The Unexpected Spy

by Tracy Walder

  Anton had said, “Slim. Unless they attack us.” He had gone on to explain that if we ever were to ~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~, that action would never be taken without thorough analysis, insight, intel, and a final approval from Tommy Franks, the general in charge of huge swaths of the globe: parts of North Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East.

  In other words, no one was taking this lightly. And our job, to accurately and correctly identify who and what we were seeing before anything was ever fired off, felt all the more important.

  I flipped up the visor and then threw the lipstick back into my crowded purse. It took a minute to fish out my ID, which hung from a blue-and-gold lanyard. I hung the ID from my neck, got out of the car, clicked the lock, and wobbled in those peep-toes toward the entrance. Before entering the building, I looked up toward the sky. It was a perfect day: bright, sunny, clear. The air smelled as pure as fresh-cut grass. I kept my face in the warm, beating sun for one last moment. Once I was at my cubicle, I’d have to say goodbye to the sun and close the blinds at my window so I could better see the maps on my screen.

  The guards were always nice and said hello as I scanned my ID. I went down the escalator and crossed out of the new building into the food court, where I headed straight to Starbucks.

  The CIA food court is similar to a mall food court, only smaller. There are no restaurants, only food stands with tables and chairs in the center of the great room. The people who work at the food stands go through a stringent vetting process. They’re not allowed to say they work at the CIA food court. And they’re not allowed to ask questions, not even a name, of their customers. This was a problem for Starbucks employees who wanted to put names on the cups. What they didn’t understand was that, for undercover operatives, even if you’re giving a false name, you feel vulnerable. Who knows how a fake name—let’s say you use your grandmother’s maiden name—could be traced back to you? Even a random number could be linked to your true identity. So there were no names, not even aliases. And conversation never revolved around work. I always smiled and chatted with the Starbucks workers. That day a woman helped me and we both remarked on how beautiful it was outside and how we wished we could work outdoors.

  I said goodbye and then walked away with my usual venti dark roast with no room for milk and sugar. It was 7:00 a.m. now, and I needed that coffee to get me through to lunch, when I might get another cup of coffee with the daily salad that I brought to my desk and ate robotically as I continued to analyze images.

  With my coffee and my purse, I headed up another escalator into the original CIA building. From there, I got in an elevator with a man whose face looked ten years younger than his gray hair implied. Stress, I thought. This job, and the pressure of feeling responsible for the lives of an entire nation, chipped away at all signs of youth. In one year, I’d seen colleagues age as though they were in a time-lapse movie. I hadn’t slept through the night in 12 months and had shadow bags under my eyes that were so pronounced, I felt like I was emptying out CoverGirl concealer sticks like they were packs of gum. The gray-haired man pushed the button for the seventh floor. I pushed three. Now I knew why he was so gray. The seventh floor was almost mythical. It was where George Tenet, then the director of the CIA, had his office. The closer you were in the ranks to Tenet, the closer you were to the seventh floor, if not on it. If you were ever going to run into President Bush, or Vice President Cheney, or anyone in the administration, it would be on the seventh floor. Even though I’d been moved into a position of high priority and even higher security clearance, I still saw myself as a rookie, a novice. Someone who could only watch someone push that button for the seventh floor and not someone who’d be going there herself. I had yet to meet any of the seventh-floor people, though their names were on emails, memos, and notices. When my friend Lindsay attended a meeting on the seventh floor with Tenet, she ran straight to my desk afterward just to tell me what it had been like to sit in a room with him. Things felt more important, bigger, when Tenet was directly involved.

  The elevator stopped at the third floor, and the gray-haired man nodded at me.

  “Bye.” I smiled and lifted my hand in an embarrassing half-wave before I stepped out.

  Of the 15 people in my division, about a third were at their desks already. I chatted with a few of them as I headed toward my cubicle in the far corner, next to the windows. Before I closed the blinds, I turned my head toward the sun. One last moment to appreciate that perfect day.

  I sipped my coffee as my computer started up. When the images came in, I was so focused, I was almost in a dream state. All the photos were of training camps, though for the past couple of weeks people seemed to be clearing out of the camps. I counted heads. I cross-referenced images to make sure I wasn’t counting the same people twice. All men. Some of them easily identifiable to me. Everyone youngish and upright. Where were they now, if they weren’t in the camps? We knew their plans involved nonspecific attacks in the United States. Hopefully this dearth of armed boys didn’t mean they were here, in the United States, under aliases or names that we just hadn’t found yet, renting cars and trucks, building bombs, driving through tunnels … no wonder I couldn’t sleep at night.

