff in a previous life. And it’s always interesting how people react when they find out, some people automatically just lose all faith in you. Like you’re some sort of actor, just playing a role. Some people legitimately want to know more about how it really works. I literally keep it to myself in most contexts.
And people all think you're always lying to them? Gosh, I wonder why?
Could this be that there is a level of dishonesty when involved with espionage/spying. This may be a natural reaction to not want to associate with people who have little qualms being dishonest perhaps?
That’s pretty much the gist of what I say these days. There’s usually questions about the wild shit or the tinkering, but that’s pretty much where it ends, because there’s no way those stories are true. My wife didn’t believe most of them until she met some of the people I worked with and she realized that the stories I told were the sane ones: they have even crazier ones.
This is certainly not their fault, and the media just makes it worse with all the fiction and "sexy" spy stuff that they put into movies etc.... It's just a reality that the public is only ever made aware of either the .01% of ops that go poorly or where there were intentional abuses or just totally made up things you see in movies.