The Rookie And Bin Laden | CIA | Spy Sisters
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Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you'll hear the true stories behind the world's greatest espionage operations. You'll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

This is True Spies. When I was read into the vault program, I did say, you know, are we going to have to kill anybody? They said, oh, you know, not unless there's some large terrorist attack. This is True Spies. Episode 6, The Rookie and Bin Laden.

Once I saw the second plane hit and I saw that it was a large Boeing airplane, I think then I was like, OK, this is some kind of terrorist attack. Who are the spies you can trust with the most vital missions? Like searching out the world's most wanted terrorist at the heart of America's most secretive operations center. Being the best just isn't enough. You need complete composure.

Any fear, any panic, sadness, guilt, it's okay to have those feelings, but you have to sort of put them away when you're at work. To stay calm in the eye of the storm. I was not scared. I'm not a big panicker because if you let your emotions completely overcome you, you could make a very, very bad mistake. And all the while act with complete integrity.

The main job of the CIA is that you need to be trusted with secret information. So even to this day, sometimes it's really difficult to talk about some of the specifics of the program that I worked on because many portions of it and the program in its entirety still remains classified. Who on earth would you turn to for a mission like that? Well, how about a rookie?

This is the story of how a new recruit was selected for a highly secretive and to this day still classified CIA program, only to have her first day on the team turn into tragedy and arguably the greatest ever challenge to America's intelligence community. 9/11 and the hunt for Osama bin Laden. My name is Tracey Walder. I'm a former CIA spy and special agent with the FBI. If you look at me and you look at my past,

There's really nothing that would have indicated to anyone that this would have been a life path for me. I had wanted to become a teacher probably since about fifth or sixth grade, particularly a history teacher. I loved history, loved learning everything about it. And I had gone to college with really every intention of becoming a history teacher. Before the CIA came into my life, I didn't have a lot of confidence. I was somewhat shy. However,

I was vice president of my sorority. I loved going to football games and I was a history major at USC. I really hung out a lot with my sorority sisters. Now if you're not familiar with the world of sorority houses, think about any classic college movie you've ever seen. If anyone here has seen the movie Legally Blonde,

That movie was actually filmed in my sorority house while I was living there. So you're talking very much Southern plantation style with a big, huge spiral staircase. College days. Frisbees. Parties. Beer pong. And Osama bin Laden?

In 1997, I remember being in my room in the sorority house watching CNN. Two gentlemen, Peter Bergen and Peter Arnett, were interviewing this individual in a cave. And I remember during that time, during the course of that conversation, he issued his fatwa or declaration of war against the United States. But he also sort of discussed his hatred of Jews.

And so being Jewish, that obviously sort of piqued my curiosity and attracted my attention, and I wanted to find out more about this. I became very, very interested in terrorism, both in the United States and outside of the United States. A seed had been sown.

And then another random moment that would alter Tracy's life forever. One day, my roommate had decided that she was going to go to a career fair. I actually had a class at around that time. And on my way to class, I happened to have a few copies of my resume on me that day. And she told me, you know, let's just ride down

the main thoroughfare together. I'll drop off my resume and then I'll ride with you to drop off yours and go to class together. And so I felt that that was a great idea. And she was spending a really long time at the table where she dropped off her resume and I was...

Not getting annoyed, but just I needed something to do. And I saw that there was a table and it said Central Intelligence Agency. And at that time, nothing that had exposed me to the CIA. I'm not even entirely sure that I knew that it was a career path. Tracy realized that here on the sunny campus of the University of Southern California,

might be her chance to go after those terrorists. So I went up to it and there was a recruiter there and I remember saying, well, I'm just a history major. I'm probably not of any use to you. And he said that, you know, there's really a place for all majors here. You really should drop off your resume. So I left him my resume. I went back, I got my friend and, you know, we went on to class and I don't think I thought any more about it than that.

Was it possible, in just that briefest of exchanges, the CIA recruitment agent had spotted something in Tracy that separated her from the crowd? Being able to make instant assessments is a crucial skill for any intelligence operative. And just a few weeks later... My roommate and I were just reading magazines and the phone rang. We shared a landline.

