You have to liberate yourself first from the prejudices of the world in which you live.
An espionage organization is a collector: it collects raw information. That gets processed by a machinery that is supposed to resolve its reliability, and to present a finished product.
I'll tell you one thing, in what I do for a living, there's no substitute for experience. I don't care how much natural talent you may have... In the type of show I do, you can depend on surprises.