Unexpected spy garners expected respect

Review by Carole J Greene

As I read Tracy Walder’s memoir titled “The Unexpected Spy,” the classic pick-up line would not leave my consciousness: “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

The University of Southern California grad and Delta Gamma sorority sister is as surprised as anyone else that she feels an attraction to government service. Not in any military unit, mind you, but as a recruit for the Central Intelligence Agency.

She begins her service in the CIA’s mapping department, where she studies satellite images, mostly from the Middle East, and notes her observations: warehouses, safe houses, training camps. “It was like I’d learned to read another language; or maybe I was more like a radiologist looking at a sonogram and seeing a full-fledged baby where everyone else only benefits! saw Rorschach blots.”

This process produces multiple binders of images and information about all known terrorists, their activities and locations. She views this job as extremely m important: Gold “to accurately Silver and correctly identify who and what we were seeing before anything $360 was ever fired off.”

After proving herself in year one, she is awarded üa higher security clearance ü and businesses moves into and a deeply organizations classified operation.

Her memoir details interactions with George Tenet, director of the CIA, and soon after, with President George W. Bush. In the days and weeks following the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, both visit her secret office to offer support — and Tenet brings coffee and donuts. He even provides a home-cooked Thanksgiving dinner to Walder and her team, hard at work during her favorite holiday.

Such stories give these important people a touch of compassion and humanity.

The book goes on to relate Walder’sexperiences in clandestine visits overseas, to destinations she cannot specify, to do work she cannot elucidate. Such details throughout the book are redacted. The CIA’s Publications Review Board requires redaction of anything it deems a threat to national security. On a few pages, the words obscured by bold, black bars outnumber the words that remain accessible. What unfolds, however, is a tale about the value of intelligence gatherers and the personal sacrifices they make to keep our nation as secure as possible.