For nearly 20 years, I was a case officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. I ran foreign agents in China. I had many alias passports and held clandestine meetings in strange hotel rooms all over the world. I was there when Tiananmen Square erupted in 1989; I still possess spent bullets that vengeful Chinese soldiers shot through my apartment walls that day. I was also in Cairo and in a lot of other places I don’t talk about, even though I’ve been officially ex-Agency for five years.

Lindsay Moran, valedictorian of her Harvard class, joined the CIA in 1998,and after three years of training at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., she spent only two years of service in Macedonia before leaving to get married. Thus her new book, “Blowing my Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy,” (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 304 pages, $22.95) is a wonderfully bold and naive misnomer. It’s akin to a first-year medical intern writing a book called, “My Life as a Surgeon.”

I’m being kind. The book should have been called “Everything you wanted to Know about Spycraft But were Afraid to Ask,” (a la Dr. David Reuben) or “Advertisements for Myself,” (a la Norman Mailer). It is a formulaic memoir by a self-absorbed 20-something who mixes tired “chick-lit” themes with a dash of secret-agent derring-do. Ms. Moran’s five-year career – five full years, omigod! – is a brief, very brief exposure to what one of my former colleagues called “the science of distinguishing the contagious source from the merely infected.”

Want to know how the Agency trained case officers in the 1980s through the 1990s? Read the first 184 pages. She gives it all away. Read how a spoiled Ivy Leaguer tried the spy game for a lark. It is vivid and instructive. But to what end, other than self-promotion, did Ms. Moran write this “expose?” Ms. Moran doesn’t give us a great tale of can-do gal with a yen for adventure, nor does she expose a great government cover-up – the wet dream fantasy of the American Left. She barely stayed in the Agency long enough to find her way around Langley.

Ms. Moran spends almost two thirds of the book in training; only the last 100 or so pages describe her actual field experience in Macedonia. But she actually does a good job in describing life in the parallel universe of Agency operational training at the Farm, located in southern Virginia – too good, in fact.

Ms. Moran’s vignettes about training are well-written and paint a detailed picture of paramilitary and operational courses. It may well serve our many enemies to read this book. (“Hey, Osama, check out this cool evasion tactic!”) I was shocked by the level of detail allowed by the CIA publications review board, as well as by how little has changed since I underwent the same greenhorn training 18 years earlier. I can only hope that Ms. Moran’s detailed explanation of training exercises was allowed by the censors because the courses have been completely overhauled since she (a pre-September 11 graduate) took them.

Ms. Moran goes on to divulge more operational tricks of the trade, and each time she did so I winced. In the Directorate of Operations culture of my day (the 1980s and 1990s), it was unconscionable to go into such depth about the business of agent recruitment and surveillance detection. You wouldn’t even tell your “witting” (code for someone who knows your true CIA affiliation) spouse.

It’s hard to find Ms. Moran a sympathetic character. She’s aloof toward most of her classmates and superiors throughout the book. At first, her main complaint seems to be that the CIA no longer recruits Ivy Leaguers. Where were the dashing young men in tweed who quoted Chaucer and coyly left the room when Skull and Bones was mentioned? Surprise: This has been the case for the last 30 years. First ROTC, then CIA recruiters were kicked off many college campuses in the wake of the Vietnam War. (I was the only Ivy Leaguer in the Langley class of 1981, but so what?) Only after September 11 did the Leftist tide shift to allowing recruiters back on campus again.

Ms. Moran condescendingly describes her other classmates: “We were not as eclectic a group as one might imagine: some former cops, a lot of ex-military people, hardly any academics.” What did she expect? Academics aren’t usually glad-handing “people-persons” able to mix with the “natives,” nor are they given to Indiana Jones-type risk-taking. It takes a special kind of person to be a case officer in a foreign country, especially one with an openly hostile government or one that incubates terrorism. Only on a few occasions does Ms. Moran portray her colleagues in a positive light, such as her retiring Farm instructor, Bill, and one classmate, Ethan, who in her last chapter was signing up to serve in Iraq.

