by Tracy Walder
I ran for the position of vice president of social standards in Delta Gamma. And I won. It was a position that let me take action rather than bitch about things I didn’t like within the sorority. I was a history major, a poli sci nerd, who wanted systems to run smoothly and people to do and act as their highest selves. This all seemed to sit well with the Delta Gamma sisters. They accepted me exactly as I was.
The morning in 1997 when Peter Bergen spoke with CNN about his interview with Osama bin Laden, I was working out alone on the elliptical in the gym/TV room of the Delta Gamma house. I was riveted. Bergen laid it all out quite simply. Bin Laden, a millionaire, had gone to fight alongside U.S. troops in Afghanistan after the Soviet Union had invaded that country. There, he secured his position as a leader of Islamic extremists who rejected the U.S. presence in all Arab countries. The interview was filmed in an undisclosed location in Afghanistan—one of the few countries that openly welcomed bin Laden within its borders. Bin Laden looked calm, serene almost, as he explained in his dulcet, feathery voice the jihad he had declared against American Jews, the United States, and any people of the United States who were in Arab countries. This was likely the first time the American public had heard the word jihad. As the interview came to an end, Bergen asked bin Laden, “What are your future plans?”
Bin Laden, with a sly but gentle smile on his face, answered, “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media. God willing.”
I was chilled. And outraged. Bin Laden’s face, that smug little grin, and every word he said felt like a fire in my head. I wanted to take action, but I wasn’t sure where, or how. I no more wanted to accept a jihad against the people of the United States, and particularly against the men and women of the armed forces who were then in the Middle East, than I’d accept excessive partying in the Delta Gamma house.
As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t run for vice president of social standards of the world. But I also couldn’t stand by and let this happen. I decided to read and follow the news as closely as possible so that I could learn everything about current affairs and foreign affairs. My plan was this: I’d become a teacher. I’d educate young people so that they could understand what was happening in the world and their, our, place in it all. And, hopefully, together we could effect change through policy, politics … op-ed pieces in the New York Times!
I felt secure in this plan. Certain of my path.
Then, in the spring of my junior year, I took a bike ride across campus. And everything changed.
It was another of those ideal Southern California days: sun so bright it looked like the sky had been bleached clean. I left the sorority house on my purple Huffy bike wearing a pink t-shirt, jeans, and flip-flops and rode through the roar of students. That day, like many, I was struck by that TV-goodlookingness of the students at USC. It was as if they were all extras on a Hollywood film set.
At Trousdale Parkway, the main pedestrian thoroughfare on campus, tables were set up in two long rows for a career fair. My roommate, Melissa, and I had typed up our resumes the night before. I had five copies in my backpack and just hoped that some private school, where I wouldn’t yet need a higher degree, would be there, recruiting. Many tables had bowls of candy displayed, as if the recruiters were witches luring in greedy children. Here and there were colorful, bobbing balloons tied to chairs. Mobs of students crowded around the dot-com tables—most people worshiped Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Bill Gates. Every boy I knew wanted to be one of them. On foot now, I walked my bike through the shoulder-to-shoulder throngs, glancing left and right, looking for someone who needed a teacher.
And then I saw a quiet table with a cardboard placard that said Central Intelligence Agency. The only person there was the recruiter, a middle-aged Asian man in a polo shirt and khakis. He looked so lonely, I almost felt bad for him.
“Hi.” I smiled, as I usually did on instinct, and then I awkwardly reached into my backpack and handed him my resume.
“Hi. I’m Mike Smith.” He glanced down at the single sheet of paper, and then said, “And you’re Tracy Schandler.”
“That’s me.” I shrugged.
Mike Smith perused my resume. Then he peered into my face and said, “So, Tracy Schandler, do you want to be in the CIA?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.” Until the moment he asked, it never occurred to me that I could be in the CIA. I was a floppy baby! A girl who had been teased relentlessly about the gap in her teeth, the width of her hips, and the flush of acne across her cheeks. I’d never touched a gun or even thought about shooting one. But the simple fact that Mike Smith held my resume in his hand as if I were a viable candidate made me see that my internal self— someone whose favorite class was on the history of Islam; someone who had memorized the map of the Middle East as a way of trying to understand the relationships between countries, religions, and tribes; someone who would rather work with Peter Bergen than Bill Gates—might one day be my external self. I’d be able to effect change and to have an impact on terrorism, a worldwide threat I thought about every single day.
Better yet, I’d be undercover. Invisible. Even more than I was in the Delta Gamma house.
* * *
Each pair of roommates in the sorority house picked a coordinated color scheme for their room. There was a lot of sorbet yellow, powder blue, bone white, lime green, and every shade of pink. If it hadn’t been for Melissa, I would have picked pink for our room, too. In defiance of our forest green and maroon decorating agreement, I’d brought in a pink leather beanbag chair from home. It was comfortable, and I preferred to sit there when I studied rather than on the stiff plastic chair at the desk.
Two weeks after the career fair, I was nestled in that beanbag when the phone rang. This was the time of landlines, and each room in the sorority house had its own phone and phone number. Melissa, who was studying at the desk beside me, picked up. I kept on with my reading, a yellow highlighter pen in my hand.
