Read an Excerpt From Amaryllis Fox’s New Memoir, Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA

ON A CLEAR, cold winter’s day, my boyfriend Andrew* drives me to a gas station on Route 123 a little before dawn. I kiss him, then leave him standing there, raw and stoic, in the empty forecourt, his hands thrust into his peacoat pockets, as he watches me climb into the warm camaraderie of a crowded beige van.

Jokes masking our nerves, we drive through the familiar gates at Langley, step out of the van and into the blacked-out bus that will deliver us to the Farm—a simulated Truman Show set in a fictionalized country called the Republic of Vertania (ROV), where we are to undergo the most demanding espionage training on Earth. We are to play the roles of first-tour case officers assigned to the U.S. Embassy in the ROV city of Womack. We each have training names—aliases to protect our identities from one another. But other than that, everything feels real. There is an actual embassy building, with an American flag fluttering out front, on an actual town square with a wooden gazebo. There’s a cable news channel, like CNN, but reporting the news of this fictional universe: Prime Minister Cartwright did this or the Sons of Artemis blew up that. There are diplomats visiting from neighboring countries, including a North Korea–style rogue state called the Democratic People’s Republic of Vertania (DPRV).

Every citizen of the ROV, every newscaster, every bombastic DPRV diplomat, every person we interact with in this giant game of make-believe is played by a CIA operative, assigned to the Farm for a tour as an instructor. And every one of them has a thousand stories—like that time a highly sensitive source brought a six-piece mariachi band to a covert meeting in a midnight back alley. They have pro tips, too, not covered in the training curriculum, like carrying Rolaids to make signal marks on brick because it’s less incriminating than chalk in case of capture and search.

They break character only to share these gems with us a few hours each night in the sanctity of our SCIF, small room–size safes where five of us work on our cables and intelligence reports, under the watchful eye of our advisers. The rest of the time, they stay in character, talking about the impact of upcoming fake elections on the value of the country’s fake currency, speculating about weapons proliferation across the fake border with the DPRV and worrying about threats from fake terror groups. We go to embassy parties, bump into our targets, recruit our assets. We drive off-base in cars tricked out with concealment compartments for our notes and dread unannounced searches at the roadside, our knees in the gravel and our graduation dependent on our not having anything incriminating lying about in the cup holders. The crises ramp up quickly. Soon our every night’s sleep is interrupted by urgent walk-ins reporting imminent threats and simulated terror attacks. We’re under constant surveillance, pitted against one another, tested well beyond our limits. A multilayered game takes hold. On one level, we recruit the fictional characters played by instructors. On a second, we recruit the real-life instructors we know decide who graduates. All the while continuing to play a third, long-distance level, recruiting chiefs back at headquarters to ensure the best real-world assignment. All without ever breaking character. It’s exhausting. And like the running millipede, we learn to avoid thinking about how we do it all for fear of tripping up.

Every so often, we are given a free weekend, but I don’t tell Andrew that. Instead, I meet up with classmates at random Holiday Inns. We revel in the anonymity of American suburbia. We see movies in cineplexes. We eat pancakes at Cracker Barrel. And sometimes, most times, we have sex.

AS THE FARM WEEKS WEAR ON, we take our human targets through the entire recruitment cycle—spot, assess, develop, recruit, run, terminate. Spotting is spy speak for noticing people with interesting access at the embassy parties or events around “town”—access that could prevent an attack or give insight into an adversary’s plans. Assessment is the dance we go through with headquarters to confirm that access, determine whether the target might be sympathetic to approach and if so, what kind. Development is where the time and talent comes in. Building a relationship with the target over weeks, months, years. Finding genuine commonality. Those are the relationships that last decades, that end wars, that prevent attacks. Those are the relationships that change history.

