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.
