If you can believe former cold-war spies, the vast majority of espionage is nothing like what you see in movies; and is mostly about gathering information that is (mostly) not secret, and building relationships that could be useful to manipulate the country from the outside. While the internet makes a lot of the work they used to do unnecessary, I imagine that the social networking aspect of spying is still needed to be able to do anything effective.
Personally, I'd be interested to see what modern espionage is all about; and I wonder if these people were trying to influence the same academics, union leaders and radicals the KGB was manipulating throughout the cold war. I suspect not because I doubt Russia would be interested in converting the US to communism ...
