George William Cave was born on Aug. 6, 1929, in Camden, N.J. His father, Walter, who worked for a milk company, died when George was 8. Soon after, his mother, Florence (Clarke) Cave, sent him to the Milton Hershey Industrial School (now the Milton Hershey School) in Hershey, Pa., originally a home and school for orphaned boys.

After he graduated in 1947, he enlisted in the Army, studied Persian at its language school in Monterey, Calif., and was discharged in 1952. He received a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from Princeton University in 1956 and contemplated a career in the oil industry, but instead accepted an offer to work for the C.I.A.

Following a stint in Tehran, Mr. Cave was sent to Beirut in 1963. The Lebanese capital was “kind of an intelligence paradise,” he said on an episode of the “Spycast” podcast in 2012. For five years, he used deception and propaganda to help break up the local Communist Party and recruit sources within Palestinian organizations.

In 1968, he began a two-year stint at the C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., where he was in charge of so-called denied-area operations, missions into hostile countries like Iraq and Syria. In 1970, he returned to the field as deputy station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan; in 1973, he returned to Tehran, where he held the same position for three years.

He moved on to Saudi Arabia as the agency’s station chief in 1976. But in 1979, the Carter administration recalled him; the Saudi leadership had declared him persona non grata after he “aroused concern among the ruling family by his efforts to ascertain the extent of internal dissension” within the monarchy, Cord Meyer Jr., a former C.I.A. operative, wrote in his syndicated column.