It was for me and it was my recruiter saying that he wanted to bring me to an in-person interview. Tracy was being selected for CIA recruitment. But if you want to be a spy for the CIA, you don't just sit down for a job interview. There's also the small matter of polygraph testing. I think what we're used to seeing in pop culture, right, is you hook up a perpetrator to a...

a polygraph and determine whether or not they committed the crime or are lying about it. But at the CIA, the goal of the polygraph test is actually to see if you could potentially fall victim to being recruited to spy and be a traitor. The CIA, like any agency running spies, need to know if their operatives have any skeletons hiding in their closets.

Anything that could be used against them in the future. For blackmailing them into being a double agent, for example. So I actually didn't have too much of an issue taking, you know, a polygraph test for a job interview. I knew, you know, the main job of the CIA is that you need to be trusted with secret information. And for the shy, introverted Tracy, who would rather stay at home watching CNN than be out partying, surely there wasn't anything lurking in her past.

When I took my polygraph test, to be perfectly honest, I actually wasn't nervous for it. I was, I guess, what you would call goody two-shoes. And so I had approached it with this sort of mentality of, oh, there's nothing I've done wrong. I've never broken the law. This will be very simple. But polygraphs are never that simple. Some agencies, like the British Secret Intelligence Service, say that they don't work in uncovering lies.

But maybe that's not the whole point. It's also about endurance. Because, as we've heard in this series already, they can be a long and grueling process. So much so that trained agents from the State Department refuse to even sit them. It's an hours-long process, which I did not know. And...

The question that I was having issues with was whether or not I had ever done an illicit drug. And I never have done an illicit drug. Even to this day, I've actually never done an illicit drug. But what happened was the polygrapher kept asking me the question over and over and over again. And I think what happens at that point is your body starts to get frustrated.

The polygrapher thought he could smell a rat, so he amped up the pressure. I said, "No, no, no. Why do you keep asking me this question?" Keep in mind that Tracy is only 20 years old as she's being subjected to this grilling by a seasoned CIA operative. And so as a result, your biometrics are off, right? You get frustrated, you sweat, you get mad. And so he was saying that, you know, his coming back is inconclusive.

and that I would need to come back the next day. And I think at that point, I was just like, I'm done. I'm out of here. I'm not doing this again. The CIA is not right for me. My recruiter called me and I told him I couldn't do this anymore. And he convinced me to do it the next day. So I went back the next day and, you know, they hooked me back up, asked me the same question again and again and again. And I obviously, I gave the same answer.

Tracy's nascent CIA career was in the balance. There was no way they could let her in with any doubts hanging over her integrity. And the gentleman stepped out. And I think at that point, I was very drained. And I was waiting for him to come back and I eventually fell asleep because I also hadn't slept the night before because I was obviously very nervous. And he came back in.

and he told me that I passed. - What had caused the polygraphers change in attitude? - I'll never know exactly what happened, but I think the way that they figured out that I passed was probably the fact that I fell asleep and was eating. Someone who was nervous and was lying probably would have been nervous for that entire almost hour that he was gone. - She was in. Tracey Walder had passed the CIA entrance test with her eyes closed, literally.

Well, I'll leave the profanity-laced part out of it. But so in my sorority house, and I came down, I saw that I had a letter from the government. It just said, you know, this is a conditional offer of employment, which it applies only to your graduation from college. That was the condition. Straight out of college. When I joined the CIA, I was 21. Tracy was a CIA spy.

and at an age where she was only just old enough to buy alcohol. For most people, this achievement would have resulted in pure elation. How would you feel?

It's a huge weight sort of off your shoulders. I believe they told me I was in, it was November of my senior year. And I think I was really excited, not because, oh my gosh, I'm going to go work on the CIA, but I think also I had a job, right? You know, a lot of folks their senior year in college, that's a big deal to have a job that early on into your senior year. We have to remember I had no preconceived notions of what the CIA was.

And so Tracy started her life in the CIA, like any graduate in their first job. When I joined the CIA, it was the year 2000. I think, you know, my first day, I was scared. I had never lived, you know, out of state before anything like that. So that part was really scary.

scary for me. I was excited, but I was also nervous. There was sort of both feelings. I wasn't nervous about the work itself. It was just more new job stuff. Very, you know, I would say a lot of the same nerves that people would have whenever they start, you know, a new job. But before she could start her actual work, Tracy needed to be assigned to a specific area within the CIA.

