The Unexpected Spy

by Tracy Walder

  The paperwork mess Jeannie had created in the office—the mess I confronted alone—would take longer to sort through than the cluttered home I’d imagined for her.

  One day, I paused at the open office door of the special agent in charge of our resident office. He was a nice guy who had the permanent squint-eyed scowl of a football coach in the middle of a game.

  “Sir,” I said, smiling as was my habit when I was nervous, “so, I’m wondering why Jeannie doesn’t just do her own paperwork, or why someone else didn’t start in on it earlier?” There was no one else in this small office who had been busied with such non-urgent business.

  “Last one in.” The special agent shrugged.

  But I wasn’t the last one in. I was only the last woman in. Two men had started at the same time as me. One, Darren, was already deep into cybercrime. The other, Bruce, was rarely in the office, as he was busy infiltrating himself into the gang wars of Los Angeles.

  I did work off and on with Bruce in gang crime and sometimes sat in an office and listened to tapped phones. Most of the gang members were too smart to give much information on the phone, so the bulk of what I heard was domestic chores: picking up cream on the way home and did Jesse prefer briefs or trunks because Louise was going to Target after work and would pick some up. Oh, and don’t forget toilet paper!

  When I saw that Bruce had a gang tattoo chart, I made a copy, put it on my desk, and quickly committed it to memory. It’s a fascinating art form; like hieroglyphics, the tattoos represent history, affiliation, and goals. The facial ones were of particular interest to me, the most common being an open or closed teardrop falling from an eye. Some teardrops represent prison time, some represent a murder having been committed, and some an attempted murder. Many of these gang boys were so young, I worried about how they’d ever get their tattoos removed if they were to change their minds.

  Often my gang assignment was to sit within view of a gang house and record who was coming and going. I’d count the kids and note what everyone’s schedule was. These guys did have guns and they would shoot, so doing a raid took a team of agents strategically entering the home in a way that none of the kids would be hurt. The most difficult bust of this sort was when we raided a tiny two-bedroom bungalow where more than 20 people were living—15 of them skilled with firearms. There were three little kids in the house, all under the age of ten. Bruce, who was directing the team, gave me the job of containing the kids once we had entered. I know it sounds barbaric, but I had to flex-cuff them. I’d heard plenty of stories of brave little kids running out with their dad’s gun and trying to shoot down the FBI. To them we were the bad guys. On Bruce’s raid, I quickly hustled the three kids into the corner of a bedroom. Mattresses and blankets crisscrossed the floor, like a fort they had made for a slumber party. Once they were cuffed, I had them sit on a mattress facing me. No one cried. No one screamed. They just looked up at me, as if they were waiting to see what else the mean blond lady might do.

  “Hey,” I said to them, ‘it’s okay. You’re going to be okay. No one’s going to hurt you.”

  The largest of the kids nodded at me.

  Once the house was secured and everyone had been cuffed and detained, Child Protective Services arrived to take care of the kids. I had a switchblade in the pocket of my cargo pants. When I pulled it out and let the blade spring forth, none of them even blinked. The smallest one said cuchillo, knife. They watched, quietly, as I sliced off their cuffs while praising them for being so good and cooperative. In my head, I was hoping that things would get better for them after this moment, that this—being detained by an FBI agent in their home—was the low point.

  * * *

  The longest case I worked on was one of the biggest counterintelligence cases to be cracked by the FBI. The suspect was a man named Chi Mak, who had emigrated from Hong Kong with his wife, Rebecca, in the seventies and was working for Power Paragon, a company that developed defense systems for the U.S. Navy. FBI agents had enough evidence to get a court-approved clearance to enter the Maks’ house and put up hidden cameras as well as tap their phones and cars. Also, their garbage was intercepted before being dropped at the dump. Every week, that garbage was sorted and closely examined in an empty garage.

  By me.

