Life Undercover

by Amaryllis Fox

  After each exercise at every step of the cycle, we retreat to our SCIF and write a fake cable to HQS 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. Cables describing a person of interest, applications for clearance to pursue, requests for traces, descriptions of each subsequent contact, coordination of the approach to recruit, validation that the target doesn’t work for an adversary, permissions from liaison governments. And then, once the target’s been recruited, the constant exchange of requirements written by analysts or policy makers back home.

  We type them up on secure computers. At the top we add the distro—a list 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 slap on the classification itself, a single judgment call that for all time determines who will be able to read our words and when.

  In real life, the cables are submitted via secure Internet, if written in a station, or via covert communications devices, if written by a NOC in the field. But here at the Farm, we print them out on good old-fashioned printer paper and hand-deliver them to our instructors’ mailboxes in the central lecture hall.

  With ever more exercises underway, the hour when 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 off at random. They give the place a nostalgic feel, sending me back to the time Christian and I cut up cereal boxes and wedged the cardboard in our spokes to sound like motors. 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 under the streetlight, its form oddly Dickensian, like Tumnus’s lamp in Narnia. Alternately pedaling and coasting, I listen to my breath merge with the wind, and surrender to the vastness of the woods and the mission and the sky. This is the only moment of the day when I am alone. The air is alive, and I am proud and tired and free. Then before I’ve even properly started, I am there, outside the lecture hall, pressing my day’s work into a pigeonhole and winding my way toward sleep.

  The pace of our training ramps up exponentially as the weeks pass. One exercise each Monday in January becomes four or five a day by June. We add land navigation, trekking for days across woods and cliffs to meet our assets, armed with nothing more than a map in a ziplock bag, a compass, and a rainproof notebook. We learn defensive driving, our instructors teaching us to flip cars by tapping a spot above their rear wheel with our own front grill and how to respond in seconds when swarmed by armed militia fighters or trapped at an ambush. They leave fake roadside bombs around campus for us to identify; we indicate that we’ve found one by pulling over and popping our trunk. Fail to do so and they assume we would have been toast, which means that as far as the Farm is concerned, we are.

  Toward the end of the course, we begin to mix in weapons qualifications. Glock and M4. Training in urban-combat scenarios, the faux city blocks stocked with dummies—some legitimate targets, most dressed as local men, women, or 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 bleeding and to cover sucking chest wounds with supermarket bags, duct-taped to a patient’s skin as their pierced lung heaves beneath.

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

  11

  At the end of our stay at the Farm, 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 just 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 that 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. But we don’t fall into one another the way we normally do. 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? To leave one simulation and go play in another?

  It’s unnerving, how suddenly the game of pretend can end. So all-encompassing one day, with flash-bangs and police checkpoints and survival on the line, then suddenly over the next, with nothing but the peaceful breeze on the water remaining—the bare, wooden stage that outlasts the play. I ask myself, sitting by the lake, how we could sound a siren to end the real war game the way this morning’s blast ended our training one.

  At the end of that strange, solitary two days, I wander into the town square and find a man I’ve never met sitting in the gazebo. “You’re in my spot,” I tell him. He just smiles and says, “Dean Fox.” I stare at him for a minute and say, “I was gonna hit up the beer machine. You want one?”

  Two hours later, we get called in to hear our respective fates. We both make it. His envelope says, “Afghanistan.” Mine says, “See Dan.” I show Dean. “Never heard of that country,” I say. He smiles. “It’s next to Chad,” he says. Africa nerd humor. Be still my beating heart.

  I go to see Dan, my training branch chief. He tells me I’ve been pulled out to be under nonofficial cover—one of the hardest and most coveted assignments in the class. Most CIA operatives deploy under diplomatic cover, pretending to be a low-level secretary at the U.S. embassy by day and working their espionage targets at night. That’s fine for Cold War–style spycraft, recruiting members of foreign governments, but terror cells don’t much care whether someone is a U.S. diplomat or a U.S. spy—if they work for the U.S. government, they’re a target. To infiltrate terror networks, you need a different kind of cover altogether. Businesswoman, artist, or aid worker, I’ll need to work out the details of a cover that fits my profile and my mission once I report back to HQS following training. For now, I try to let the significance of the designation sink in.

  Dan pours me a drink. Nonofficial cover is an honor, he tells me, but it’s no picnic. It means I won’t have diplomatic immunity. No all-important official passport to bail me out of trouble like a golden “Get Out of Jail Free” card tucked safely 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 the planet has to offer. 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 and I’m flying, not sure where I end and they begin. We’re on our way across the vast wilderness of the base to a lone covert airstrip, where we’ll become the newest graduates of the most challenging operational training on earth. Someone blares “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 arrives by helicopter, and one by one, we cross the stage, shake his hand, and lay fleeting 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 darkened warmth of the blacked-out bus.

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

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

  * * *

  —

  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 traffic with nonexistent correspondents, in case anyone should check my phone or hack my digital accounts. It’s the birthing of an entire identity, all to backstop one simple line: “I deal in indigenous art.”