I think a lot of people assume that with the CIA, you can pick wherever you want to go there, and it definitely doesn't work like that. They basically tell you what office you're going to. You don't get to pick. Which for Tracy was a bit of a risk. She had joined the CIA to go after terrorists like the one she had seen in the cave on TV. And CIA spies can be anything from economic analysts to cybersecurity officers.

I got lucky. I was really excited that I was put into counterterrorism. But that was just, I guess, luck of the draw for me.

But was Tracy using up all her luck before her job had even begun? So when you join the CIA, I think there's a perception that if you're on the operations side, you go straight to what we call the farm. And that's actually not true. A lot of what you do first is what we call desk work. You know, just sitting in a cubicle in your office, really getting to know what they're doing there.

That's actually how really everyone's training begins. Some people like that, some people don't, but that's just is what it is. So for me, where I was placed was I was looking at terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, you know, providing targeting packages to like the Department of Defense, things like that, monitoring those camps. Monitoring the training camps for Tracey with her fascination for terrorism. This seemed like a dream come true. I thought it was very interesting.

And so I was doing some training. I can't really get into too many details, but it was very much business as usual. You know, I had a very, I guess, normal life. I'm an early bird, so I would always get in at, you know, like 6.30 in the morning. I really enjoyed running and working out so that I could do that. So for me, I would say my life was very stable, very predictable, very much, you know, I went to work and I came home. It was the calm before the storm.

I would just say the world was uniformly positive at that time. But as the summer of 2001 ended and Tracy reached the end of her first year in the agency, change was in the air. One day, she was told that she was being assigned to a new program. On September 10th, I was told I would be working in The Vault. The Vault, a highly secretive program and operations center at the heart of the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. So secretive, in fact,

you're going to have to use some imagination in working out actually what went on in there. I'll be very honest with you, the program still isn't classified, so it's difficult to talk around it. Sometimes it's really difficult to talk about some of the specifics of the program that I worked on in the vault because many portions of it and the program in its entirety still remains classified. But here is what Tracey can tell you about the work of the vault.

The overall objective and the purpose of the work that was done in the vault was to hopefully stop future terrorist attacks and to locate terrorists. You're going to hear more specific information about the kind of operations that went on in the vault, but you might have to do some spy work yourself. Listen out for the morsels of information dropped by Tracy during her story, and you'll uncover a lot of what the CIA used the vault for.

But all you really need to know is that when it comes to fighting international terrorism, this is perhaps the most significant room in the world. Which certainly wasn't apparent to Tracy back on September the 10th, 2001, when she was first told she'd be assigned there. I think I had received an email, you know, just saying that

you know, you would be working on such and such program. I really didn't think too much about it. It sounded like something interesting and something different to apply my skills that I had picked up. Tracy is still only 22 at this point. Her pre-training at the CIA hasn't even finished. And here she is being invited into the top secret program at the heart of the CIA's hunt for terrorists. But I do 100% think that my youth and naivete actually helped me

Not that Tracy didn't have questions about her new role. I did say, you know, are we going to have to kill anyone? I believe when I asked them if I was going to have to kill anybody, they said, oh, you know, not unless there's some large terrorist attack.

At the end of September 10th, 2001, Tracy finished being briefed on her coming work in the Vault program. Maybe tomorrow they would show her what was actually inside that room. But who knows what tomorrow will bring. So on September 11th, I came to work like it was any normal day. When you put your mind back to the really significant days in your life, what's the first thing you remember? Um, you know, parked my car. Is it the event itself?

That cataclysmic moment? Went and got my Starbucks. Maybe it's the chaotic chain reactions that follow. The ripples that to this day still spread out into your life. Went up to my office. Or is it just the utter mundanity of how it all started? You know, maybe talking to some colleagues, talking to them about their day or their morning. But what happens when you let your mind spool backwards? Maybe it didn't all start on that morning after all.

