20-Year Prospect
The CIA: giving America a bad name since 1947.
Whoa, calm down there. That was a joke. We know CIA operations officers do valuable work...we just don't know what it is, because that's a secret.
CIA agents provide intelligence, right? Like, they knew about 9/11 before 9/11, although the intel wasn't enough to stop the hijackers.
And they participate in covert ops. For example, the CIA tried to kill Fidel Castro. More than once. That never worked out, though.
Oh, and CIA operations officers show up in a lot of Hollywood movies. Not real CIA operations officers, obviously, because that would totally blow their cover...but Matt Damon, Jeremy Renner, and Ben Affleck have made good stand-ins. And Americans clearly love a good spy story, since Argo earned more than $136 million in the United States alone and won Best Picture at the Oscars.
So, yeah, CIA operations officers will still be around twenty years from now. After all, someone has to keep the president up-to-date on who Kim Jong-un's favorite basketball player is.