Lindsay Moran, author of ?Blowing My Cover ? My Life as a CIA Spy? told the that nothing in her actual spywork was nearly as intense as the training itself.

Ms Moran wrote the book after retiring from a brief career in the CIA. She now lives in Washington D.C.

In January 2005, ?Blowing My Cover? published by Putnam, busted open the CIA?s best kept secret ? that life on the inside isn?t all that glamorous.

To become a CIA operative, a lifelong dream after reading ?Harriet the Spy? by Louise Fitzhugh, Ms Moran underwent months of intensive training which involved lie detector tests where she was repeatedly asked questions like ?Are you sure you haven?t killed someone?? and hostage training so brutal that some trainee CIA spies were actually traumatised by it mentally, and physically. She also learned how to crash cars through barriers at 60 miles per hour, and jump out of a plane with cargo strapped to her body.

After the training, the job itself turned out to be an anticlimax. She was posted to Macedonia. Her early work included arranging entertainment for foreign diplomats (topless bars for the men and shopping for their wives), and enduring hours of sitting in a dark, parked car with an elderly contacts who insisted on telling her their very long, long life stories. (She should have been a reporter.)

?That was one of the ironies,? said Ms Moran. ?The CIA training was the most difficult and the most fun aspect for me.

?I was very naive when I joined. I had envisioned some kind of Bond-girl hijinks but the reality was it was a lot of sitting in parked cars, and driving around and doing paper work. For every hour I might sit with a recruited agent, I would spend countless hours before that writing correspondence to headquarters. There is a lot of paperwork involved.?

In fact, Ms Moran said the Macedonian roads were much more of a threat to her physical safety then the Macedonian people.

?Aside from the one incident I described in the book where I surprised three armed soldiers hiding in some bushes, I never felt in danger much, except when I was driving around. You spend 50 percent of your time in your car driving and in the Balkans the roads are terrible, and not lit very well at night. Sometimes I?d be driving over snow and ice. I did fear that at some point my roll my car might roll off a cliff.?

The book is as much about the personal life of a spy as it is about the working life. In the book, which is full of dry wit, Ms Moran described the difficulties of keeping friends and romantic relationships going, when you can?t actually tell your boyfriend what it is you do for a living, or why he won?t be able to contact you for the next two months. Her foreigner dates also had to be vetted by the CIA.

Since leaving the CIA, Ms Moran is now happily married to a photographer and has one son, who was born not long after her book was published in hardback.

The September 11 crisis in New York City was one of the catalysts for her leaving the CIA.

?While it was devastating on a personal level it was even more so for those of us working for the CIA,? she said. ?We worked for an organisation that was supposed to prevent something like this from happening and we really failed the American public.

?I absolutely feel the CIA could have done more to prevent it. It came out afterwards that the CIA did not have a good relationship with the FBI and that was one of the reasons that the hijackers were able to enter the country. The September 11 hijackers were people the CIA had been watching for years and never relayed to the FBI and the result was the hijackers were able to get into the country. More than that after 911 there was no accountability ? no heads rolled, nobody was held accountable.?

She said although she didn?t keep a diary during her years as a CIA spy, she wrote ?Blowing My Cover? very quickly because the events in it stood out clearly in her mind. Before she could publish it, it had to be cleared by the CIA.

?When I wrote it I didn?t know if the CIA would allow me to write it,? she said. ?There were a lot of people at the agency who were not happy about it, but at the end of the day the CIA was pretty fair. They allowed me to publish even though it doesn?t portray the agency as stellar.

?I think that the book made a lot of people unhappy. Some people didn?t like that I had debunked the myth that the CIA is a super glamour organisation.

?Other people read it is a political book. I openly talked about the fact that America didn?t have any evidence to go to war in Iraq. It was not meant to be political, it was meant to be a personal story showing the human side of the CIA, but it was viewed as controversial by many people.?

Ms Moran is now writing a fiction book that will be a (even) more humorous foray into spying. This book will also have to be checked-over by the CIA.

As to whether there is any spying done in Bermuda, Ms Moran said she has never done any here.

?I?m sure there is spywork done in Bermuda, but I never did anything,? she said. ?It is actually the sort of place you might try to meet someone, but I wouldn?t call it one of our international hot spots.?