When I'm looking at terrorist training camps, I probably needed to focus on that. In the weeks and months before September the 11th, when Tracey had been poring over maps of terrorist training camps, she'd started to notice something strange was happening. People seemed to be clearing out of the camps. But as the new girl in the office, she couldn't be sure. Was she counting them correctly?

Where were they now, if not in the camps? You know, I was just doing my thing, looking at anything that had changed in training camps overnight. So on the morning of September 11th, as she sat at her desk with her coffee, waiting to be taken to the vault, her mind was back on those terrorist training camps.

oblivious to what was unfolding in the world outside her office. At the CIA, you know, you can't bring cell phones, outside computers, those kinds of things inside. So unless you're actively watching a news station there, you don't necessarily know that, like, breaking news has occurred. And so for me, I really did not know that the first plane had hit the World Trade Center until a colleague called me and, you know, was like, "Hey, you really should turn on sort of your real-time TV."

because a plane just hit the World Trade Center. And so I did. Initially, the significance of what was happening passed Tracy by. And my first reaction to the first plane hitting actually was not terrorism. About a month or two prior to that, a baseball player had accidentally flown his plane into a very large apartment building in Brooklyn, in New York. That's actually what popped into my mind was, oh no, that happened again.

Because again, my colleague didn't tell me, hey, this is, you know, 737 that hit. I assumed it was like a small Cessna, which is what had hit the apartment complex in Brooklyn. I think once I saw the second plane hit and I saw that it was a large, you know, Boeing, I think then I was like, okay, this is some kind of terrorist attack.

Hello, True Spies listener. This episode is made possible with the support of June's Journey, a riveting little caper of a game which you can play right now on your phone. Since you're listening to this show, it's safe to assume you love a good mystery, some compelling detective work...

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And I'm so excited to get back to it. Like I said, if you love a salacious little mystery, then give it a go. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read.

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, or a book that they've been reading for years.

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more. If you've ever started out in a new job, you'll know it takes a while to get your feet under the table, to really feel like you know what you should be doing.

And if you're fresh out of college and in your first ever real job, that feeling might take a little longer to go away. But if you're a spy working in counter-terrorism and you haven't even finished your pre-training training, and now your country is being attacked and you are suddenly at the center of it all, how would you react? Well, first of all, you might look around and see how your more experienced colleagues are reacting. So I think at that point, um...

People started gathering around other people's desks, you know, watching their TV. And then you saw a lot, like a lot of times they're your managers. They have their own office. They don't work in cubicles. And I would say 99.9% of the time they keep their doors open. It's very much a very collegial environment. But a lot of their doors were closed. And so my best guess is they were obviously talking to, you know, leadership above. And so all of us were sort of at our desks.

with each other, huddled, you know, what's going on, what's going on, we'll have to wait until so-and-so comes out of their office to tell us what we're doing. And then things got worse. It wasn't just America under attack. It was the intelligence community itself. So when the plane hit the Pentagon at that point, I believe really all federal buildings were evacuated. I know ours obviously was.

But I think all federal buildings around DC were evacuated. You're one of the people who are supposed to be protecting your country from attacks like this. And now you're under attack yourself. What is going on? You know, our cell phones didn't work. Nothing was working. It was just a mess. Are there more hijacked planes headed for other intelligence headquarters? New guesses are being made all the time, the situation changing rapidly. Would you be able to keep it together? Around you, it's chaos.

Tracy's colleagues filed out of the building, headed for safety. But not her. Yeah. Well, if you worked in the counterterrorism center, you know, you're going to be asked to stay. And so we were asked to stay. These are the moments that reveal what you're really made of. And in Tracy, what these unfolding events revealed was perhaps what that CIA recruiter had spotted in that sorority student dropping off her resume on a whim. Someone who, when the going got tough...

really tough might stay calm. I was not scared. I'm not a big panicker. So I think to be able to function at the agency and the type of work we were doing, you have to compartmentalize things. Someone who, when you most needed them, could clear their mind and focus.

