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

"I started keeping a journal and a folder of news articles on US and Soviet forces," he tells 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.

We recently talked to Goral, 39, who spent a total of 15 years with the agency, about what it's really like to work for the CIA - a career that brought him to over 30 countries.

Not so surprisingly, he couldn't share all the details of the hiring process, his classified jobs, or his experiences, but he did give us a glimpse into his life at Langley:

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.