Michael Thorne is an agent with the CIA.
We are told four pretty interesting pieces of information about Thorne in an opening blurb for the first recorded adventure. He is a Specialized Skills Officer stationed in Moscow. He is considered an expendable spy. He is "fed up with the games played by Langley's chiefs" but to his annoyance, "There's not a lot he can do about it".
In the opening pages, we are also to that when on assignment, "if this mission went bad, no one was going to show up and pull him out of a Turkish prison". He was used to it but that does not make any less challenging. "Years spend in places where people wanted to kill him" is one way the chronicler described his life in the espionage business.
Aiding Thorne in his vocation is a gift for languages. When his father, a professor at the American University in Beirut was left to raise Thorne after the death of Thorne's mother when he was two, he hied a Syrian woman to look after him. That woman would a year later become his step-mother so he "had grown up in a household where English and Arabic were interchangeable. By the time he entered college, speaking Arabic was as natural to him as English". It was in college he found he was a natural at languages, quickly picking up French and then Russian.
The Agency was interested in him in college but after graduating he went to the Marines instead, going through OCS to become an officer and then serving the next few years in Force Recon. At age 27 he decided a change was in order and that is when he listened to the CIA offer and went to them for the next stage of his life. When we pick up his activities, he has been with them for just over a decade.