Tradecraft, Part 1
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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: Tradecraft, part one. It was as close to Mission Impossible or Q as you could get and not be in Hollywood. You're about to peer inside a folder of espionage industry secrets with some of the world's most qualified agents. Are you ready? This is your first installment of True Spies: Tradecraft.

You've seen it in movies and you read about it in books. A gifted, bright young thing is swept away from the path they thought they were heading down and recruited into a life of secrets, danger, deception. Their tools? That will depend on the assignment. But one thing that each and every operative brings with them into whatever mission awaits is a foundation of skills and intuition. Some of it innate, some of it very much learnt.

It's this that the spies are referring to when they talk about tradecraft. We had to learn all of the tradecraft of all of the spies who might operate in the United States so that we could determine whether they were targets and to follow those targets and catch them in the act of espionage or terrorism when they went to do their bad act.

This is FBI investigative specialist Eric O'Neill. In episode two of True Spies, he was tasked with catching the most notorious mole in the history of the Bureau, Robert Hansen. We worked from the shadows, so we were trained in all of the traditional clandestine techniques, disguises, how to use photography to capture a target from a long distance.

There's a word in this business for specialists like Eric O'Neill. The word is ghost. I think that when people imagine a spy hunter, they're not thinking of an FBI special agent. They're thinking of a ghost. So before we immerse ourselves in the skills and technology used by some of the most gifted spies in the world, a little crash course in some of the basics of tradecraft. Let's call this Ghosting 101. First up...

Whether they like coffee or tea, whether they're going to go into a fast food restaurant or they like the high-end places, you need to know enough about them to know where they might go when you're following them. Are you dressed correctly? You don't dress in jeans and a rowdy t-shirt if you're downtown in the middle of corporate DC, but you might if you're walking across a college campus.

And third, you need to know how to be grey.

If you are gray, you are unseen. That doesn't mean that someone doesn't look and you're standing there and they notice you. That means that when they notice you, their eyes just sort of slide right by because you're nondescript, you're non-threatening, you're non-interesting, you're non-memorable. That means that you have to have the right disguise, wear the right clothing, act the particular way, not look like someone that stands out. And that is a skill that is extremely hard to teach. So the best way

Field operatives who move around following a target on foot have to know the art of being gray. Got all that? Maybe there's a tendency to think of spies as larger-than-life characters. People who wear an appetite for danger on their sleeves. Risk takers. Would you be able to spot one of those characters among your ranks? I wouldn't be so certain. My name is Valerie Plame. I was a covert CIA operations officer.

My first job overseas was as a case officer. My last job was as a manager of some extremely compartmented secret programs that dealt with nuclear proliferation, essentially making sure that bad guys, whether they are terrorists, black marketeers, rogue nation states, that they did not acquire nuclear weapons.

nuclear capacity or nuclear weapon. And I loved what I did. Valerie Plame learned a thing or two about being gray. She had to, you see. For one thing, she was married to a highly visible American diplomat, Joseph Wilson. Surely their friends in Washington were curious about what she was getting up to while Joe was at work?

All the attention was on Joe, right? When you're in Washington, if you're just, quote, a spouse, no one pays you any mind, right? So all I had to say was, you know, I'm a consultant, I travel, I'm

And then people just, they glaze over, right? You don't have your own car and driver. You don't have any important position. It's very much driven by your access to power and so forth. Because whether it's in Washington or so many places in the world, many, many people, frankly, discount women. And what could they possibly be up to other than, say, shopping? No one knew where I worked other than my parents and, you know, my husband. Yeah.

So, staying unnoticed, living in the shadows, being grey, perhaps not so tricky after all when you're a woman. Valerie would, however, be expected to put her gender to good use if push came to shove, as she rightly intuited at one memorable CIA job interview. So the woman who that day happened to be interviewing me was a very proper older woman, I think she had a twin set on, set of pearls, her grey hair and a very nice bob.

And she asked me the following. Okay, what would you do, Valerie, if you are in an operational meeting with an asset, a man, you're in a seedy hotel room, he's passing you very secret papers, and all of a sudden, in your middle of the meeting, you hear pounding at the door and you hear, police, open up. What would you do?

Well, what would you do? Careful now. Your entire future in the world of espionage hinges on this answer. I wasn't very worldly in many ways, but I realized the only good reason a man and a woman would be together in a hotel room, well, there's only one good reason. So I said, look, everyone takes off their clothes real fast and jumps into bed.

It goes without saying by this point that Valerie got the job, and in doing so, walked a path that was pioneered by another woman, who knows a thing or two about being underestimated. My name is Mark Cohn. C-O-H-N.