  By 8:30 a.m., most—if not all—of the people in my division were at their desks working. My friend Randy stopped by to chat for a moment. He had an idea that we should start color-coding folders, reorganizing them by rank in al-Qaeda. As he spoke, I couldn’t help but think, I’m not going to be here, Randy. I’ll be in The Vault. But I can’t tell you, or anyone else, that The Vault even exists. Until then, my secret life as a CIA agent hadn’t felt so secret. It was too hard to maintain friendships outside of the agency, as the inability to reveal what you did for 50 hours a week created a wall that prevented real intimacy. The result of that was that all my friends were in the agency. They knew I worked in mapping, and I was free to discuss my day with them. But now that I was being moved, I felt the strange tickle of distraction created by a secret. G.I. Joe had even asked if I was having an affair. I’d told him I’d never have an affair (I’d just break up with him if I met someone more compelling), but that I was involved in something new and I couldn’t reveal to him what it was. This didn’t appear to sit well with G.I. Joe, and immediately I could feel that part of his pleasure in our relationship depended on his seniority and experience being far beyond my single year in.

  There were two phones on my desk: a black one that led to the outside world, which I used to call my mother every day, and a beige one that was secure within the CIA. At 8:50 the secure phone on my desk rang. It was Jeff, a guy who had started in the agency around the same time as I did, and one of my pals.

  “Go to CNN,” he said. “A plane just hit the north tower of the World Trade Center.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said, and I held the phone between my shoulder and ear while I pulled up CNN on the closed-circuit TV that ran through my computer.

  There had been chatter about al-Qaeda’s plan to hijack planes, there had been chatter about plans to blow up buildings. But no one in the CIA had detailed information about when or where. It was all conjecture—words, phrases, and movements gathered here and there with some of the smartest people I’ve ever met trying to piece it all together into a cohesive narrative. Also, no one knew if al-Qaeda had the organizational skills to pull off something like flying a plane into a building. Certainly, there had not been nearly enough information to shut down any of the 15,000-plus airports in the United States or cancel the 87,000 flights that crisscrossed the nation each day. Just as there hadn’t been enough information to close off every tunnel in the country to an unknown car, driven by an unknown driver, that might have had unknown explosives.

  Now, I know that much of what the 9/11 Commission later presented was a failure on the part of the CIA to communicate with the FBI. But from where I sat, this is what I know to be true: every person I came in contact with, every person I worked with, every person to whom I sent or received
information was working toward the same goal—to keep America safe and to shut down the terrorist operations of al-Qaeda. There were thousands of people in the CIA who were working toward that same goal. The snafu between the CIA and the FBI might be where the blame lies in hindsight, but to narrow the tragedy to a single error is to oversimplify a complex battle between those who wanted to destroy the Western world and those who wanted to save lives. Additionally, one cannot ignore the sleepless and devoted hours put in by every operative and analyst I saw. And, more importantly, one cannot ignore the documented fact that George Tenet went to the Bush administration several times to explain that an attack was being planned on American soil and told them that we needed to be proactive in defending our country. The administration didn’t seem able to wrap their minds or imagination around the extent, breadth, and financial resources of al-Qaeda. The locus of their “worry” was more on the disbanded Soviet Union and the drug cartels in Central America. The administration refused to approve action other than that in which we were already engaged.

  Jeff and I stayed on the phone together, mostly in silence, as we each watched from our desks. We were both stunned. Groups of people were gathered around desks, computers, TV screens. There wasn’t much noise, but there was talk, commentary. My mind was racing over the images I’d been studying: had I missed anything, were there any airplane mock-ups I hadn’t seen, was there something I should have caught that I didn’t? And were all those people who had been missing from the camps the past few days currently sitting on American airplanes?

  At 9:03 a.m., American Airlines flight 175 hit the south tower. The entire floor went eerily silent. I don’t think I took a breath for at least a minute, and I doubt anyone else did either. Again, I thought back to the images I’d seen lately. How many people were missing from the camps? How many more planes might hit?

  “I’ll talk to you later,” I finally said to Jeff, and we hung up. I went to the binders, leafed through the images I’d seen over the last week, and tried to compare them to images from two or six or eight weeks earlier. My brain felt frozen, stuck in a rerun of What did I miss? I closed the binders and joined the others in my area who were gathered around a TV in a conference room. The office doors to all the supervisors on that floor were now shut.

  It was 9:37 a.m. when American Airlines flight 77 crashed into the south side of the Pentagon. That plane might as well have crashed into the south side of my body. I wanted to crumple, collapse in on myself like a foot-smashed soda can. The pain, the guilt, the sense that my failures were resulting in lives lost had taken over my body and erased all other thoughts.

  A woman named April, whom another friend had once described as “the skinniest, whitest person I’ve ever met,” clapped her hands and smiled. “Here we go!” she said. It was misplaced excitement, like finally being deployed to war after all you’d done was train. No one really wants to go and shoot people, but if you’ve been prepping for it, you do feel the thrill of knowing that you’ll finally be executing the maneuvers in which you’d been trained. My guess is that April, who was also tracking terrorist training camps, was excited that the hours and hours of work she’d been doing weren’t for naught. Still, that clap of the hands has haunted me ever since.