And I don't know if that's good or bad, but I think you have to because if you let your emotions completely overcome you, you could make a very, very bad mistake that could have worldwide consequences. So you have to, any fear, any panic, sadness, guilt, it's okay to have those feelings, but you have to sort of put them away when you're at work. That ability to compartmentalize is essential in a spy.

in a high-pressure situation like responding to the single deadliest terrorist attack in human history. You have to put those feelings somewhere else and turn your focused mind to the tragedy unfolding around you and to the individual who could be ultimately responsible. And that individual turned out to be known as Osama bin Laden.

I believe it came into our heads right away. I don't think there was any question. Because he had tried to attack the World Trade Center back in 1993. You know, obviously the world is different now. You've got ISIS, lots of other different groups. But at that point in time, that was the only one that was capable of really doing something like this. Towards the end of September 11th, Tracy finally left work for the day. And the enormity of that day's events had a chance to register.

Like millions of Americans that day, she did not want to be on her own. I ended up going to my friend's house and she and I just, you know, hung out sort of in numb silence, I guess, and watched the news. I think for me, I just wanted to be with somebody too. That's why, you know, I was with my really good friend and we just kind of hung out together. And then, you know, I went home. I didn't really sleep and then went to work the next day.

It's difficult to imagine what it must have been like to enter work at any of the US intelligence agencies the day after September the 11th. Tracy and her colleagues started that day knowing that they were the ones tasked with responding to the attacks that had just happened. Some people that were like,

let's go fucking kill everyone. You know, of course. And then, you know, there were other people that were like, what the hell just happened? Do you know what I mean? So for me, I've never been one of those people like, let's go kill a bunch of, that's really not my personality, but I'm also not one of those people who like walks around sort of affected in this like emotional daze either. I think for me, I walked in, I was like, okay, what's the job? What are we going to do? I'm going to do the best job that I can at it.

I think for me personally, I just became more and more and more passionate about the counterterrorism mission. Externally, Tracey was focused and determined on the job at hand. That ability to compartmentalize again coming into play.

But deep down, I think that a lot of us felt a lot of guilt, particularly, you know, if you look at the 9-11 report that blamed us for it, that, you know, we should have stopped this. We should have seen this coming. We should have put all the pieces of the puzzle together. So I think that that happened right away. But you sort of have to put pack that away because you have to focus on the work. So I think what made, I guess, me fortunate was that

I felt guilty, but I was in a position where I could actually do something about it. I could do something about trying to find these people, trying to protect us from another terrorist attack. And so I think that is where I could really pour all of my effort into. And after September 11th, there was one room where all that effort was focused. The next day after September 11th was my first day in the vault. So when I first entered the vault, just right after the wake of September 11th,

I felt B, I guess, would be the right. I think I felt a little sad, but I also think I felt somewhat energized because I felt like I could do something and make a difference. The vault, it was actually like a two-compartmented room. You walked in one door and one...

portion that upon your entry that you see was almost sort of a smaller conference room. It had a conference side table at it. And then once you were in there, there was another door that you would walk into. And then that was sort of, I guess you could say the beating heart of the vault where all the actual work really took place. And that place was extremely, extremely small.

It was maybe across like 12 feet and deep, maybe 10 feet, just kind of a big rectangle. It only had about three or four people in it at any given time. The vault constantly, it sounded like constant humming. You know, there really wasn't a lot of like chit chat and chatter that went on. Every once in a while you would hear the Muslim call to prayer because we would always set our clocks to that.

But other than sort of that low hum and the occasional call to prayer, that was really the extent of what we heard. Call to prayer? Why would that be playing in this room? And why would Tracy and her colleagues need to know when it was? I don't know that I can particularly say what I saw. I'm sorry.

Well, as a hint, what I can tell you is that the U.S. forces were always very careful not to strike when they saw people practicing religious worship. For me, when I was working at, you know, the mapping, we had seen terrorists coming in and out of training camps. And, you know, our job was really to try to find them and to get the people that had attacked America. Tracy's work inside the vault had begun. I worked very strange hours, you know, 12, 13-hour shifts,

When we first started, it was really just us and, you know, George Tenet. The director of the CIA back in 2001. But as this particular program grew and grew and grew, we began to have more and more influential people in there, folks like Dick Cheney. The then U.S. vice president. George Bush. The then U.S. actual president. Condoleezza Rice.