Students who lose an asset also likely lose their place at the Farm. For the rest of us, the recruitment cycle continues. Next comes running—the long sweeping arc of a source’s working relationship with the Agency. All our meetings at this post-recruitment stage are clandestine. Arranged via predetermined signals, which are themselves documented for headquarters, to be sure a new field officer could take over an asset in case we disappear or worse. We learn these signaling and meeting techniques as we go, with new ones added in each exercise. There are the traditional chalk marks and lowered window blinds, shifts in the physical world made by one of us in a place the other can see during their daily commute. Then there are the newer, more creative ideas. One instructor prefers using Starbucks gift cards. Each has a balance he can check by typing the card number into the Starbucks website online. He gives one to each of his assets and tells them, “If you need to see me, buy a coffee.” Then he checks the card numbers on a cybercafé computer each day, and if the balance on one is depleted, he knows he’s got a meeting.

When an asset signals for a meeting, we head to a predetermined spot—an operational site we’ve cased and scouted, checking to be sure it fulfills the slew of attributes our instructors have drilled into us with endless lists of acronyms. Something as simple as a car-pickup site—the spot an asset knows to stand so we can swoop in and scoop them—must be shielded from passersby, have a different entrance and exit, be free of cameras and security, sit sufficiently far from hot spots like police stations or schools, remain accessible 24 hours a day, and offer some plausible explanation for why somebody of the asset’s position or stature would be hanging around by themselves, often in the wee hours of morning.

Given all the care that’s gone into selecting the pickup spot, it wouldn’t do to take a tail to the meeting, so we can’t drive straight there. Instead, we embark on long, circuitous surveillance detection routes, known as SDRs. The aim is to identify cars or people who keep popping up over time and distance. If we see the same granny with a yoga mat twice on the same street, she could just be walking in the same direction we are. But see her twice on two different streets, miles and hours apart, and we might have just nailed our surveillant. To spice things up, they work in teams of seven or eight, switching off with one another each time we turn left or right, so no single surveillant exposes themselves more than a handful of times over the entire route. It’s a cat-and-mouse labyrinth chase through city streets, and the only way to win is to design a route with enough changes of direction to force surveillance to stick close. All that need for pickup spots and surveillance detection routes means every unoccupied minute of time at the Farm is spent casing the surrounding area for operational sites.

“When I retire,” my friend jokes, “I’m coming back down here to open a restaurant that just happens to have perfect cover and flow. Guaranteed business from every class of students.”

When a source loses their access or just gets to a point where they prefer to retire, the recruitment cycle reaches its last stop—terminate. This isn’t the termination you hear about in the movies—the kind with blood splatter on the walls. These are dignified, intensely emotional conversations about the end of an era, about gratitude and honor and legacy. Sometimes the source knows they’re finished even when the case officer wishes they’d continue. Sometimes it’s the other way round. But more often than not, it’s a decision they make together, two long-bound dogs of war who know when the battle is through.

After each exercise, we retreat to our SCIF and write a fake cable to headquarters describing the interaction. This is the part of the training—the part of the job—that doesn’t make the spy novels. The paperwork kingdom. We type them up in all caps, according to the old-school, midcentury style the Agency still uses. At the top we add the distro—lists of stations in relevant cities that have a stake in the asset or the topic at hand. We add slugs, code words that identify the cable’s subject matter and allow those with access to find it in the Agency’s classified search. And we add the classification itself, a single judgment call that for all time determines who will be able to read our words and when. With ever more exercises under way, the hour we finish our daily cables grows later and later. There’s a peace to the Farm at night, when the day’s humidity has settled and the hum of distant traffic gives way to insect song. There are bikes parked at each building to be picked up and dropped at random. Each night, I print out the last of my cables and saddle up whichever bike looks least likely to lose its chain. I push off from under the streetlight, oddly Dickensian, like Tumnus’s lamp in Narnia, alternate pedaling and coasting, listen to my breath merge with the wind It is the only moment I am alone. Then I am outside the lecture hall, pressing my day’s work into a pigeonhole and winding my way toward sleep.