“Traaaaacy, it’s the CIA—” Melissa had a teasing smile as she handed me the phone, adding, “yeah, right!” She figured it was one of the frat boys playing a game. I hadn’t told her, or anyone else, that I’d left my resume with the CIA. Already, even the act of applying for a job there was clandestine.
I snatched the receiver from Melissa and pressed the phone to my ear.
“Hello?” I shifted away from Melissa, who leaned her head in toward me to find out who was really on the phone. The beanbag chair let out a crunching Styrofoam sound, almost drowning out the voice of Mike Smith on the line.
My heart thumped like a rabbit kicking in my chest. Melissa inched closer, but I didn’t want to move in the noisy chair. “Hi, Mr. Smith!” I smiled even though he couldn’t see me.
“We like your resume, and we want to interview you for a position.”
I got up from the chair as quietly as I could, leaned over the desk where Melissa sat, and wrote down the letters: C. I. A. Mr. Smith said he was mailing me a letter. The information for the first step in the interview process would be detailed in that letter.
When I hung up the phone, I was still smiling.
“I thought you wanted to be a history teacher.” Melissa tilted her head and smiled to let me know she still believed it was a frat boy on the other end of the phone.
“I did,” I said. And then I thought, but making history would be way better than teaching it.
* * *
I’ve never had good luck with cars. My first car, an ancient Oldsmobile—like something out of Starsky and Hutch—caught on fire when I drove it to the Homecoming game the year I was a reluctant Homecoming princess. I always thought the fire was karma for my disinterest in being a princess when so many other girls really, really wanted the position. My next car, a used Honda Accord, was stolen over winter break my freshman year in college, when I was working at a sporting-goods store. Three girls in a gang stole it. Before they could get too far, they sailed it into the air—like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang—straight off an overpass. I
always wondered if they were nervous, distracted, or just driving too fast. They ended up in the hospital, and the car ended up in the junkyard; it’d been totaled from the hard, nose-first landing. My next car was a hatchback Acura that had been purchased with the insurance money from the Accord. I drove that Acura to my first CIA interview, which took place the summer before my senior year, while I was living in my parents’ home in Orange County.
I wore a black suit with a pink blouse and toe-pinching black pumps. It was the only suit I owned so I was careful with it, wiping dirt from the driver’s seat before I sat down. As soon as I hit the freeway, however, I was overcome with nausea. This wasn’t nerves; I rarely got nervous or scared. And it wasn’t a hangover—I’d never drunk enough to throw up. It was just a bug. Or food poisoning. Whatever it was, it planned to shoot out of me soon. I careened off the freeway, cranked up the parking brake, opened the door, and vomited on the road. Then I leaned back in the seat and waited a few minutes before round two came up. Once that was done, I drove to the hotel near the Los Angeles airport where the interview was being held.
It cost ten dollars for the garage, a lot of money for me at the time. There was a spot alongside the curb across the street, so I parked there, then staggered into the lobby and followed the signs to the conference room.
Around 40 applicants, the women in some version of the suit I wore, the men in jackets and ties, were told to sit at a very long Formica table. In turn, each person gave his or her name and said what school they went to. I could barely hear what was being said as my focus was on my stomach, on not throwing up.
After the introductions, we waited at the table until we were sent, individually, to one of the hotel’s suites. My first thought when I walked in the suite was that the man interviewing me had no taste in glasses. He wore big lenses the shape of television sets; the kind of spectacles associated with kidnappers or lone wolf deviants hiding out in their mothers’ basements. My second thought was that I needed to find a place to vomit should the urge arise. I sat in the chair in front of the desk where Mr. Glasses sat, then reached out and pulled the black, plastic trash can toward myself.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I need this nearby because I think I have the flu.”
“Oh. Well. Okay.” Mr. Glasses scooted his chair back another ten inches, creating a larger air barrier between us. In front of him was a paper I’d written for my modern Chinese history class, in which I explained why I believed communism worked in China. In the weeks before the interview, I had been asked to send in a writing sample that showed both my skills as a writer and my knowledge of world affairs. Instead of writing something new, I had sent in that paper.
“So, you’re a communist,” Mr. Glasses said.
“I’m a staunch capitalist.” I eyed the trash can and pulled it a little closer.
“But you said you supported communism in China.” He took his pointer finger and pushed the giant glasses further up the bridge of his nose.
“I don’t support all of the government’s actions in China. I do think, however, that in the world’s most populous country, communism manages the needs of a great many people in a way that capitalism just can’t. I mean, any system that feeds 1.25 billion people is working on some level, don’t you think?”
He didn’t answer, and so I continued, “If you were to remove that system, you might end up with something like the famine of the 1960s. That thing wiped out a whole chunk of the Chinese population.” The word chunk caught in my throat. I glanced toward the trash can and willed myself not to vomit.
Mr. Glasses slid his specs up again and paused. Then he leaned back in his chair and started throwing questions at me like darts—all of them regarding China and communism. I stuck to my beliefs and answered the best I could, but it was hard to think straight as I simultaneously focused on holding in the churning soup in my gut.