If you heard Marta's story in an earlier episode of True Spies, you'll know that this formidable spy, a bilingual Jew who fearlessly risked her life in aid of the Allied forces, was about as devoted to the cause as an agent can be.

Still, that didn't stop our colleagues.

and almost every officer she encountered from overlooking her. I was 4'11". I was very thin. I was very blonde with blue eyes and a very light skin. And they felt that I had no substance whatsoever. So they didn't trust me and they never accepted me. In the end, though, it was precisely this assumption that someone as insubstantial as Marta Kohn could never prove a threat

that delivered her biggest victory as a spy in the dying days of World War II. I stopped along the road a group of German military ambulances.

And the colonel, who was a physician, I saw by his uniform immediately that he was a physician, was standing there with all his entourage near the ambulances. So I stopped to inquire what was going on. When you see something unusual, you have to stop and know what's going on. The colonel told me,

said they would, that night, drive into Switzerland, which was very close, and from there to Austria to prevent to become prisoners of war. They knew that Freiburg was occupied already by Allied armies. They didn't know which one, but I knew. But they didn't. He asked me from where I was coming.

And I told him that I had just escaped from Freiburg because I was terrorized by the French army. I complained, too, that the German army was not defending us anymore as much as they should. And after a while, the colonel said to me, don't be so desperate.

The war is not ended. Then a gift. And he told me exactly where the remnant of the German army was hidden in ambush in the Black Forest. The lives of Allied soldiers advancing on the Black Forest were in Marta's hands. She wrote it in a letter and ran as fast as she could to the nearest customs office so the message could be delivered to her commanding officer.

It arrived on time. Colonel Reinhard read it because it was not coded so he could read it. It was in French. I didn't take the time to code it. I had no time for that. Intelligence received. The Allied leaders were warned. In those last days of the war, no Allied troops died in a Black Forest ambush. She had saved countless lives.

And that's why I got all these medals. A little well-earned recognition then for some exemplary espionage and a welcome reminder that sometimes the best disguise is nothing more than the skin you live in. There are other times though when your skin alone won't quite cut it. It's difficult because you're operating against some very sophisticated and professional KGB surveillance teams. They are very good at what they do.

In episode 21 of True Spies, an undercover CIA officer by the name of James Olsen shared his hair-raising story of being sent on a mission, alongside his fellow CIA officer wife, Meredith, behind the Iron Curtain to Moscow. We were briefed on this incredible space age project that was being contemplated.

It was to tap an underground cable in Moscow, an underground cable that we believed would have extremely valuable intelligence information for us if we could succeed. For all three decades of his career with the CIA, Jim worked undercover. But being sent to the center of Soviet power at the height of the Cold War? That required some special skills. The tradecraft used in Moscow is extremely specialized.

very, very demanding. So Meredith and I had to master all of that, as well as continue our Russian language training. Part of the training was to recreate a Moscow environment. So Meredith and I were put in a special bug department. We were put under surveillance, trying to recreate what we would encounter in Moscow to make certain that we could

First of all, operate under those conditions successfully using our tradecraft. And then secondly, if we could withstand that kind of constant pressure and lack of privacy, whether we individually could withstand it, but also maybe just as importantly, whether our marriage could withstand that kind of stress. Once James and Meredith were in place, undercover in Moscow, they were watched unceasingly.

So when it came time to carry out their assignment, to somehow slip through the net of KGB surveillance and wiretap a pipeline containing the secrets of Russia's nuclear capability, that would require some advanced tradecraft. Never mind grey, this would mean going black. Black is our terminology for getting free of surveillance. I was being smothered by KGB surveillance. This was part of the pipeline for Meredith and me.

involving some very sophisticated space age techniques. And one of these is what I used to get free of surveillance on this particular day. A devoted family man, it would make sense that James would take his wife and children out to one of the many parks and forests that surround Moscow. James used one such outing in the forest to slip away, while Meredith held the attention of the KGB surveillance team. Well, she was a decoy.

And I can't be too specific, but we're under surveillance as a couple. They see me go off somewhere for some purpose. Who knows? Maybe to go into the bushes to a restroom. Maybe to find a wayward child who's run loose. Something. They see me temporarily disappear. And I don't come back and do course. So Meredith is a decoy. She's holding them there.

While Meredith kept the KGB's surveillance focused on what may or may not have been a perfectly ordinary picnic, James sprang into action. Back in the pipeline, James had been briefed on an experimental new disguise technique. Combining Hollywood special effects and some creative tailoring, the "Disguise on the Run" program was the ultimate in identity-bending technology. Now it was time to put it into action.

