Yes that's typically who actually spies for governments, people that are manipulated by the field agents. A typical agent's job is to recruit and collect data f

Yes that's typically who actually spies for governments, people that are manipulated by the field agents. A typical agent's job is to recruit and collect data from those recruits. For a fascinating take on this I suggest the book See No Evil by Bob Baer. He talks a lot about his experiences as a CIA agent doing just that in a lot of interesting places during the cold war.