Life Undercover_Coming of Age in the CIA by Amaryllis Fox

Author:Amaryllis Fox [Fox, Amaryllis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Politics
ISBN: 9780525654971
Goodreads: 43800588
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

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I’m assigned back to CTC/WMD, charged once again with keeping nuclear, biological, and chemical agents out of the hands of global terror groups. I’m working operations around the world and returning only to switch out bags, pick up new alias docs, and get a fitful night’s sleep between briefings.

After a few months, my boss calls me into his office and says it’s time to pick a more permanent cover. The Beltway consultancy gig is fine for friends and family—even for customs and passport officials in the countries I’m visiting—but it carries too much D.C. stigma to allow me to get close to the top targets we’re pursuing. Up until now, I’ve been debriefing detainees or working with our counterparts in allied governments to plan or monitor operations. But if I want to be recruiting and running terrorist assets myself, I need a cover story that doesn’t reek of Washington.

“You’re a twenty-five-year-old white girl,” he says. “Don’t hide from that. Lean into it. What reason could you possibly have for being in Yemen or Libya or the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan?”

There’s aid work, but that cover has been used a thousand times before. And each time it is, it erodes the ability of real aid workers to do their job without falling under local suspicion. There’s journalism and documentary filmmaking, a nod to my history freelancing in Thailand and Burma. But that cover holds for only so long, until it becomes obvious that your work isn’t showing up on the wires.

“What about art?” I ask.

“Go on.”

My parents collect it, I explain. My sister is studying it. Anyone would believe I’d be drawn into that world, too. With artists from emerging scenes like China and India making record sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, it would make total sense for a young entrepreneur to be out scouting new markets in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. If China’s anything to go by, I say, governments and criminals alike love using the art scene to launder money, so there’s real access there. It might even allow me to brush up against some antiquities dealers hawking war trophies. Most of all, it would give me a reason to run around the boonies with sealed boxes and bags.

He mulls this over for a minute, then nods.

“Sold. Family history makes it believable. And the art market’s just dirty enough to give you entrée to the netherworld when you need it. Get it set up.”

It turns out that “getting it set up” involves hundreds of hours of work. There’s the preparation of fake business plans and financials to ensure that I can talk mechanics if anyone should ask. There’s designing the website and creating the digital litter—search results that reinforce the company’s legitimacy. There’s the printing of business cards—my own and those of colleagues I would have met were this my real job. There’s the forging of expired conference passes to scatter in my backpack and the generation of a year’s past e-mail

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