Why is recruiting agents so important to the CIA?

Why is recruiting agents so important to the CIA?

Recruiting agents is important because foreign agents are the bread and butter of the CIA. They are the people who are actually taking the greatest risks, and they are the people who are providing us the information that we want. Some people, including myself before I joined the agency, have this notion that a CIA Officer would be someone who scales walls and breaks into safes and physically steals secrets. That's not how it actually works. How it works is that you are essentially defending foreigners, and you are specifically defending foreigners to give you information that we might want. A foreigner who might be a nuclear physicist who works in that particular country's nuclear department. That's the one you might want to get to know, because they have access to information the US government wants and the information the US government might not get through diplomatic channels. What you are looking for as a spy is secret information, the stuff that we don't hear from their ambassadors or their political officers. The stuff that the foreign countries want to keep secret.