Lectures in history on cspan3 every saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on American History tv and lectures in history available as a podcast, find it where you listen to podcasts. Tracy walder is coauthor of the unexpected spy. From the cia to the fbi my secret life taking down some of the most notorious terrorists. Next, she sits down as a special Operations Officer in the immediate aftermath of the 9 11 attacks, and focusing on chinese counterintelligence. The International Spy museum recorded this event in february. Good evening, everyone and thank you for coming out on this gloomy, washington, d. C. , evening to the International Spy museum. Im chris costa. Im the executive director of the International Spy museum. Im really excited to introduce this program with former cia Operations Officer, fbi special agent now author tracy walder. Tracy joined the cia straight out of college and served as a staff Operations Officer at the Counter Terrorism center where she was responsible for tracking down terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. She went on to become an fbi special agent at the l. A. Field office where she specialized in chinese counterintelligence operations. Tracy lives with her husband and 4 1 2yearold daughter in dallas, texas. This evening, tracy will discuss her memoir, the unexpected spy from the cia to the fbi. My secret life taking down some of the worlds most notorious terrorists. Tracy will be interviewed by our very own historian and curator dr. Vince houghton. They will open the audience to questions and answers. Everyone will have the opportunity to ask their questions this evening. We are also going to ask that if you are trapped in the middle of a row please put your hand up and we will ensure that you have a mike to answer questions, but there will be two mikes on each side of the auditorium that you can use to answer your question. Again, if you cant get out, just stay where youre at, raise your hand and well send a mike out to you. One another administration notice. If you have a cell phone. Does anyone have a cell phone in here . Please silence it, and ill lead by example and make sure mine is silenced. So now ill kick it over to Vincent Tracy and i think youll enjoy this evenings discussion. Thank you, chris. I probably mentioned the first time we were introduced to tracy as a museum was on an Educational Team discovered the amazing work that she was doing now at a teacher at a school in dallas and well talk about this later, but its extraordinary what she decided to do to challenge young people that i would on ei taught at every levl from Elementary School and the gumption was exceptional, i would never have College Students do what youre having them do and these on the board of directors for girl security which we will talk about later on, as well which is another way shes decided to give back to not only her community, but also to her country. Youll hear about more of those later and well jump right in. We actually had one conversation, if anyone listens to spycast youll have a chance to hear a much longer version of this. On tuesday, we just recorded a podcast together and we had a chance to try out some of these questions before we put it before a live studio audience and some of them work better than others and one was interesting to me and certainly as someone like myself what was the process that you had to go through to get this book cleared through the cias publication review board in particular because they can be somewhat problematic. They can be somewhat difficult and if anyones looked at the book there were lines redacted that were left inside. In our conversation theres a whole lot more that they didnt want you to put out when you went through this. How much difficult how much difficulty was it getting through . First, thank you, everyone, for coming. I see a lot of my former students in the audience which is really exciting, a lot who took my class. Thank you for being here. In terms of the publications review board there were two women that came before me, martha backos, and Sarah Karlsson and i credit them with the easier time that i had. So my book was extremely important to me. I signed a nondisclosure agreement when i left and i wanted to honor that and i sent it off to them just hoping it wouldnt be denied in full meaning you cant publish this. It was not. It came back after four months after my initial submission with four complete chapters just black lines. So the cia was it willy really great. You can email the prb. There are a lot of places that you cannot, they wont tell you exactly why, so i resubmitted it and it came back with two chapters redacted completely and a chapter and a half and finally, after i took out one word which was the name of a statue, they left that whole chapter through and decided the way it was was intelligible enough for people to be able to read. Its tricky because yes, they want you to give away what cities theyre operating in and its not widely known, but you allowed the leeway to describe these cities pretty well. Theres a modern headquarters for an intelligence right on the river and this is near where a famous serial killer killed in the victorian era. I dont know why they redacted some of the things that they did. I was just talking to someone about this. Why they redacted some things and redacted others. I dont understand the process. Some of them, in my opinion its extremely easy to figure out where i am. Maybe they want people to take that extra step of googling for about ten minutes. I dont know. Lets talk about your origin story because it is somewhat different than others. I have nothing with you being in a sorority in Southern California, a lot of people wanted to do it from an early age and you didnt set out to think about being a cia officer in middle school or high school, although subconsciously you did a little bit because of what you studied and when other people were playing you were learning with the middle east and looking at maps and what