  The simplicity and compact nature of the Maks’ lives was interesting to me. Rebecca appeared to live in self-imposed exile. She hadn’t learned English during her decades in California and never partook in the things that make most people happy: movies, museums, the beach, TV, shopping … Yes, the world is messed up now, but there really is so much joy to be had by simply walking out the door. Well, she did walk out the door, once a day for a quick, silent stroll around the neighborhood. Other than that, she only left the house with her husband, and mostly to do chores—wash the car and grocery shop. They did play tennis every Saturday, but to me it seemed like a physical education requirement rather than an act of pleasure. I could have been wrong, though. Maybe that was her hour of joy each week. In their home, the Maks were frequently companionably silent. When they did speak it was often about Chinese politics, Mao, and Chinese history. Those things are of great interest to me, too; I was a Chinese history minor in college. But, unfortunately, I was not assigned to read through the translated texts of their conversations.

  The salary Mak earned was plenty for two people living in a modest home in Downey, California, but he and Rebecca lived as if they were subsisting on pennies and dimes found in the change slots of vending machines. They dressed in old clothes and never appeared to purchase anything other than groceries. Each Saturday, they went to the same hardware store, where they never bought anything. At first the FBI thought they went there to make a drop and pass off information. Eventually we figured out that they were there to drink the free coffee that was put out in the lumber aisle. Also, they ate off newspaper rather than plates. After their meals, they balled up the paper with the food scraps wrapped inside and threw it all away. This made their garbage easily identifiable for me. I always wondered if the newspaper plate was to save water, to save the cost of dishwashing detergent, or to save the time it took to wash dishes. Maybe it was all three.

  Once a week, I put on my cargo pants, boots, and a long-sleeved t-shirt and drove to the garage where I sorted the trash. Wearing a mask and puncture-proof gloves, I opened the Maks’ bags and dumped them on a tarp spread on the floor. It was like playing Where’s Waldo?, except I wasn’t sure what or who Waldo was. Other than the days I was trained to sort garbage, I was alone during this task, which allowed me to do it in a Zen way. With my mind cleared, I would tell myself that I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, I was just looking carefully. To look for specific things eliminates the possibility of finding what you don’t expect. Everything—every toilet paper tube, or travel brochure, or dietary change (what did it mean the one week they cooked a turkey breast in July?) was fair game for my scrutiny and piercing suspicions.

  All printed matter and handwritten matter, usually in Chinese, was of particular interest. As Mak tended to rip up his papers, I often pulled out small squares, like postage stamps, and laid them out on a table. A woman named Fran went through the Chinese-language bits pulled from the trash and translated them. She didn’t work in our office but was on this case to help decipher everything.

  It was Fran who identified a tasking list from the sorted trash. Written in both Chinese and English, this list clearly identified classified materials that Mak was to supply to the Chinese government. It turned out Mak, the guy everyone at work said was friendly and helpful, had come to the United States solely to pass on classified military information. It was a career-long commitment. Though maybe not lifelong. The Maks owned two houses in China. It was presumed that once his undercover life was over, he and Rebecca would retire there. I couldn’t help but wonder: if Mak, who was sixty-four at the time he was caught, had been able to retire with Rebecca in China, would they have continued to eat off newspaper?

  M
ak and Rebecca were both eventually convicted. Rebecca’s charge of acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government got her three years in prison and then deportation to China. Mak is still serving his twenty-four-and-a-half-year sentence for conspiring to export U.S. military technology to China.

  * * *

  I did feel like I was being a productive member of society while I was in the FBI, and I’m proud of the work I did there. But throughout my time in the bureau, I couldn’t help but note that my skills and talents weren’t being properly utilized. I was The Girl in the eyes of the agency, and everything I was asked to do reflected that. When there was a misbehaving boy (A.J.), I was the girl-bride who stood by and watched while her husband doled out the punishment. (The words wait till your father gets home come to mind in that scenario.) When there were children involved, I was the girl who babysat. When there was a wife, daughter, or mother involved, I was the girl who would be their friend. With Jeannie, I was the girl who would act as her secretary, there to fix her messes and clear her name. And in the Chinese spy case, even though I was the most well-informed person in that office in Chinese history and politics, I was the girl who sorted the trash. The domestic worker. The cleaning lady. The maid.

