BOOK REVIEW: Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA
By Amaryllis Fox
Reviewed by Suzanne Kelly
Suzanne Kelly is CEO & Publisher of The Cipher Brief. She previously served as an Intelligence Correspondent and Executive Producer for CNN. Prior to that, she was a freelance anchor for CNN International based in Berlin. Kelly also worked in Europe as an anchor and reporter and in Kosovo and Macedonia as a warzone correspondent. She is the author of Master of War: Blackwater USA’s Erik Prince and the Business of War.
This December 30 marks ten years since a terrorist, posing as a CIA asset, blew himself up on a remote forward operating base in Khost Province, Afghanistan. Seven agency officers were killed and another 6 were injured.
A day later, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta offered words of respect and remembrance for the dead saying, “Those who fell yesterday were far from home and close to the enemy, doing the hard work that must be done to protect our country from terrorism.”
The cost of that protection was high. Those who were killed were committed to playing their role in a mission that they hoped would lead to the leadership of al-Qaeda, which was responsible for the deaths of 2,977 people on September 11, 2001.
There was something a little unusual though, about this loss. Two of the victims at Khost were female CIA Officers. One of them was serving as base chief and had three children back home.
The CIA has traditionally been a man’s world, at least on the operations side. There were female pioneers of course. I’m proud to say that some of them are now part of The Cipher Brief’sexpert network. They broke the mold, but they were the exception, not the rule.
Today, for the first time, the Agency is run by a woman. And most of her senior leadership team are female. If there was ever evidence that the face of American espionage is changing, we are seeing it now.
With Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA, author Amaryllis Fox is joining an emerging chorus of former female officers who are sharing their experiences. (Earlier this year, I interviewed author Nada Bakos, the author of, The Targeter: My Life in the CIA, Hunting Terrorists and Challenging the White House. And more books are in the pipeline from former Agency officers Sarah Carlson and Tracy Walder.)
Life Undercover is a beautifully written, made for Hollywood account of Fox’s life and describes highlights of her CIA career that lasted nearly a decade. I don’t know if Fox wrote this book herself or if she had a ghost writer, but whoever put pen to paper has incredible talent. Fox’s story has been well received in Los Angeles and has already been picked up for a series on Apple TV, according to Variety.
Life Undercover describes Fox’s emotional transformation as she escorts the reader through the highlights of her childhood and her young-adult adventures in Burma. She takes the reader with her to Oxford University, and then, eventually, settling at Georgetown. That’s where her studies catch the attention of CIA. She applies, is accepted and is pulled into a Hollywood version of the life you’d expect any good spy to live. She describes her training at the Farm -the Agency’s classified training facility - and how they teach her to recruit assets. She also takes the reader on her journey into some of the world’s most dangerous places, describing in great detail how she developed her cover story as a spy working under nonofficial cover, and how she both recruited and communicated with her assets. NOCs, as they are called, are considered some of the riskiest roles at the Agency because NOCs operate without any diplomatic immunity. If they’re caught, they don’t enjoy any of the protections afforded to other officers. Altogether, the details weave a fascinating story.
The only trouble with Fox’s story is that many of the details she shares – if true – would violate a real spy’s agreement with the CIA to allow them to review anything they write before its published – in order to protect the Agency’s sources and methods. It’s a promise to your country that you will do no harm, especially not for personal gain. If every former spy wrote a book about what they did, to whom, and how they did it, how long do you think it would take a real adversary to start using that information against the Agency? When asked why Fox didn’t wait for final agency approval before publishing her book and securing series rights, she said that she did submit her manuscript to the CIA’s Publications Review Board for approval, but after waiting a year for it to be cleared, she decided not to wait any longer.
In an interview, Fox told NBC’s Ken Dilanian that she changed some facts, including names, places and other operational details in the book in order to not disclose some information. "My aim was really to capture the kind of 'Capital T' Truth, the emotional truth of going through this transformation," she told NBC. "And that is something you can do and still maintain accuracy by not only changing names and places but by having compelling characters and situations I met along the way without identifying them directly."
The problem is that the reader is left not knowing how much of the book is true and how much of it has been ‘fictionalized’ to protect sources and methods. For people who care about more than just a good story, that’s a big problem.
Going Wildly Off Script
In a long-form interview about her book with NPR, Fox recounted a meeting with an al Qaeda operative that she attended by herself. She describes him in the room with some of his associates who are planning to bomb a busy Pakistani intersection. The reader is led to believe that he knows she is there to talk him out of it. Fox says his infant daughter was also there and that she noticed she was having trouble breathing. Fox told NPR that’s when she decided to go ‘wildly off script’ and try to bond with the terrorist by sharing real-life personal details about her own baby. She then offered the terrorist clove oil, which she told him, helped her daughter who also had trouble with wheezing. Fox proudly writes that the planned attack didn’t occur.
The account is just one example of Fox’s changing feelings throughout the book, and her eventual belief that if she can only convince the enemy to dig deep and find their own humanity, that might be a helpful way to influence their future actions. It’s a theme that’s repeated as she begins to question what she’s doing and why she’s doing it.
Based on her clear determination and resourcefulness on display throughout the book, that encounter is likely not the only time Fox has gone off script, but lucky for her, Hollywood never seems to mind. We’ll see whether CIA does. The outstanding question is whether they will seek legal action against her, the way that DoD has done with former Navy SEALS who have published books without prior permission.
What I was left asking is whether there was a way that Fox could have written this book to highlight the incredibly important role that women in these positions play, without giving so much detail about how they do it. Whether Fox violated agreements or not, her story goes a long way in sharing details about the changing face of American spies. Director Gina Haspel, in the very few public comments that she has made since becoming Director, has said that diversity is a priority at the Agency, not just in gender, but in sexual orientation, and ethnic and religious backgrounds as well. What matters most is not whether future spies are white men, but whether new recruits understand the mission and whether they buy into it. The latter seemed to be the reason why Fox and the agency eventually parted ways.
While I would recommend reading Fox’s story, I would also encourage the reader to utilize their own fact-finding skills and to explore the experiences of the women at CIA who came before her. Some of them have sacrificed in other ways, spending countless hours piecing together the bits of analysis that pour in so they can see the bigger picture as quickly as possible. Not all of them would have written books, but as is the case with the two women in Khost ten years ago, their stories matter.
This book earns three out of four trench coats because truth should matter more when something is presented as a non-fiction book, but it's still a great read.
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