led you to want to join the agency . To back up a little bit. That was when i was recruited in the mid90s. Popular culture looks really different today than it did then. I did not grow up with quantico or criminal minds or any of those things. So i had no preconceived notions about this is what the cia is and this is where i want to work, and im not sure a whole lot of people did either necessarily, but i do know that i had a large interest in the middle east and Counter Terrorism. So i would say that was cultivated when i watched the peter bergen interview when he interviewed Osama Bin Laden in 1997. That was a huge turning point for me and sort of when i decided i wanted to, i guess, do something about him and so when i applied at that career fair in college that was really the impetus. Most of us in here, unless youre really young, maybe some of your former students remember where we were on 9 11. It was a turning point for a lot of our lives. For many people it was a turning point in their careers and the decision to go in a different direction. You were already working. In fact, youre at langley the morning of 9 11 and this is the question that popped in my head and how it hadnt been thought about that much before, but i sat on my couch on 9 11 and id been army for about a month just pissed off because i couldnt do anything about it and i wanted to go back, but my knees stunk. We had the feeling of oh, my god, weve been attacked. To a degree, you had an advantage because you couldnt wallow in selfpity about our countrys been attacked because you had a second to do that and then it was time to get to work. So i think because you made me think about that question a little bit differently. I think everyone always asks how i was feeling, thinking and its not that i was happy that people had died in the world trade center, but you have to almost compartmentalize those thoughts so you can get on with the mission and get on with the work that you need to do and stop the next attack and gather the evidence that you need to stop the next attack and i think youre right, having a sense of purpose to be able to do something about it even though maybe youre not waiting for next attack and in a way keep us going. You had a unique advantage, and you moved into what is known as the vault which is ground zero for the war against al qaeda, the war that was created because of 9 11, and when i say ground zero. Youre working in a small group and george bush is standing behind you asking you whats going on or condoleezza rice. This is the epicenter and the nerve center of the cia response. How daunting was that as youre 23 at the time or 21. 21 at the time. And youve got scar chomping doors behind you, who are we killing today . Youre not allowed to say that, targeting or drones. Who are we looking at today . It had to be a surreal experience. So that was a chapter i was very surprised cia approved. I submitted it and thought the whole thing would come back redacted and it didnt so yay. For me i was read into that program on september 10, 2001, and i think for me i was naive and said well never need to use this and obviously we did. It was obviously very intense. Youre working really long hours, but youre not really thinking about the people that are in the room because if you think about the people in the room youre not focusing on what youre doing which is trying to get people, trying to talk around it, and so i think you really cant process who is in there and what theyre doing other than tenet who was in there every day and sat with us and hung out with us and he brought Us Thanksgiving dinner and doughnuts and bagels all the time. He was really great to work with in that environment, but other than tenet, he was the only one that we were super aware of all the time. Let me ask you this because the concept behind this room, this space and im not going to mack you say anything you cant say and this is where you have and i wont out your politics. Youre a Southern California girl. Youre very overt in the book about what direction you lean politically. Im not a fan necessarily of certain administrations. In that room, it didnt matter. We are so used to today. This isnt because of the current administration, but even under obama and youre used to taking foreign approximately see and National Security and this was a moment where it didnt matter where you came from and it was texas or Southern California and everyone was working together. That was what was so great about the cia when i was there. You obviously grew up in Southern California in a liberal household, but to be hon of tesh you im registered independent. The cia helped move me to the middle in a weird way. They didnt purposely do that, it just helped me think more about the issues not as7o blac and white way. It was sort of a gray and what i liked there i served under clinton and bush and tenet was there under both of them and that was great. I felt at least the people around me it was very apolitical. Politics are taken out of this situation and people are frustrated who read my before i came out that i had some nice things to say about bush and he didnt understand that, but it wasnt about servicing someones political agenda. It was about what my observations were at that time in that moment and that helped me gain this apolitical insight when it came to foreign policy. There was an event that people dont talk about that much today and certainly, since the death of bin laden has become less and less, a key moment in the timeline of the early global war on terror and thats shortly after 9 11 when the United States had been pinned down. The last time we knew where he was and this was abbottabad an outpost out in the middle of nowhere in tora bora. I want you to talk about the frustrations, perhaps, that you must have felt having a chance to get the guy that caused 9 11, but having him slip through your fingers. That night what was interesting about that, and at the time i was writing the chapter about the Ground Forces that were there and it