Hey guys! New to the forum,
I'm pretty much 16 years old (a couple months until my birthday) and I've been considering a few careers. I have one particular that I want to do, but I like to keep an open mind.
I've been pretty interested in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. I know they're Canada's main centre of handling intelligence. And I know many of you are going to just say that I'm interesting in this job because I want to become a "spy".
Let me just say that's not true. I'm interested in the job because of the lifestyle. I find foreign affairs, politics, and international cultures interesting. I also like the dealing of secret information, and dealing with bad people. It sounds exciting, and somewhat dangerous.
Anyways, I guess my main questions are what could I start doing to prepare myself for a job there? In terms of high school courses? Do I need to take French?
I'd also like to know the physical aspects of training they do. Do they teach you any physical training (Fighting, firing weapons, etc)?
Sorry for my ignorance, I'd just really like input from someone who knows more. Thank you! 
Before we get too far sidetracked ... you might want to note that the
intelligence business is neither dangerous nor glamorous, it involves, for 99.99% of its practitioners, careers of unending drudgery, sifting and sorting
information until some meaningful patterns
might materialize.
Please take careful note of CSIS' name: the Canadian
Security Intelligence Service - I put a lot of emphasis on security because many countries divide the
intelligence function into two broad categories:
1. Protecting out secrets, here at home, from foreign spys; and
2. Gathering information, overseas, which can be turned into useful intelligence.
Speaking very broadly CSIS does the former and other agencies do the latter. CSIS can and does operate overseas but, mainly, in pursuit of its
"Priority Areas" of responsibility.
As you might expect, in this
cyber age, much of the
volume of "spying," by which we mean
information gathering is done electronically because so much
information is moved about by electronic means. Canada has an
agency, separate and distinct from CSIS, that does that work.
If you are interested in that sort of work - in the
intelligence part of CSIS and/or CSE - then, as
dapaterson says, you will need a university degree, likely more than one, and some facility, better yet, fluency, in one or more foreign languages. There are CF members and other folks who roam around foreign countries gathering or trying to gather information - we call the CF people
attachés and they are, mostly, colonels with one or more university degrees and some skill in a foreign language or two; the others are called diplomats - once again university educated and having some language skills. The information those folks gather is assembled and analyzed and rearranged and reviewed and turned into
real intelligence by the analysts - the
real intelligence professionals: grey little people, working in grey little cubicles in grey little office buildings in Canada's grey little capital.
French matters because these agencies are part of the Government of Canada - even if you have a PhD in physics and are fluent in Arabic, Hindi and Mandarin you had better be bilingual.
By the way ... Ian Fleming's
James Bond character was modelled, in part, on Commander Lionel "Buster" Crabb, RN. But
Crabb and his ilk were always rare, everywhere, and are even more so, today. And remember,
Redhotpengy, all those in the
intelligence world are Taoists at heart and they believe Lao Tzu's diuctum that
"Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”
