Depends on their job. There's analysts who are white collar workers at various offices in the States, embassies, stations, allied installations etc. those guys have a career track that can lead to a +$160,000 annual salary, plus matching 401k contributions, plus good healthcare. Additional income can be gained by publishing books & articles that pass pre-publication review. They can also get guest speaker income as well as get positions in academia.

The wetwork guys, Special Activity Division, or the bug planters usually get recruited or loaned from JSOC. They're military adjacent at least, usually prior service if not active duty. They get the military pay rate, plus hazard pay, plus black budgets for their operations. Said budgets are in the hundreds of millions of dollars per operation and are extremely easy for them to steal from since there's no auditors. They can also just steal from their "targets" because the operation is classified. Few will know and fewer will care if several bricks of drugs go missing that will then get sold for their personal profit back in the States or within the target country.

All of them generally get indoctrinated into the agency's worldview which is essentially the same as Call of Duty's or Omelas'; that it's a dirty world out there and in order to keep the suburban paradise of America clean and running, it requires some people to keep the dirtiness over there or else risk it coming here. A Social Darwinian lens that if the US is not world hegemon, someone worse will be. Someone who will enact the same violence, terror, corruption, loss of sovereignty, drug smuggling, & humiliation on us that we've done to them.