was easy to footnote to be easy to use and thats one way i got the chapter approved. I dont know, but it was extremely frustrating and we were working seven minutes on and seven minutes off and it was intense what we were doing and i think people would have thought that once we lost him that there would have been cursing, screaming, yelling and that really did not happen. It was sort of like the air had sort of gone out of the room. What people did when they went to their offices ill never know, but in that room it was just sort of, like, the sails completely went out of it and we just carried on doing what we were supposed to be doing. This will be a theme that we will investigate again and again and again throughout this conversation, but when i think about your work in the vault, youre operating in here in eastern time in the United States in langley, virginia, where the actual action is taking place sometimes is five, five and a half, six hours ahead of where you are and sometimes more than that. This is not a normal 9 00 to 5 00 job and you dont get to scratch the ears of your dog and then get home in time for dinner and you are working shifts that dont allow you to be a normal human being. How draining is that . This is nonstop. We talked to mike morel because he was the briefer for President Trump president bush. I woke up at 4 00, 4 30. I woke up at midnight to start my day. It seems like almost impossible to keep up over a long period of time. I think it is, and its one of the reasons that i ultimately left. Im not a night person and im a morning person. I would have my friend sometimes come to my apartment and wake me up. I have to change your whole body clock. Your proverbial 9 00 to 5 00 job before that and that all went out the window. So you went from a relatively stressfree job hunting terrorists in the vault to the most stressful job and thats hunting down bioterrorists who are trying to create weapons of mass destruction to kill not only a couple thousand people, but hundreds of thousands of people around the world. When you moved over to the wmd group, what i thought was funny from the book is those of us who studied weapons of mass destruction at school, they sent you out saying go find bad guys. Yes. Its a little bit different than that. The guys that worked the nuke program, those are people that had their phds in Nuclear Physics and i dont want to communicate your Work Experience and we did crude toxins and poison so ricin and botulinum toxin and we thought two weeks would be enough to understand what al qaeda was trying to procure. This is really what keeps people up at night. Its not Nuclear Weapons and theyre incredibly difficult to create, to deliver, but bioweapons and you drive by the pentagon at 3 00 in the morning and its because people are there worrying about a bioweapons attack. How much going through the twoweek poison school, did you come out more worried when you see how easy it was. You just helped my poor students who had to do their 15page threat assessment and they know what im talking about in my class about bioterrorism feel vindicated that they had to do that. So it does keep people up at night and i know you want me to say its because the cia has spoiled them all, but its very difficult to track biological weapons. I dont want to say nuks, thats not easy. It requires a lot of stuff, launch systems and all those keeps of things. In my opinion, biological weapon, you can get them in parts, its very easy. You can get them off amazon, home depot. What becomes problematic and maybe people arent putting the entire piece of the puzzle together and i think thats what were going to probably slip up one day. I mean, all you really need is an airconditioning vent. And the trouble is you need a delivery system. At worst case a ship with containers to sale into a port. Which is why terrorists really i would guess theyre not trying to really create one because of what you need. When you combine someone willing to kill themselves with the ease and access of bioweapons it becomes very scary. I agree. Sleep well tonight, guys. Youre welcome. Whats extraordinary and i didnt have a good understanding about this before i read the book. You have to be on the ground in these areas of the world to understand the culture and understand the people and so you, for the first time in your career, you started deployed to places, spending time overseas spending time in the countries that you cant talk about by name in the book. Yes, i did. I know some people would disagree with me and everyone has their own experience at the cia and the fbi, but this was mine. I felt very prepared. At least from a cultural standpoint in those countries. That was one thing that i thought that they did extremely well. Preparing you is one thing. The frustrations you might have experienced through having to cooperate with local intelligence agencies you talk in the book being the womans side of things and these are countries that have fundamentalist islam as a tenet behind their governing system and they werent taking things as seriously as they should have at the time. What ended up being more frustrating for me. For me, i know we talked about this, and you wanted me to get mad about the sexism when the Intelligence Service called me malibu barbie. It didnt bother me that much because my colleagues were so great about being, shes the one you need to talk to. So if you want to continue calling her malibu barbie, go ahead, but youll need to deal with her. I always felt supported by my colleagues. What frustrated me was stams getting cables back when we knew someone was transiting a country. I am so sorry, but we dont work on sundays. It was really frustrating and as a result you cant locate that person anymore because they dont want to work on a sunday. You have a known bad guy going through a european country or in a european country, you know where hes at and they either dont work on sundays, and theres not enough evidence to arrest a person. Theyre not probably going to attack albuquer