  By 10:00 a.m., everyone in the CIA had been emailed that we were on lockdown and should shelter in place. No one went under a desk with their hands over their heads. We continued to watch TV, talk, speculate. Every person I spoke with—every single one—went through all the work he or she had been doing up to that day and tried to figure out if they’d missed something. Or misjudged something. Or misread something.

  By 11:00 a.m., notices went out that said everyone was to evacuate the building, except those of us in counterterrorism. G.I. Joe called me to suggest we leave together.

  “I have to stay.” I scanned the room. No one near me was leaving.

  “But we’ve been evacuated.”

  “Everyone in counterterrorism has to stay,” I said. He sighed, mumbled goodbye, and abruptly hung up.

  By 11:30 a.m., all the buildings were emptied, except the pockets of counterterrorism operatives and analysts on various floors and the bigwigs on the seventh floor. On my floor, all the private office doors remained closed, and groups of us remained huddled together in front of the TVs, methodically unraveling all we knew as we tried to puzzle together what had just happened.

  The food court was closed. There was no salad to be had, no more Starbucks. But all of that was the farthest thing from my mind as the next few hours progressed. I wasn’t scared and I wasn’t panicked. I was simply determined to identify every terrorist involved in this attack so I could cross-reference them with any photos or groups I had from training camps. I wanted their names. And I wanted the names and locations of all their known associates. Mostly, though, I wanted to know exactly where Osama bin Laden was. Though it hadn’t been confirmed in the media yet, I—and everyone else in the antiterrorism units—knew he was behind this atrocious attack.

  At 2:00 p.m., my boss from mapping instructed us to go home. As people went to their desks to gather their things, I approached him and asked if I should go see Anton, the supervisor of my new department. My boss tilted his head for a second and smiled. He couldn’t have known exactly what we were doing—no one but Tenet and those chosen for the program knew. But the fact that I had asked that question made him realize that I now had a security clearance higher than his. He was a supportive man, however, and I could tell that this pleased him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Go there. That’s where you’re needed.”

  Anton was in a SCIF (the agency’s name for a secure room or space) in the new CIA building, where The Vault also was located.

  He had a line of sweat across his forehead, but he didn’t look panicked. A woman was sitting at a table with him. They had papers, charts, and a white board laid flat on the table.

  “What should I do?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what the fuck any of us should do,” Anton said, and I could see he was feeling the onus of this attack even more than I. “I didn’t think we’d have to use the ~​~~​~~​~ so soon.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I was hoping we’d never have to use them.”

  “It’s gonna be intense,” Anton said. “Go home. Eat. Sleep. And meet me here at 6:30 tomorrow morning. We’ll have a schedule figured out by then.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep,” I said. “Haven’t quite mastered that one yet.”

  “Yeah.” Anton looked down at the objects scattered across the table. There was a pile of black beepers. He flipped a few over, found one that had my name on it, and handed it to me. “Wear this at all times you’re not in the building, not in the room.”

  By the room, he meant The Vault. “Oh, okay.” I put the beeper in my purse because I wasn’t sure how or where to wear it. At the time beepers seemed exclusive to drug dealers and doctors. I’d never even touched one before.

  “And do try to sleep tonight,” he said. “Because from today forward, you’re on. It’s you and the rest of team who’ve got to stop this crazy shit.”

  It felt as if a lead bowling ball had dropped into my stomach. I understood then, probably for the first time, just how serious, how integral, how impactful, my new position was.

  * * *

  The parking lot was virtually empty. It appeared larger than usual when seen as an expansive field of blacktop. I looked up toward the sky again, my face to the sun. How odd that the whole country could change in an instant and yet the sun still sat in the sky, shining as if this were the most beautiful day on Earth.

  I got in the car, took my cell phone from the glovebox, and tried to call my mother. Nothing was going through. After several attempts, I threw the phone on the seat, started up the engine, and pushed the CD back into the player.

  With Sting singing “Desert Rose” again, I left Langley and tried to head toward my apartment in Alexandria, Virginia. Twenty minutes later, when
I hit the George Washington Parkway, the traffic was dead-stopped. It looked like the CIA parking lot, midday. I rested my foot on the brake, leaned back in my seat, and turned up the music. Sting was singing “The End of the Game.” It’s a haunting, eerie song with lyrics that mention the western sky, the sun, and a cliche that didn’t feel so much like a cliche on September 11: What did not kill me, just made me tougher …

  It was clear that it would be hours before I could make it to my apartment in Alexandria. Rather than sitting in traffic, I pulled off at the next exit and headed to my friend Jenny’s house. She was a CIA analyst, good with numbers, statistics, and other mathematical abstractions.