  If I were the only new person in the office, I might have bought the special agent’s excuse of last one in. But there were Darren and Bruce, both of whom had entered when I did. I would have loved to have plunged deep into the cases they’d been assigned.

  In high school, I had decided that I wanted to be a history teacher. I wanted to change the lives of young minds, to inspire them to think broader, deeper, and within a global and historical context. When I joined the CIA, I didn’t stop wanting to do that—I just tucked it away while I challenged myself to take a harder road, to do the unexpected, to become someone I hadn’t yet realized I could be. My experiences and my achievements in the CIA gave me a sense of myself and a confidence that I’d probably had as a young girl, but had lost during the years of being bullied. I didn’t just learn about myself in the CIA. It was an immersive course that gave me a postgraduate-level education in politics, foreign policy, world history, and cultural history. I was dealing with the ugliness of terror and terrorists while surrounded by the great beauty of Muslim culture, art, and architecture. In the end, I gained greater tolerance and compassion for people who, on the surface, appear to be nothing like me.

  As an FBI agent, I wanted to learn all I could about counterintelligence, I wanted to find new ways to keep our country safe, and I wanted to become more proficient, smarter—an expert in my field. But my time in the FBI didn’t feed into that. I have since discovered that my experiences with the bureau aren’t unique. Currently, there are a dozen women who have filed a complaint against the FBI with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. All these women claim to have been discriminated against at Quantico, and 7 of the 12 claim they suffered additional discrimination because of their race. None of this surprises me, and I expect that the more public their case becomes, the more women will speak up. Not that there are many to come forward; women still represent less than a fifth of working agents.

  I did grow in the FBI, but not in the ways I had expected. Instead, I grew deeper into my true self, where I could see what I really wanted to do with my life and how I should proceed to get there. It became clear to me, as I was pulling greasy chicken bones from the Maks’ soiled newspapers, that in order for things to truly be different, the balance of power would have to change.

  When I was a kid, there was a bumper sticker on our refrigerator that said, Stop bitching, start a revolution. I read those words every day, 10 times a day, 20 times a day! They are embedded in my head just like the sound of my mother’s voice. The FBI poured gasoline on a tiny flame that was burning in my heart. That flame blew up and encompassed me so that I could no longer ignore it. I had to stop bitching and start my revolution.

  After 15 months, I quit the FBI.

  EPILOGUE

  THE REVOLUTION IS NOW

  Dallas, Texas Present Day

  Projected on the screen at the front of the room, next to my desk, is a Hate Map. The top of the map says in bold sans serif type, “954 hate groups are currently operating in the U.S. Track them below with our Hate Map.” The interactive map would be fun if it weren’t so horrifying.

  There’s a passel of seventeen- and eighteen-year-old girls lying on pillows and blankets in the center of the room, staring up at the screen. The lights are out, the room is a perfect temperature, and everyone is comfortable, at ease. The topic for today is domestic terrorism.

  Melia raises her hand. “How many neo-Nazi groups are there?”

  I click on the pull-down menu that categorizes the variances of hate and then click on Neo-Nazi. “A hundred and twenty-two. That’s the biggest increase of any hate group in the last couple years. Up 22 percent.”

  “More than the KKK?” Amity asks. Back at the pull-down menu, I click on the KKK. We all see that there are 77 chapters now, down 17.

  “More than the KKK. But isn’t the presence of only a single group enough for us to take action?”

  “Yeah,” Amity says.

  “Can you click on just the hate groups in Dallas?” Harper asks.