The reader soon realizes the real reasons why Ms. Moran bristled under the mantle of case officer: lack of a love life. The Girl’s Gotta Have it. This is where the “chick-lit” theme comes in. Ms. Moran disparages CIA culture throughout her book, mostly because she cannot find a love interest. Hey, cowgirl, don’t knock the ranch’s brand just ’cause the trail boss ain’t provided you with a bunkmate.

She whines about losing boyfriends on “the outside” because she finds it difficult to maintain cover and “live the lie.” I recall being uncomfortable about cover the first few years in the CIA, as well. But after several overseas tours, cover becomes more natural. Like any skill, the more you practice, the better at it you become. If you handle really sensitive cases, you do all your work in alias; you completely compartmentalize your work from your real (personal) life.

Perhaps Ms. Moran felt that she was compromising her principles by staying in the outfit. Or perhaps she needed the instant gratification that so many of her generation accept as a given. Her impatience with the B.S. of any governmental agency is understandable. She barely finished out her first tour before quitting, however, supposedly rescued by the globetrotting photographer boyfriend (now husband), James, who Ms. Moran portrays as the antithesis of the plodding CIA dolts surrounding her.

Ms. Moran also gripes about the CIA’s strict travel protocol for overseas case officers. In one episode of the book, she crosses the border to Bulgaria to canoodle with a Bulgarian boyfriend without notifying her boss. When the boss tries to track her down using the emergency communications plan, she reacts as if it were a nuisance to cut her dirty weekend short. In my career, officers were fired for less egregious violations.

In another misstep, Ms. Moran cavalierly brings her non-CIA friend, Emma, to a developmental meeting with Macedonian insurgents in a seedy bar. The bar is raided, and Ms. Moran and friend barely slip away. Ms. Moran then moralizes that she did not know any more than her friend about the internal machinations of Macedonian politics, especially funding to ethnic Albanian Muslims from Osama bin Laden. Again, if that had happened to me, I would have been given, at the bare minimum, a severe reprimand from my station chief.

It only took about 100 pages before I became angry at Ms. Moran for using her brief “misadventure” in the CIA as a vehicle for self-promotion. Call me cynical, but I strongly suspect Ms. Moran embarked upon this career with the premeditated idea to write an expose. Or at least she figured that, if things didn’t work out, she could always write a book. (For a truly insightful book about CIA culture and how it deals with the Middle East, read 20-year-veteran Robert Baer’s “See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism,” published by Crown.) What will Ms. Moran do to follow-up? At least the late George Plimpton always saw himself as an amateur when he entered new worlds to write about them.

The last major female spy cover blowing episode was the Valerie Plame affair. The press was incensed. How could this fine young patriot be exposed? Those terrible Republicans in the White House! Most people ignored the fact that Ms. Plame, married to blowhard diplomat Joe Wilson, was in her fourth year of psychiatric care for post-partum depression after giving birth to twin boys. While it’s possible Ms. Plame did good work in her dozen or so years on the job, it is unlikely the CIA would even want to send her overseas again.

Ms. Plame’s husband, a former diplomat with a book to flog, chewed up the talk-show circuit, concocting his own 15 minutes of fame. A year ago this couple was outraged; recently they posed for a staged photograph in Vanity Fair, which caught them driving a convertible though Washington, D.C., Ms. Plame in glamorous sunglasses and windblown scarf. Ms. Moran seems to making a similar play for attention: Her book will be excerpted this weekend in the New York Times Magazine.

This is what I don’t understand: With Ms. Plame, I never heard of such outraged punditry over a cover being blown. Now “Bridget Jones” Moran does it and Langley (and the press) couldn’t care less?

Ms. Moran conveniently ends her short memoir by claiming that one of the reasons for quitting the CIA was her inability to support the war in Iraq. She also states, with some unexplained authority, that the United States had “accomplished precious little in our efforts to eradicate the terrorist networks that had caused September 11 in the first place.” This is simply not true. Even I know, from open-source information, that there have been hundreds of attacks thwarted and cells “rolled up” around the globe. But that wouldn’t conveniently fit into Ms. Moran’s plotline, now would it?

Ms. Sutherland was a case officer for more than 18 years. She now owns an art gallery in New York City, which specializes in contemporary Chinese painting.