The then U.S. National Security Advisor, you get the picture. They would all be in there wanting to see what we were doing, but then also wanting our opinions on things. Tracy turned 23 in October that year, working in the vault with the president of the USA looking over her shoulder. I was definitely relaxed about that. I mean, we were...

It became almost annoying after a while because we got very used to like being able to come to work in this environment in like sweatpants. And so if we received a heads up that, you know, Bush was coming or Cheney or whomever, we always had to come in like super professional attire, which meant, you know, waking up earlier. So after a while, we started to get annoyed. But no, we were, I wouldn't say we ignored them, but we just sort of developed the attitude of only speak when spoken to by them.

They would ask us a lot of questions. That's mostly what happened. Or they would just sort of stand there and see what we were doing. I think that, you know, those sort of high-value individuals really just thought that we were playing computer games in there. Playing computer games? What exactly were the president and the intelligence chiefs there to watch Tracy do? Can't get into specifics about that, but they weren't there to just, you know, see me. More classified details, I'm afraid.

But those activities become a little clearer when those "computer games" reach their end of level showdown. It was early December 2001, nearly three whole months since the September 11th attacks. The US was still striking out in their search for the person who had masterminded it all. Was he still in Afghanistan? Possibly Pakistan? Maybe somewhere else entirely? Rumor was abundant, but facts were scarce. And then, one cold night,

We had received information or intelligence from analyst operatives that bin Laden was in a place called Tora Bora. In Afghanistan's White Mountains near the Khyber Pass. Which is very close to the Afghan-Pakistan region. And that's, you know, that's great intel to have a more precise location of him than that. The military had received word that we should try to get him there.

A chance to capture Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of 9/11, was suddenly here. The story had been leaked to the newspapers, who are now reporting that the US knew where bin Laden was hiding. So now bin Laden knew that the US knew where he was. The clock was suddenly ticking. How long would he stay in that location?

To make matters worse, there was also a shortage of available ground troops in the Tora Bora location to go in and capture him. There were a lot of issues that we were facing as well. We really needed ground troops down there and we were not getting them. So I think for us, we were starting to get a little frustrated. There were just so many different things that needed to happen and some of which were not happening. Can you imagine the frustration of that situation?

That man Tracy had seen on TV back in her sorority house, issuing a death sentence on her country and religion. Then going on to kill thousands on 9-11. Now suddenly in her crosshairs, but without the full arsenal to capture him. How would you feel?

With some of the most powerful people in the world looking on, you and your team consider the options. There were two schools of thought, right, of how we should get bin Laden in Tora Bora. Like the first, do we send in ground troops? Do we do kind of like precision Air Force bombing? Or do we not send in ground troops at all and just, you know, carpet bomb the whole place? And the ground troops being requested weren't available.

I would say that ladder is what, you know, won out. You know, let's just carpet bomb the whole place. And that's sort of what had happened. Down on the ground in Afghanistan, pandemonium, explosions rained down. You know, mostly the Air Force that was doing those missile drops. And in the vault...

Members of the team had to take 30-minute shifts. Difficult to explain what that was without divulging the program, but sometimes when something is extremely intense, you can develop sort of tunnel vision really quickly. So it's kind of better to have a fresh perspective coming in more rapidly. I would say my colleagues and I were all behaving the same. We were quiet. I don't think anyone talked to anyone.

I don't remember talking to anyone during that time. Because I remember, you know, if you did talk, someone somewhere high up would tell you, yell at you to shut up. But it's not because they were being mean. It's just they needed the focus. And I don't think we really wanted to talk to each other. What was there to talk about? You know, so I think we all were sort of behaving the same. We all just, you know, we would take those shifts, right, on and off. And then in between those shifts, we would maybe put our head down.

I remember some guy going like underneath the conference table and like there was a pillow down there. Hours and hours went by.

