Life Undercover

Amaryllis Fox

2019 • 256 pages

Ratings9

Average rating3.8

Amaryllis Fox's riveting memoir tells the story of her ten years in the most elite clandestine ops unit of the CIA, hunting the world's most dangerous terrorists in sixteen countries while marrying and giving birth to a daughter Amaryllis Fox was in her last year as an undergraduate at Oxford studying theology and international law when her writing mentor Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded. Galvanized by this brutality, Fox applied to a master's program in conflict and terrorism at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, where she created an algorithm that predicted, with uncanny certainty, the likelihood of a terrorist cell arising in any village around the world. At twenty-one, she was recruited by the CIA. Her first assignment was reading and analyzing hundreds of classified cables a day from foreign governments and synthesizing them into daily briefs for the president. Her next assignment was at the Iraq desk in the Counterterrorism center. At twenty-two, she was fast-tracked into advanced operations training, sent from Langley to "the Farm," where she lived for six months in a simulated world learning how to use a Glock, how to get out of flexicuffs while locked in the trunk of a car, how to withstand torture, and the best ways to commit suicide in case of captivity. At the end of this training she was deployed as a spy under non-official cover--the most difficult and coveted job in the field as an art dealer specializing in tribal and indigenous art and sent to infiltrate terrorist networks in remote areas of the Middle East and Asia. Life Undercover is exhilarating, intimate, fiercely intelligent--an impossible to put down record of an extraordinary life, and of Amaryllis Fox's astonishing courage and passion.

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Allie

My first thought was, I'm surprised Fox was allowed/willing/able to share so much about her missions and the training she underwent as part of the CIA. I read an article partway through about how she didn't wait for permission from the agency to send this book to her publisher, but that they (allegedly) had a copy for over a year and had only requested superficial changes, and that surprised me a lot. I think that I expected that, with a book as fascinating as Life Undercover is, more would need to be redacted, that there would be more cover-up (particularly in those sections where Fox is critical of the CIA, in how they handle common names in the Middle East, in how they willfully choose to act first and apologize never, and how they look down on things that may take time even if it will produce more effective results in the long run). Maybe I just don't have a lot of faith in the Systems That Be, so it was kind of refreshing that Fox was allowed to be proud of the work she was doing while also admitting that it was not perfect by any means.

This is not a very action-oriented spy story, but it really delves into the psyche of those who participate, as active agents and those on the periphery (families, spouses, etc.). I loved seeing why and how someone like Fox would be attracted to and recruited into this work, what it takes as far as training, and the toll on one's personal life and emotional health. I'm glad she didn't shy away from describing Dean's PTSD after leaving Afghanistan, and I can only hope the CIA has systems in place to help their employees deal with that trauma. I was also glad to see that there is a time and place in which the best option is to walk away - I think I expected that once you're in, you're in for life ... even if that life doesn't work for you anymore.

It was very well-written, and I think I just convinced myself to bump this up to a 4.5.

July 11, 2020