Author Alex Finley Dishes on Life as a Spy

Posted: July 30th, 2019

By Alex Finley

Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where she served in West Africa and Europe. Before becoming a bureaucrat living large off the system, she chased puffy white men around Washington DC as a member of the wild dog pack better known as the Washington media elite. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Reductress, Funny or Die, POLITICO, and other publications. She has spoken to C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CBC’s The National, Sirius XM’s Yahoo! Politics, The Cipher Brief, the Spy Museum’s SpyCast, and numerous other media outlets. She is the author of Victor in the Rubble, a satire about the CIA and the War on Terror.

Alex Finley worked for CIA’s Directorate of Operations for about six years in the early 2000s. Her roles took her to places like West Africa and Europe and also allowed for some time at Headquarters in Langley. Her work as a reports officer – which serves as a bridge between case officers who collect information and analysts who use that information – allowed her a unique vantage point from which to observe the good, the bad, and the hilarious things that sometimes transpire when doing the nation’s spy work.

Finley decided to take all of that knowledge and turn it into a hilarious work of fiction called Victor in the Rubble, about a fictional spy named Victor Caro who works for a fictional spy agency called the CYA. Finley followed that first book with a second one earlier this summer titled Victor in the Jungle, which sees Caro relocate to South America, bringing his whole family with him.

“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62

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