Reminds me of the practice of Translations.com / Transperfect, one of the largest language services providers. Their HR policy is to not allow employees to name the company in any online space, social media or otherwise. So when you see staff on LinkedIn, for instance, their employer will invariable say "Leading language service provider" or similar. These seem to be completely unreasonable policies, to me, that in effect are demanding that basic facts are ownable by the company.
After some military contractors in some countries got targeted and hurt, most European defence companies started asking their employees they don't advertise who you work for and where, especially in the Internet, and especially on social media.
You're advised not to wear company swag and all company-provided transport (buses) are required not to say or write the name of the company when picking up employees. You're also advised to avoid giving a precise Linked In profile. Even your role makes you a phishing (or worse) target.
You'd get frequent opsec training refreshes explaining all the new tricks and how such and such got roped in from their SM presence.
People who I know who have worked in intelligence have a career history on linkedIn which says they worked in diplomatic service or something similar. If you think about it, it makes sense given they would need to have such a cover job to get visas and so forth. You can't show up at some posting and try to explain "Yes I know my LinkedIn says '2005-2015 Secret Intelligence Service' but now I'm actually a legitimate diplomat".
Way back when but assume this is still the case, there were positions in the CIA (in DC, i.e. not agents) where you officially worked for someone like the Navy and weren't supposed to tell people you worked for the CIA. I was offered such a position but didn't take it.
Yeah, this is my experience too, at least in the UK. We had a close family friend whose father, the patriarch of the family, worked for 'the Army' his whole life. It was only after he died that they discovered - somehow - that it was actually 'intelligence' work.
I'm sure it's different for secretarial roles, leadership roles, etc, but for the bulk of people it seems like the usual career path is up through the normal military, and officially they remain in the military. (I also knew some linguists - normally of somewhat exotic languages like Arabic or Russian – who were taken aside at Oxford or Cambridge and asked if they were interested in working in intelligence.)
Like the other person said: relative to 'plain' Western European languages – like French, German, Spanish, or Italian – yes, they are. There are some languages in the world which are more exotic, but Arabic and Russian are indeed somewhat exotic to us.
I imagine that native or fluent English speakers are less likely to be fluent in those languages than other western European languages. So, yes, they're "exotic" or at least less common in that sense.
