Burn Notice was the usual half-baked spy thriller fantasy.
If you want to watch something that is reasonably accurate in regard to espionage and tradecraft you have to go foreign. Watch the French TV series “The Bureau”. A series based on portraying the deep-cover (operating ‘under a legend’) officers (Which is NOT the normal Intel officer!) of the French foreign espionage service the DGSE. Even then it exaggerates storylines adds unrealistic subplots for dramatic effect. The first 3 years are the best. The next 2 seasons it moves further from “realism” to more typical “spy drama”. I think it’s on Netflix and you can buy it off Amazon.
True Lies was just flat out ludicrous!
True Lies got at least one thing right: the reaction of the wives of deep cover field agents on learning of what their husband's career was actually about. In the 1980's, the CIA and US military intel agencies became alarmed at the high rates of divorce and suicide among their retired spies. A program to inform the wives and children about the spy thing was then developed.
A friend of mine, John, had been a NOC agent for US military intelligence, with various foreign and domestic postings as a supposed businessman. His college sweetheart wife Sue put up with a lot: abrupt changes in her husband's business work, odd trips, poorly explained absences, and unusual friends and associates. Sue suspected infidelity and that her husband's business was tainted with fraud, but she buckled down and devoted herself to their two children.
When John retired from field work and settled back home as a small town businessman, his marriage to Sue began to unravel. Too many accumulated questions and doubts, and too much dodgy behavior from John over the years. When the intel counseling team came to town, John was pleased to think that his wife Sue was about to learn that instead of being a bad husband, John would be officially revealed as a patriot serving his country, even a James Bond type hero of sorts.
Not quite. Just like Jamie Leigh Curtis in True Lies, Sue was furious that John had put his wife and children in harm's way by being a spy. It took a lot of talk and some time before Sue was persuaded that the conventions of the spy game assured that John's family's was safe and off limits.
There is even a true True Lies kind of twist. Reconciled, John and Sue remained married, even finding renewed devotion and happiness in later years. Indeed, partly with some advice from me and a little help from John, Sue and her friends relentlessly dug into their local municipal government and found enough ethical misconduct and irregular accounting to force the resignation of almost all the elected officials and top staff. A reform mayor and new city council were soon elected.
There was some mumbling among the targets that they had been the victim of a CIA type coup, referring to John's intel background. What they could not accept was that the unfailingly polite Southern belle and her friends who had spent months poring over City records and asking simple questions were the true instrument of the reckoning that they suffered. I have never seen a more thorough political housecleaning.