You are under observation in one identity, in one location, and there is an opportunity for you to change that identity very, very quickly on the move while you are temporarily out of sight and then instantly reappear in a different identity and walk back through your surveillance without being detected, without being picked up. As James stalked toward his target, using the park's natural foliage as cover...

He applied his disguise in fluid, expert movements. First, the semi-animated mask, SAM for short. Designed by John Chambers, the legendary prosthetics artist behind the original Planet of the Apes movies, the SAM allowed its wearer to eat, drink, speak, and even smoke in relative comfort.

Unlike the time-consuming designs used on Hollywood productions, the mask would be applied in a matter of seconds, allowing any operative to convincingly change their appearance on a whim. With this technology, even ethnicity and gender were rendered superficial traits. A spy with a "Sam" in their armory could become anyone, anytime. Just like that, the clean-cut American diplomat had become a working-class Muscovite.

As he took a winding path towards the highway, all the better to throw any pursuers off the scent, James checked and double-checked his surroundings. The KGB were nowhere to be seen. He was black. I look like a Russian worker, complete with the physical features of a Russian. I have Slavic features. I get on a bus.

that's heading out this highway. I get off past the manhole cover about a mile. You're free on the streets of Moscow and you have a mission to perform. I'll never forget that feeling. It's indescribable. So you've heard about being grey. You know what it takes to give the KGB the slip under the most intensive scrutiny or to go black. How about purple? Where does that fit into Tradecraft 101?

There was five undercover agents, myself, a female undercover, and the three other undercovers. We're on a 30-story condo overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, a beautiful condominium. It just screams money. So we're all preparing for this meeting. This is Special Agent Michael McGowan in episode 11 of True Spies.

He served in the FBI for 30 years, mostly as an undercover agent. And the meeting that he's about to describe? It was a key turning point in his effort to bring down the infamous Mexican drug lord, El Chapo. An effort that saw him go undercover as the head of a Sicilian crime family and deal directly with El Chapo's cousin, Manuel. So we're all preparing for this meeting, which is critical because, you know, Washington headquarters is...

This was a big, big deal at the time to be able to work a case against the Sinaloa cartel. So as the team leader, I noticed all of our guys were very nervous, which was expected. But everybody in that room had 20 years of experience. So I had worked with everybody in that room many, many times. And I could just tell they were a little bit anxious about what was going to happen. Put yourself in Michael's shoes. This is a huge opportunity for the Bureau. The scene is set to perfection.

But you know that the Sinaloa cartel are acutely aware that law enforcement officers are always on their tail. Any nerves on the part of your team could reveal that this is all a setup. Your target is going to arrive at any minute. You need to calm everyone down quickly. What are you going to do? Whatever you're thinking, I'll wager it isn't anywhere close to what Michael actually did. Without any thought, I went in to use the men's room. I was dressed in a...

very expensive suit and dressed as a Sicilian crime boss would look. And I went in there and in the bathroom I found a purple velour bathrobe behind the door. And I don't really know why to this day I did it, but I took off my expensive suit and my jewelry, et cetera, and I put on this bathrobe, this hideous bathrobe,

And I walked out before Manuel arrived into our crowd. It immediately broke the ice. Everybody started laughing. They were rolling on the floor. It really kind of cut the tension. And it was just a technique I used to try to put everybody at ease. And then they thought I was going to go back and change. Well, I didn't. I stayed for this meeting. So when Manuel came, and I didn't appear at first. He met with the other undercovers. When Manuel came, I eventually came out of the back room in a velour bathrobe,

Which, you know, they're not going to think you're an FBI agent if you're dressed in a purple bathrobe. And we later learned, we have a recorded conversation where Manuel went back and told Chapo that De La Jefe was so unconcerned that he didn't even get dressed for the meeting. He was walking around in his bathrobe. So again, you do these little nuances to get them to think that you're anything but an FBI agent. And in this case, it seems to have worked.

A valuable lesson there on thinking like the enemy and committing to your cover. Another vital aspect of tradecraft. Not that it always has to be quite so... adrenalized.

The first months of 1982 were probably the most serene and quiet in my life. Hang on a second. Those aren't words you'd expect from a former Mossad operative describing one of the most dangerous assignments of his career. My name is Gad Shimron, born in Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Israel, 26 February 1950. In his long Mossad career, Gad Shimron had to commit to many cover stories.

But the one he's remembering now, in episode one of True Spies, saw him stationed in Sudan, attempting to smuggle persecuted Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the early 1980s. The problem was, it was very small numbers, say five, six, ten every week. And the Mossad, they understood they needed another cover story in order to be able to get information.

