by Tracy Walder
I was at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on September 11, 2001. As an operative in counterterrorism, I was on the team of people who were supposed to save America from men like Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Mohammed Atef. I’d known their names when most others didn’t. In fact, as a news junkie since high school, I’d been thinking about bin Laden, in particular, for years. So I’d expected more from myself. While America was focused on the disbanded Soviet Union and the drug wars in Central America, I was studying images of deserts in the Middle East. I watched and marked where terrorism was being grown and cultivated, new branches continuously sprouting like a well-pruned tree. I’d memorized the rocky, dry landscape. I’d memorized the faces of men who were hiding in reinforced, serpentine caves or sparsely furnished safe houses. I knew where they were. And I had thought I knew where they were going.
I should have seen it coming.
But I didn’t.
And then came the invasion of Iraq. It was a war that hinged on the proof that Saddam Hussein was hoarding weapons of mass destruction. I belonged to the team of people assigned to find that proof. I didn’t find it. None of us did. But the war began anyway. After that, all that was bad turned into all that was unthinkably awful. I knew I couldn’t halt the downhill plummet. But, at the very least, I could stop the terrorists and terror plots that scrambled out of that war like cockroaches from a razed building.
I was young, fearless, and optimistic. My career in the CIA had started directly out of the University of Southern California when I was twenty-one. More specifically, I’d been recruited straight from the Delta Gamma sorority, where my long blond hair matched that of 90 percent of my sorority sisters’.
The first year, being an officer in the CIA was thrilling. The poli sci wonk in me thrived during the day, while the sorority girl inside me still had fun nights out with girlfriends or dating. But by the time I watched the sun come up on September 12, everything had changed. I felt the grief of a nation and the responsibility to make things better. And when America invaded Iraq, that responsibility only grew.
At times it felt like I was living in a hamster ball. I was running and running, rolling through countries where all I could see through my plastic shield was the terrorists I had to stop. Day by day, most of the real world, my stateside life, was slipping away from me as I rolled farther off into the distance.
Q would be the first terrorist I’d meet face to face. As Johnny and I walked to his living quarters, it didn’t even occur to me to be nervous or scared. I had so much information in my head, and I had Johnny by my side. Also, according to the notes I’d read, Q—who had entered this place unwilling to even give his name—was now agreeable and talkative. Surely it hadn’t been easy for him to turn from truculent to cooperative.
Let me say this now: I absolutely do not support torture as a means of information gathering. Also, after what I experienced, I do not believe that torture works. However, I do not agree with those who have vilified the CIA and its use of torture during this time when America was responding to the largest and most deadly terrorist attack on our soil while a “second wave” of terror was in the works. Imagine the pressure of being responsible for the lives of more than 300 million people. Imagine what you might do if you had high-ranking al-Qaeda members in your hands. In the context of that moment in history, and with the additional information that bin Laden had most certainly met with Pakistani nuclear scientists and was acquiring plans for the development of nuclear weapons, getting the high-level detainees to talk was a life-or-death task. Remember, the people who were detained in war zones were men who were not only willing to die but who wanted to die so that they would be crowned martyrs for their cause. Enhanced Interrogation Technique (IET, or torture) was what the CIA, with full disclosure to and approval from Congress and the Bush administration, believed would be the most effective way to get information from known terrorists. And it wasn’t a first resort; it was a last resort. Of the hundred men held in war zones over eight years, only 30 were subjected to EIT. The point wasn’t to hurt them. The point was to save lives. And not just American lives. Human lives. I, and just about everyone else I knew in the CIA, wanted the whole world to be safe. No exceptions.
* * *
I entered Q’s dark room just inside the doorway. As had been trained in me since childhood, I smiled. This is how I’ve always greeted people, and it didn’t occur to me to stop that smile for a terrorist.
“Can I offer you tea?” Q asked. Like my smile, his question was a formality ingrained in him. Criminal or not, he was doing the polite thing in offering me tea, even though he had no way to procure or serve tea. Though it seemed like he’d lived decades already after all he’d done, Q wasn’t much older than I. Maybe this was our first point of connection: each of us still carried the culture of our childhood into the room.
I politely declined the tea and then held up the orange I had brought for him from the cafeteria.
“Let’s go in the other room where it’s easier to talk.” It sounded so genteel and formal, like we were in the Four Seasons in D.C. and were going to move over to a meeting room with monochromatic furniture and a modern, square chandelier. In actuality, we were in the former garage of a half-destroyed building and were moving to what had probably been a large storage closet.
Q and I sat at a small metal table across from each other; there was a light above us, but it was far from a chandelier. I handed him the orange and he nodded thanks. I asked the most important question I had come to ask, and he put his hand to his newly grown beard and ran his fingers like he was playing a keyboard. He may have been compliant, he may have been polite, but he wasn’t yet ready to give me the central piece of information I needed.
That simple gesture reminded me that I was everything Q hated; I belonged to every group he wished to kill. I could feel my childhood self vibrating inside me, the girl who occasionally went to synagogue.
