Dennis Cunningham is an agent with the CIA.
He is not an operative in the normal sense, at least not in the manner most in this compendium who work for the Agency would be thought of but he is an agent nevertheless.
He works for the OIG, Office of the Inspector General, so when he does any 'spying', it is on his own people in an effort to make sure that no rules are broken and no secrets revealed. His is, therefore, a very unpopular vocation.
As he puts it, "my job is difficut. Poeple inside the Agency hate you when you come calling, and people outside the Agency hate you because they think you're covering stuff up".
There is likely another reason or two that people would find Cunningham's presence distressing - he is a very outspoken young man with a sense of humor that many would not appreciate and an honesty that a lot would not. When a new supervisor and he were talking about the large number of people at the CIA going to work each day to make the country safe, he indicated it was safe from 'ourselves'. He said it as a quip, of course, but as I indicated, many of his fellow workers might not find it as amusing as he did.
Add one other factor to the equation about Cunningham is that he does have a bit of a temper and does, it seems to me, get annoyed rather easily. "When he was angry, his worst affronts came at the end of several sentences; the longer he talked, the more likely he was to offend. It was a problem of mathematics, he believed. When he was angry, uttering one less sentence was much better; it was always the last sentence that caused him grief."
If the information above gave the impression that Cunningham was an unpleasant sort, please remove them. He is not unpleasant. He is just, well, direct. That and impatient.
Well, okay, maybe he is a tad unpleasant: "Dennis thrived on digging out deception, graft and illegal behavior by agency employees, but only if it involved working with human beings and not spreadsheets. He could accost people, verbally harangue them and even threaten them to get information he needed. It was a visceral exercise that fit perfectly with his naturalistic view of the world."
But on the plus side of Cunningham, he is one of the best people the Agency has for finding people. In a government department having 20,000+ employees, a lot of them being especially well trained at clandestine activities and staying in the shadows, when one suddenly disappears, the ability to know what happened is greatly hampered by the very skills they were asked to use. It then takes someone very good to locate them.
Cunningham is very good.