The pace of our training ops ramps up as the weeks pass by. We add land navigation, trekking for days to meet our assets, armed with nothing more than a ziplock-covered map, a compass, and a rainproof notebook. We learn defensive driving, our instructors teaching us how to flip cars by tapping a spot above their rear wheel and respond when swarmed by armed militia fighters or trapped at an ambush. They leave fake roadside bombs around campus for us to identify by pulling over and popping our trunk. Fail to do so and they assume we would have been toast, which means as far as the Farm is concerned, we are.

The Author, Photographed in South Asia after completing her service with the CIA.
The Author, Photographed in South Asia after completing her service with the CIA.
Courtesy of Amaryllis Fox

Toward the end of the course, we begin to mix in weapons qualifications. Glock and M4. Training in urban combat scenarios, peppered with dummies—some legitimate targets, most dressed as local men, women, and children. Hit a civilian and we’re out. Even the actual targets have to be given first aid as soon as we complete our objective or the compound is secured. It’s not clear if the point of that policy is compassion or to keep the adversary alive for interrogation, but there’s something confusingly tender about it, the nursing of wounds we ourselves have just inflicted. We learn to use tourniquets to stem the fake bleeding and cover sucking chest wounds with supermarket bags, duct taped to a patient’s skin as their pierced lung heaves and rasps beneath.

“Excellent work,” an instructor tells me at the end of an exercise responding to a checkpoint ambush. I look down at my target dummy. His dishdasha is soaked with blood and ripped open from throat to navel. Across his chest is a plastic bag with the word WALMART taped across his heart.

On a day we don’t know is coming, a siren blares across the base. It means the simulation is over. The explosions stop. The interrogations shut down. The instructors playing terrorists and cabinet members get up mid-meeting and walk away.

We stand there for a minute, in the deadened aftermath of the fake town square, like survivors of an apocalyptic event, unsure what to do now our world has evaporated. And then a two-day period of limbo kicks in. It’s been weeks since we’ve had time to ourselves. We split off, alone. Uncertain whether we’ve made the cut, uncertain whether it was all for nothing. And if we did make it, even then, what was it for? It’s unnerving, how suddenly the game of pretend can end.

I GO TO SEE DAN, my training branch chief. He tells me I’ve been assigned to the portion of the Counterterrorism Center responsible for keeping nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists. It’s one of the hardest and most coveted assignments in the class. He pours me a drink. The assignment is an honor, he tells me, but it’s no picnic. The nature of my assignment means no diplomatic immunity. No all-important official passport to bail me out of trouble like a golden get out of jail free card tucked in my pocket. No comfort of working in an embassy every day, surrounded by people who share my truth. I’ll be alone, without a safety net, in the most dangerous places on Earth. But I’ll have the best shot at doing what I signed up to do—preventing the most catastrophic attacks.

Dan sends me outside to pack into the van with the others who made the cut. We’re on our way across the vast wilderness of the base to a solitary, covert airstrip, where we’ll become the newest graduates of the most elite operational training on Earth. Someone blares “It’s the final countdown” on the stereo. Everyone is singing. I slide the window open, and the air is hot and fast and my heart is outside of me. Then we arrive at an airplane hangar full of chairs, with an American flag hung over the stage. The director of the training program arrives by helicopter, and one by one we cross the stage, shake his hand, and lay brief eyes on the diplomas we’re not allowed to take home.

A sunset, a sunrise, and a lot of alcohol later, we pack up our fictional lives and head back to D.C., dozing in happy exhaustion in the dark warmth of the blacked-out bus.

Amid the cookie-cutter condos outside the city, I brace myself to face reality in the form of Andrew. But I find our apartment empty, a few remaining things in boxes and a note saying our cat is at the local humane society.

Andrew is gone. And in the stillness, I’m flooded with relief.


Excerpted from Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA by Amaryllis Fox, to be published by Knopf in October, available to pre-order now.

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Originally Appeared on Vogue