My family belonged to Temple Beth Am, where you had to be buzzed in, and then walk past several uniformed and armed security guards. Orange County, California, felt so safe, so sunny, I couldn’t imagine who would want to come to temple to do something mean or dangerous to Tracy Schandler, her parents, her brother, her grandpa Jack, or her grandmother Geraldine. I’d known of bank robberies, and carjackings, and road rage on the knotted freeways of Los Angeles. But Beth Am seemed outside all that. Separate from it. It appeared to be as calm and safe as our house. But now here I was, not that many years later, and the reason for Tobias, the Beth Am guard who reached out and bumped fists with me every time I passed him, was sitting across from me peeling a fat orange I had picked out especially for him.
Still, I remained unafraid. Yes, I was a Jewish American woman, but I was free and currently wielding more power than Q. And though I was slight compared to his grizzled form, I also had the force of Johnny behind me.
I flashed a smile as Q jammed his shoehorn-sized thumbs into the center of the peeled orange and split it open, releasing a thin spray of juice onto the table. Q offered half the orange to me.
“It’s all for you.” I relaxed into a moment of silence as I prepared for my next move. I would do this right. I knew how to proceed. I needed to create trust; a relationship. I had to find a point of connection between this man, who absolutely wanted me dead, and myself, who absolutely wanted him locked away for life.
“Do you miss your mother?” I asked. “Because I really miss mine.”
* * *
Over the next couple weeks I spent several hours a day with Q at that table, Johnny looming somewhere behind me. At each meeting, I brought Q a fresh, plump piece of fruit, selected especially for him. He wasn’t starved or hungry, but he loved fruit. And, if only for a few minutes, it gave him something to do with his hands and created a point of focus other than the young, blond American sitting across from him.
Sometimes it felt like my brain was a sparking electrical panel as I tried to piece together the stories
Q told me of loving parents and a swooping rush of religious devotion, alongside the brutal, violent killings of Westerners and Muslims whose poor luck had put them in the places where he had rained terror. It was like a book I’d had as a kid. Other than the cover, the book was cut in half so you could match different top pages with bottom pages: a giraffe head with a hippopotamus body, an ape head with a curled-kitten body. Q was two mismatched pages: a cunning, hateful murderer and a man who loved his people, his country, and his religion.
What I learned about Q was this: he had been poor, uneducated, and displaced by war in his country. Al-Qaeda provided him food, a home, medical care, education, a community that in its best form represented what he’d had as a young child, and a purpose. It was easy to see the appeal of the al-Qaeda “family.” But I didn’t get the appeal of the jihadi lifestyle. I asked Q, more than once, to try to help me understand why—beyond the religious rhetoric—he had chosen to live and die as a jihadi. Q explained: society had maligned him, al-Qaeda had lifted him up. He owed them everything. Including his life.
It may have been my open, youthful curiosity. It may have been my lack of fear when faced with his answers. And maybe it was just luck. But, eventually, after a cornucopia of fruit and hours of seemingly casual conversation, Q gave me exactly the information I had come for.
And another pod of terrorists were stopped before they could kill.
TWO
THE SORORITY LIFE
Los Angeles, California 1978–2000
I was my parents’ first child, born two years after America’s bicentennial. It was a time when the country felt confident, secure. Both world wars, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War were behind us, and everything was forward looking. Kids no longer practiced bomb scare positions, ducking under their desks with their hands over their heads as if that could save them from a nuclear mushroom cloud. The Cuban Missile Crisis seemed far behind us, and the craze to build a bomb shelter in one’s backyard, as President Kennedy had suggested in 1961, had mostly passed. Every home had a television (usually color), with ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS. In the Los Angeles area, where I lived, there was Metromedia Television, Channel 11. You couldn’t watch a show on Channel 11 without being interrupted by a used-car ad with Cal Worthington and “his dog, Spot,” who was either a tiger or a monkey, depending on the year. Cal and Spot ran along his enormous lot lined with hundreds of low, flat cars—like boats—each with a giant silver antenna. A rumbling Johnny Cash–like voice sang “Go see Cal, go see Cal, go see Cal…” These were the last years of cars and California housing being affordable to anyone with a salaried job.
My father was a psychology professor at Chapman University. My mother, who eventually worked at a bank, was a stay-at-home mom then. My parents started our family in a tidy ranch home with a two-car garage and an actual white picket fence in a sunny mid-century development in Van Nuys. White sidewalks framed each street, fruit trees grew in the yards, and every few houses there was a basketball hoop hanging over a garage door. (When I was six or seven, we moved down the coast to Orange County. The yards were a little wider, our house was a little bigger. It was the slightly grander version of what we’d just left.)
In Van Nuys, everything seemed perfect, in place, moving along as my parents expected and hoped. Then, around the time I was five months old, my mother realized I wasn’t doing the things the neighbors’ babies were doing. I didn’t sit up. I didn’t try to crawl. I didn’t even grab at things. I smiled and cooed, but my head and body flopped around like a doll’s. Or, as my mother once said, a “limp fish.”