  Alongside the creation of my cover, I have a few other post-Farm errands to run. I stop by the Directorate of Science and Technology, known as the DS&T, to design my covcom—the covert communications system I’ll use to communicate with HQS from the field. Most operatives rely on secure computers in the embassy’s station to send their cables, but as a NOC, I won’t step foot in the embassy door. For us nonofficial types, the DS&T teams design systems that can travel with us, embedded in our computers and accessed through labyrinthine combinations of physical trapdoors and online keystrokes to be sure no inspecting customs officer can find them. Each is created from scratch with a given NOC’s cover in mind, and now that I have the art business underway, it’s time to get my covcom fired up to match.

  I sit with the engineers in their warehouse of technical delights and brief them on the finer points of my new business. They scribble notes with a pencil—the only low-tech item in the room—and, a few weeks later, present me with a phone and a long list of instructions, to be carried out in the correct order to unlock the covcom hidden inside. There are buttons and switches interspersed with keystrokes and visits to art-related websites and edits to pictures of the Louvre. It’s a spy-tech Konami code, like the combinations of commands that unlocked secret power-ups in the Nintendo games we played when we were kids. There’s a cheekiness to it, hiding a portal to the heart of the government’s secrets right there in plain sight of every adversary I’ll meet. I tuck it away like a Batphone, my secret connection to the cavalry back home. It is my talisman. It makes me feel less alone.

  Down the hall in the DS&T is an altogether different room, hung with fabrics and leathers and lace. It is the CD shop, where tailoring wizards add concealment devices to briefcases and dresses and coats. They’ve pulled a Tumi bag in preparation for our meeting. “These are my favorites,” the woman tells me. “Professional, anonymous, well-heeled but not luxurious.” I grimace at its plush smugness.

  “Do you have anything a bit more hippie-backpacker save-the-world art lover?” I ask.

  The woman smiles. “Stand by,” she says and disappears into the fabrics. When she reemerges she’s holding a woven cloth hobo bag, straight out of a Thai night market.

  “Bingo,” I say, and she winks.

  When I return to pick it up, she walks me through the three compartments she’s added, each of a different size, and accessed through its own particular combination of thread tugs and flap pulls.

  “Magic,” I say.

  “Just a regular old Muggle,” she says. “Doing my best.”

  The last tech stop is a few floors up, in a mirrored makeup studio hung with latex noses and glasses and wigs. I’m there to be fitted for light disguise—a ridiculous getup, not much better than a drugstore Halloween costume, intended to throw surveillance off the trail during a testing SDR.

  “I’m not sure anyone’s gonna buy this,” I say to the man as he stuffs the last of my hair under a ’60s bob.

  “It’s for from far away,” he says in a French accent. “Try these.” He adds a pair of spectacles. They are more preposterous than the wig, but somehow the combined effect cancels out to an awkward but nonalerting librarian.

  “Fine,” I say. “Can’t imagine using these, to be honest, but seems as good a getup as any if I have to.”

  The man looks miffed but tags them with my Agency ID number and pads off to find some clay to make a mold of my face. I’m pretty sure he leaves me caked in the stuff a beat longer than he has to, lying on my back and breathing through a straw. “Don’t piss off Guillaume,” I remember my boss telling me when I spotted a crooked latex nose hanging from his cabinet. Now I understand what he meant.

  Reality gets more and more distant, obscured by the ever-thicker veil of my new cover. I take my first trip under its protection and then my second. At the beginning, I run through the details obsessively during each flight, preparing for possible grilling at customs when I land. But soon I come to slip in and out of it more easily, like a softening pair of shoes.

  The real world feels farther and farther away. My annulment with Anthony is finalized, and the papers sit in an unopened envelope on my kitchen table.

  I go to brunch with my family at a café on the Potomac River and tell them I’m going to try my hand at dealing in indigenous art. They don’t take much convincing. They’d never understood why I’d wanted to work for a multinational anyway. Seeking out cultural expression in far-off lands is a much better match with their expectations of me.

  “Now, that’s the Burma rebel I know and love,” my
sister chimes in. I’m relieved when they buy it. If they do, maybe al Qa’ida will, too.

  “Just don’t get thrown in prison,” my mother jokes.

  “Not much chance of that,” I laugh. Of all the lies I tell them, that one is the biggest.

  I see Dean on the rare occasions when we’re both home. He’s finishing up some paramilitary courses, getting ready to pack out to Afghanistan. I’m mostly at airports between this identity and that one. He doesn’t know much about my work, and I don’t know much about his. There is a closeness in the way we both accept our distance. He seems to understand where he fits in the multilevel game of pretend. Somewhere closer to the truth than my family, who thinks I’m out collecting tribal art, and further away than my boss in the safe house, who hands me sealed envelopes I have to sign before I can read what’s inside them.

  Dean’s growing a beard to prepare for deployment to the Pak-Afghan border. It will be his only armor out there, and I can already feel it at work here at home, protecting him from getting too attached to me. Still, we laugh and drink and walk Kipling, my giant White Fang of a dog, along the Georgetown canals. Before he leaves, I give him a box of little envelopes, each with a different date on the front, one a week for six months. Inside each one is some silly drawing or joke. Then I drive him to the private air terminal at Dulles and watch him climb onto a blacked-out chartered jet to the mountains of Afghanistan.