Tracy and her colleagues passing each other between shifts, stepping between worlds, the pressure of the work in the vault, life and, let's face it, often death decisions being made, then normality outside. But that's part of the compartmentalization I talked about. You just don't have time to reflect on, you know, holy shit, what did I just do? Sort of, you know, that moment. You don't have time for that because

Because if you take time for that, you might do something wrong or forget to do something that could have broader implications. And part of the problem with the compartmentalization is

is that it starts to take a mental toll on you a little bit. And one of the things that I do think that the agency could do better, and maybe they have done better, is providing more psychologists to the people that work there. Because you have to remember, I can't just go talk to someone about it, about the things I did and the things that I saw, because they're not cleared. So that presents itself as a problem. The battle of Tora Bora went on.

Hours of focused concentration and pressure. I know that we came very, very close. Hours turned to days. But I think if you don't have enough ground forces on the ground to keep him from escaping. Over a week, still no sign of the target. He's just going to kind of leak through like water, which is exactly what happened. The creeping realization that this wasn't going to be the success that so many hoped for.

Well, I think everyone knows that we lost him at Tora Bora. We don't know for sure where he went, but in my opinion, best guess is he went to the mountainous border region in Pakistan. And then, you know, I think there was this huge sense of defeat. I don't think we blamed ourselves, though.

I think it was more of like, we told you you should have had ground troops. That kind of situation, we didn't blame ourselves, but it just became, it was a little bit defeating. However, we had lots of successes throughout, you know, the time, the months that I worked there even, and even that night. And so I think that's probably why we weren't too defeated. I would say once he was lost, you know, it was sort of like, okay, everyone just go home. Just go home. We need to rethink all this.

Soon after the Battle of Tora Bora, Tracy left behind her work at the vault. I think they realized that doing really intense work has a lifespan, kind of the whole idea of on and off shifts of 30 minutes. And so they wanted to rotate people off of the program. And that's pretty common, actually, at CIA. You do that a lot. And so Tracy decided in her next posting she was going to take it easy on herself. You can sort of internally apply things

for other jobs and there was a new group that had been set up within the counter-terrorism center called the Weapons of Mass Destruction group so I applied for it and I worked in there. So not easy at all. Tracey went to work in the field, down on the ground, and I'm speculating here, in some of the countries that she might have once looked down on from the vault. I can't really go into that, I'm sorry. And after that, an easier posting, surely.

And so I knew I liked counterterrorism, so I thought, "Well, why don't I apply for the FBI?" So I did, and I became a special agent at the FBI. I worked Chinese counterintelligence there. But through all of this work, there was a calling for Tracey that was stronger than counterterrorism and counterintelligence, a passion that she'd carried in her right from the start.

And after six years of intense spy work, it was a calling that eventually won her over. I, you know, decided now is the time for me to finally be what I had gotten a college to be, which was a history teacher. And so I enrolled in my master's in education and became a teacher. But for those who've lived their lives in the shadowy world of espionage, your past can often be hard to ever turn away from, no matter how hard you might try to hide it.

And one day at school, Tracy let slip a detail about her past to one of her students. Obviously they have a lot of questions about them. And she realized that rather than hide her past, she could use it to the benefit of these inquiring minds.

So I was able to set up a course on national security, foreign policy and espionage for my students. I came to see that they really didn't have anything like that. And it became really one of the most popular classes at my school. And as a result, a lot of these girls have gone into espionage.

Department of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, State Department, sort of all over the place. And I think they needed a woman to show them that these are careers that females can have. For me, I think teaching is a way that I feel that I'm still involved in this mission because I'm sort of arming a new group of people to take it on and to at least care about it.

Tracey is using her unique perspective as a former CIA and FBI agent to nurture the next generation of spies. I think the best piece of advice that I could give a young woman wanting to go into the intelligence community are two things. I'd say the first one is...

don't be afraid to go for it even if you don't see a lot of people that look like you within these these careers um the only way they're going to change is there are more people of your gender in them um and also you know don't have too many expectations or preconceived notions of what you think you want when you get into these jobs go in with it with with an open mind tracy's story highlights something we see again and again secretly spies are just like us

ordinary people doing extraordinary things. That's why the CIA and other agencies recruit bright young things from college campuses. And that's why Tracy is now able to inspire her high school students to think big about where their skills might take them. Join us next week for another assignment with True Spies.

We all have valuable spy skills, and our experts are here to help you discover yours. Get an authentic assessment of your spy skills, created by a former head of training at British Intelligence, for free now at Spyscape.com.