After numerous appointments, my flaccid little body being carted from one specialist to the next, I was diagnosed with hypotonia, otherwise known as floppy baby syndrome. There was no internet then and not even much to be found in books at the library. All the information my parents got was strictly from the specialists they visited. And the information they got was, to my mother especially, terrifying.
I might be brain damaged.
I’d never walk.
I’d need to be in a special school.
College was out of the question.
Don’t expect her to be a ballerina, one particular doctor muttered. As if being a ballerina was the single great hope for a little girl with a big, then-toothless smile. There was no physical therapy, no therapy at all for kids with hypotonia. Parents were just supposed to accept it, throw the kid over their shoulder like a bag of dog kibble, and expect nothing.
Not my mother. On the floor of the den, she’d put her hands behind each of my feet so I’d have something against which to gain purchase. And from there I crawled. Then she held my hands, stood me up, and worked on my putting one foot in front of the other.
At age two, later than most kids, I walked across the pale tan wall-to-wall carpet in the den. Once I’d started walking, I couldn’t stop. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to be able to do the things I did. Something inside me seemed determined and intent. I was like an engine that wouldn’t shut down.
At two and a half, I was in a dance class showing just as much talent as the other wobbling, diaper-wearing kids. In elementary school and junior high I continued with dance classes: modern, jazz, and ballet. Through all four years of high school I was on the elite dance team, practicing three hours a day and then competing every Saturday in routines that incorporated ballet, jazz, and modern. I loved the training and the intense work it involved. And I tolerated the showy public performances as something to get through simply so I could stay on the team and return to practice the next day.
In college, at the University of Southern California, I took dance classes on campus and at private studios in Los Angeles. I studied everything but tap and clogging.
But that doctor was right. I wasn’t going to be a ballerina. I had other things on my mind. Far more pressing things than whether or not I could nail a triple pirouette.
* * *
I joined Delta Gamma my freshman year at USC. If you haven’t been in a sorority then let me explain a little. Greek life is both what you imagine and what you likely haven’t imagined. Yes, there are parties, and people are expected to wear the right clothes and have hair that looks a certain way. It’s a bit like a country club with members holding fast to an idea of themselves as “one of these people,” but with a lot of alcohol and maybe some marijuana thrown in. I did drink at times, but I have never tried pot, or any other drug, to this day. A minority, an outlier, I know.
Many people I’ve spoken with abhor the Greek system, so I feel compelled to point out its values. You have to maintain a good GPA to stay in, so it keeps students on track (and women in sororities have a higher average GPA than the non-Greek population). At a large school like USC, where it’s easy to feel isolated and cut off, a sorority (maybe not a fraternity, I can’t speak for them) can provide a community. A place where you feel a sense of belonging. Where you feel safe. For an introvert like me, someone who is shy and has never been socially comfortable, the sorority gave me a place to hide. Rather than using it as a calling card, or defining myself as a Delta Gamma, I used it as camouflage. The sorority was a place where I wouldn’t stand out as … as anything: the blond with shiny white teeth, the girl on the purple bike, the nut reading Newsweek instead of People. In the DG house I felt relatively unnoticed. And for me, to be unnoticed was a gift.
From third grade to ninth grade I was noticed every school day in exactly the wrong way. I was bullied. Always by girls. The fact that by age eleven I had grown to my full height of five feet seven inches didn’t help. Before the braces went on, there was a gap in my teeth that kids found comical. The girls called me fat because I didn’t have that gymnast's thinness that was popular at the time. And I suffered years of severe acne that even a tube of Retin-A couldn’t wipe out. The most common nickname they used for me was Zidiot, zit + idiot. According to the in crowd, everything about me was “wrong.”
The girls on the high school dance team were nice enough, though I was never a
n insider. After so much bullying, it was hard to trust people outside my family. Also, the world in my head never quite matched my surroundings. While dance-team girls fretted about boys, I fretted about Nelson Mandela and if he could be sworn in as South Africa’s first black president without being assassinated. When kids in class talked about Pulp Fiction, the radical new movie out, my mind drifted to the Oklahoma City bomber and the fact that many American government buildings were vulnerable and unfortified.
I wish the person I am now could go back in time and talk to that girl who was taunted daily just for walking down a hallway. Though maybe my advice would be to do exactly what I did: ignore them, shore up, focus on what you want to do, who you want to be and not what other people want from you. Even in twelfth grade, when I was inexplicably chosen to be one of four Homecoming princesses, I didn’t suddenly feel like I was an “insider” in my high school. It was terrifying to sit on a float, wave to a crowd as if I were Elizabeth II, and wear a tiara. I was awkward. And unsettled. Engaged in a performance I didn’t want to take part in, though I was honestly grateful that I was being appreciated for something … kindness, maybe? My skills on the dance team?
My childhood was a continuous rerun of how my “floppy baby” syndrome played out. Once again, other people’s expectations had nothing to do with who I really was. Or what I was capable of.
Until Delta Gamma. It was in a sorority that I finally blended into the crowd without feeling like a complete outsider. It was also there that I came out, in a sense, as my true self.