  I scroll over the map of the United States, down to Texas, and then click on Dallas. Circular symbols are clumped and layered. I click on each symbol so we can see which hate groups are in this city, their city, and my city, too, now. I can’t help but note that the girls in the room, wearing their plaid skirts and white blazers, represent the target of every single hate group in the United States: African Americans, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, women, and LGBT.

  “Consider the reading you’ve done this week,” I say. “Look through the different groups on this map. Now ask yourself, Is this terrorism? Are these groups equal? Do we feel stronger about some than others, and if so, why?”

  Immediately there’s a cacophony of voices. It appears that everyone has an opinion.

  We are in week seven of this class, which I have named Spycraft. The girls have read about the Oklahoma City bomber, events leading up to and following 9/11, the creation of ISIS, the hunt for bin Laden, and EIT (torture). They spent one month each extensively researching a different terrorist group (ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda, etc.). Unfortunately, no matter how many girls I have in the class, there are enough terrorist groups in the world for each to have her own. Each student wrote a threat assessment report on the group she was assigned, analyzing the likelihood and capabilities of that organization to deploy biological weapons, along with the statistical likelihood of where and when those weapons might be used. Every year, the reports have been so thorough, insightful, and intelligent that I have bound them into a binder, made multiple copies, and mailed them to the Department of Homeland Security and senators, particularly those who are on intelligence committees.

  * * *

  Going forward, my students will learn code cracking, “masked writing” (where the message one intends to send is camouflaged within a meaningless message), and how to get information out of someone who would rather die than speak. They will write a paper analyzing the current administration’s policy on domestic terrorism; a paper analyzing the events of September 11 and proposing if, and how, those attacks could have been prevented; and a paper on the effective and ineffective ways to wage war today.

  The work, the reading, the content of this class is heavy stuff. But in asking the girls to analyze it and to find solutions, they don’t get overwhelmed or terrified of what they find. Rather, they become engaged and empowered.

  “Mrs. Walder,” Austen says, “will you click on the other cities in Texas so we can see who has the most hate groups?”

  “I hope Dallas loses that one,” I say, and I start clicking as the girls start talking. The opinions in this room are strong; these girls are fierce and outspoken. As I expect them to be. And they are respectful and kind to each other. As I also expect them to be. There is no tolerating
bullies here.

  * * *

  In the fall of 2010, when I had just started teaching at this all-girls school, I felt I was firmly walking the track I’d set for myself after leaving the FBI and earning a graduate degree. I was a history teacher who planned to throw a lot of current events and politics onto her syllabi. It was the nine-year anniversary of September 11 that year when the headmistress came on the loudspeaker and asked that everyone sit in silence for one minute to remember the victims of the terror attacks. The girls of that class were freshmen; they’d been in kindergarten when the towers went down. I imagined it was one of the first vivid memories for each of them. I watched their faces: a couple of girls had closed their eyes, and then I noticed that one girl, Ruby, was crying. I motioned for her to follow me into the hall. No one was around and there was utter silence as the minute ticked down. It was only in the past summer that Ruby and her family had moved to Dallas from New York City.

  “I was five years old and going to so many funerals,” Ruby said, sobbing. I hugged her and couldn’t help but cry, too.

  That afternoon when I drove home, I thought about my work in the CIA following the 9/11 attacks. I had been swimming through a murky sea of guilt, driven and singularly focused on finding the perpetrators. But instead of seeing through swim goggles, my sights were streamlined into the vision of night goggles. It’s a limited point of view that doesn’t allow for peripheral vision, color other than green, nuances, or even the particular features on a face. Thinking of Ruby’s experience of 9/11 helped me take off those night goggles. It put a face on a form and directed me toward a broader place of empathy where I could see the echoing effects of that act of terror and not just the terrorists and those they’d murdered. I understood then that my focus in teaching had to come from a broader place than my focus in the CIA. I needed to open up and turn toward the people whose lives were, and are, changed because of terrorism. I needed to examine things from the outside in, rather than from the constricted tunnel of undercover work.