Some spy stories will be forever confined to memory, locked safes, and invisible ink. But for others there’s a quarterly journal called Studies in Intelligence, published by the Central Intelligence Agency. “Every profession has its own literature,” Andres Vaart, the publication’s editor, said the other day. Since 1955, when it began, intelligence officers have filled its pages with analyses of old spy operations, book reviews, and tales of derring-do. “We have some great writers here,” Vaart said. “Studies is where they get to speak their minds.”

Vaart, who typically works off-site, in northern Virginia, was at the C.I.A.’s headquarters, in Langley, to discuss the journal’s latest issue with his boss, Peter Usowski, the director of the C.I.A.’s Center for the Study of Intelligence. They were seated at a wooden table in a windowless room. Usowski was wearing a suit, but Vaart had a jauntier look, with a white turtleneck under an Argyle sweater-vest. Outside, snow dusted the wings of a decommissioned spy plane in the parking lot.

Vaart riffled through a pile of back issues. One featured an article titled “Cold War Spy Fiction in Russian Popular Culture”; another was called “Sputnik and U.S. Intelligence: The Warning Record.” Vaart said, “We want to be of the moment.”

“In the aftermath of Snowden, we published a piece on the psychology of leaks,” Usowski said. With a touch of embarrassment, Vaart confessed that the journal’s most-read piece was one from 2007: “The C.I.A.’s Role in the Study of U.F.O.s.” (In sum: the agency looked for proof of flying saucers, but didn’t find any.)

Vaart talked about the cover story he’d commissioned for the latest issue, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Tet Offensive. The story was by Raymond Lau, a retired C.I.A. officer who’d served in the Marines during the Vietnam War. In January of 1968, Lau was ambushed in Hue during the offensive and was trapped for days behind enemy lines, hiding out in a pigsty. Vaart described the piece as “gripping.”

Usowski chairs the journal’s editorial board, whose sixteen members, current and former intelligence officers, consider submissions. They were lukewarm at first on Lau’s Tet story—not enough spy craft. (They’d had the same response to a piece about a former operative’s journey to China during the Second World War; one board member dismissed it as “just a travelogue.”) But Vaart had argued that the Tet story had intelligence value, especially for paramilitary types in Afghanistan and Iraq. “As an intelligence officer abroad, you just don’t know what kind of life-threatening situations you’re going to face,” he said.

Before becoming the journal’s editor, Vaart was a China analyst at the C.I.A. He’d also done editorial work, of a kind. For two years, he helped to write the President’s Daily Brief for George H. W. Bush; he knows what it feels like to labor over a passage, only to have a superior hammer the prose into bland P.D.B. style. “That can be demoralizing,” he said.

When asked about President Trump’s disparaging remarks about the C.I.A., Vaart was evasive. “It hurts to see our business denigrated at any time,” he said. “I think, definitely, there’s a feeling among a number of folks that the way intelligence is treated by others in the public can be very disappointing and misleading and downright makes one angry.”

The new issue of Studies was almost ready to go to press. A review board was still scrutinizing the Tet piece to make sure that it didn’t contain any state secrets. (Each issue appears in classified and unclassified forms—a classified version was already up on government Web sites.) After that, hard copies would go out to the journal’s roughly five hundred subscribers (subscriptions are free—costs are covered by taxpayers). Several copies would also be catalogued down the hall, in the C.I.A. library.

One of the librarians showed a visitor around. She wore a “Star Wars” lanyard and horn-rimmed glasses. “This is what we’re interested in at the moment,” she said, pointing toward a glass display case. It contained books on Iran and North Korea—a mix of academic works (“Iranian Entrepreneurship: Deciphering the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Iran and in the Iranian Diaspora”), contemporary histories (“Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty”), and travel guides. “We love ‘Lonely Planet,’ ” she said. A nearby shelf overflowed with DVDs. Apparently, spies not only like writing about their craft; they enjoy watching dramatizations of it. “Yes, we have all the Bond movies,” she said. “And there’s always a wait list for ‘Homeland.’ ” ♦