Spend ten minutes by the SOAS steps at lunchtime and you'll see the student body is far removed from what it used to be during WW1.
Again, what you say may be true of the SOAS Language Centre or tuition organised privately with faculty members (generally frowned upon but it's known to happen), but the undergraduates are almost invariably young A Level/IB students, not shady looking Americans in their 30s.
Having some regional law/politics knowledge with the language ability to go along with it might be good for raw recruits into the intelligence service or armed forces, but it's not SOAS that'll turn them into spies. And let's not even bother to consider the ethnomusicologists and gender studies types.