I was in ENLA (the recruiting corp of ENLI, TEST alliance member) during the 2013 fountain war, so I got to see some action as well. While the actual fight wasn't really that fun due to time dilation (server slows the game down to as low as 10% of normal speed when there's a lot of ships in the same system) and lag, the days leading up to it were great. Us complete newbros in ENLA managed to take out a heavily guarded goonswarm cyno (a jump point destination beacon if you will), trapping their capital ships somewhere completely remotely.
As for the spying/counterspying it was definitely present. Due to the mass paranoia people started joking about everyone being a spy. I remember one guy saying "I want to kill some goons" with the squad leader replying "only goonswarm spies make such statements" etc.