When I was finally released, I hurried out of the hotel without even saying goodbye to the other interviewees who were gathered in the lobby exchanging phone numbers. I rushed across the street and then stood on the sidewalk looking at the open curb.
I’d been towed.
* * *
Later that summer, I received another call from Mike Smith. In spite of my illness and ill-perceived communist tendencies, I’d made a good impression on Mr. Glasses. Mike Smith said I’d be moving on to the next step: a polygraph test, a physical, and a psychological examination. All these tests were administered in Virginia, not far from the CIA headquarters in Langley.
I asked my mother to come with me to Virginia. I was only twenty years old, still had a year left of college, and hadn’t yet traveled without my parents. For the duration of the flight, my mother fretted over how we’d locate the rental car agency and, if we actually found it, how we’d manage our way from D.C. to Virginia. I was an excellent map reader, I reminded her, and airports were loaded with people who could direct us to the rental agency. She also worried about the fact that I had a fake ID, which she had in fact paid for as a Hanukkah gift my first year in Delta Gamma. Though I wasn’t a big drinker, carrying a working ID was standard operating procedure in every sorority house.
Before we landed at Dulles Airport, my mother held out her delicate hand with her perfectly manicured red nails and said, “I think you should give me the fake ID.” The ownership of this ID was the only thing that marred my perfect record. Once I’d handed it over, the vice president of social standards at Delta Gamma was clean.
The interviewees were housed in two different chain motels. A CIA bus picked us up early the first morning, stopping at one hotel and then the next. We were driven to an unmarked low-rise building that was as nondescript as the parking lot and the thin trees that surrounded it. I couldn’t help but wonder if the people eating in the nearby McDonald’s realized there were spies all around.
On day one we took a long “logic” test that felt more like a personal questionnaire. It was impossible to figure out what the right answer to any question might be, impossible to know exactly what kind of person they were looking for. I decided not to second-guess, or guess at all, and just to respond to the questions honestly. After the tests were turned in, there was much chatter among the applicants about what people had and hadn’t revealed.
I stood in a circle of five people, everyone nervously divulging their answers.
“Did you say you preferred a bath or shower?” a girl asked me. She had intense blue eyes and blinked continuously as she spoke.
“Shower,” I said. “I hate baths.”
“I think that was wrong!” she said.
“How is it wrong that I hate baths?” I asked.
“I hate baths, too,” a guy said. “But I said I preferred them anyway.”
“Baths is definitely the right answer!” the woman said. “They want to know if you’re mellow, like, relaxed, right?”
“Totally,” the guy said.
No one discussed the details of the medical exam. We each had to pee in a cup, and blood was drawn. We were weighed, measured, listened to with stethoscopes. Nothing we all hadn’t done before.
Day two was much more intense. It was the day of my first “lifestyle” polygraph test.
The man administering the test seemed old to me, though he was likely only in his forties. He wore a white button-down and khakis. His hands were big and gnarled, and the lines in his face were so deeply etched he looked like he’d been carved from a giant block of wood. His lips never parted for a smile.
We were in a small, white room with a table, a computer, and a one-way mirror. Without speaking to me, the wooden man hooked me up to wires on my fingertips, heart, and abdomen. The blood pressure cuff he tried to put on me was too big for my arm, so he left the room and returned with a child’s cuff, which worked.
Like I had in the written test, I answered honestly. These questions were less abstract. I was asked if I’d done illegal drugs, if I drank alcohol, if my friends thought I was an honest person, and if I thought I
was an honest person. There were questions about my sex life as well, but my experiences were so limited (the shy girl who stays home worrying about bin Laden is not often pursued) that my first couple of answers precluded follow-up questions.
After three hours of divulging what appeared to be a milky clean past, I was told that I hadn’t passed. Nor had I failed. The results of my polygraph, according to the wooden man, were inconclusive. I was to come back the next day and take the test once more.
That night, I was so worried about the polygraph that I couldn’t sleep. My mother, who felt my feelings and then magnified them in the funhouse mirror inside herself, also couldn’t sleep. When I tossed and turned in my motel bed, she tossed and turned twice in hers. For half the night, I watched the crack in the curtains that frequently lit up like an alien presence from the headlights of passing cars. Was there a truth about myself that I didn’t know? Had I thought I was telling the truth but was actually lying about something that only my subconscious understood? Once I’d imagined myself as a spy, I didn’t want to be anything else. I was getting closer and closer to this dream, but everything would end soon if I couldn’t prove I wasn’t lying.
“I can’t think of anything I’m hiding,” I whispered around four in the morning. I had spent the evening mentally shuffling through each year of my life. I revisited everything from my first kiss at age sixteen in the family room of Alison B.’s house to the time I watched my friend Kelley smoke a cigarette. I hadn’t even tried the cigarette. I had just watched.
“I can’t think of anything either,” my mother whispered back. There was little in my life I hadn’t told her.
The next morning, the wooden man and I were stationed in the same room. He hooked me up to the wires and blood pressure cuff. Then he sat on a chair in front of me, his forearms resting on his thighs, and he said, “Tracy, what aren’t you telling us? What are you hiding?”
“I don’t know … I’ve searched my memory.”