Big numbers of Jews every time, not family here and a family there. And so Dani and Ferede, they went looking around and 40 kilometers north of the big port city of Port Sudan, they found a deserted diving resort, which was built in the early 70s by an Italian company. In an abandoned Italian diving school, perched on the shores of the Red Sea,

Gad's colleagues in Mossad saw an opportunity to scale up their rescue operation. Danny found this place, deserted as it is. He came up with the idea that we, I mean the Mossad, will take over the place, will pay the Sudanese government, the Sudanese tourist corporation some money, you know, every year.

And, you know, kind of a lend-lease deal. And the idea was that this diving resort will enable the Mossad to bring operatives to Sudan. And it's a good cover story. Indeed, it is. One of the best. And so they built a high-end, high-class diving operation from the ground up.

This is a remarkable feat as the infrastructure is, let's say, limited. There was not one single gasoline station on the way, not one single normal hotel, not one single normal garage. Maintenance is a word nobody knew what it is. But despite those limitations, by 1982, renovation of the Red Sea Diving School was well underway, and the Mossad agents in charge

They were wholeheartedly committing to their cover. We were two Mossad operatives in a deserted diving resort in the process of being rebuilt with five or six Sudanese employees. And we really had the time of our life.

I remember Ruby lying on the beach. He spread his fingers in order to let the sun reach every centimeter of his skin. I took one of the locals and taught him how to drive a rubber dinghy, a Zodiac.

And we would go in the lagoon and he would tell me, you know, water skiing in the name of the security of Israel, which is very nice if you think about it. Whenever we were hungry, we would take one of the boats we had there and go out to, you know, the most beautiful blue seas of the world. And we would just, you know, pick up a nice grouper and bring him for lunch or a lobster or two.

If only all assignments were so luxurious.

and a larger-than-life character or two. You can find all of those things in abundance in June's Journey. In the game, you'll play as June Parker, a plucky amateur detective trying to get to the bottom of her sister's murder. It's all set during the roaring 1920s.

And I absolutely love all the little period details packed into this world. I don't want to give too much away because the real fun of June's journey is seeing where this adventure will take you. But I've just reached a part of the story that's set in Paris.

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. Here I am brand new to the United States. I had no frame of reference. I didn't know how to interpret this.

I go into the hotel and the reception desk was protected by plexiglass. Having no point of reference, I thought maybe most hotels would be that way. When Jack Barsky, or should I call him Albrecht Dietrich, arrived in the United States in the late 70s, he had two goals: to embed himself in American life and to wait. He was a KGB sleeper agent, cut off from the world he left behind the Iron Curtain.

And back in those days, his only means of communication were, by today's standards, a little complicated.

Communication with a center was the most awkward and at one point most annoying part of the whole spying business because it was labor intense. It took a lot of time and the amount of information that could be transmitted back and forth was not enough to really, in many cases, make sense. I never met a Soviet agent before.

on the territory of the United States for purposes of direct communication. So I got my instructions to shortwave radio

It was double encrypted Morse code. I got a transmission about once a week on a particular day at a particular time. Thursdays at 9:15 p.m. And if you think of maybe a half-page typewritten material that would take me to receive and to decrypt, would take me roughly about two and a half hours. Sometimes I spent the whole night into early morning if there was a very lengthy radiogram.

And what about if Jack had information to send back home? Or a question about an upcoming assignment? Surely there had to be a simpler way in an emergency. For me, to transmit information to the sender was even more awkward because it was via secret writing through the regular mail.

I would compose a letter as if I was writing to somebody. And then on top of the open text, I would put a text in secret writing. And that letter was then mailed to what we call a convenience address in, say, in South America or in Europe to a person who was collaborating with the

who would then hand it to a local KGB agent. It would then go into the diplomatic pouch, sent to Moscow, and over there would be developed. So when you think about, you know, was there a conversation possible? You ask a question and you get an answer three weeks later. It was awkward and fundamentally insufficient. This spy game, it turns out, is not all lobsters and water skiing after all.

But Jack Barsky's stroll down KGB memory lane serves as a good reminder of the nitty-gritty of espionage. Arduous as they may be, these practices were essential in protecting assets during the Cold War,

Whichever side you happen to be fighting for. The other thing that kept me there was the idea that, from my point of view, almost everything we were doing was protecting the foreign officers that were working with the American case officers. And in many cases, keeping them from getting arrested.

and in Moscow, keeping them from being executed. Even in the, shall we say, eclectic world of espionage, Jonna Mendes' CV might strike you as particularly varied. Before she became the head of disguise for the entire CIA, she worked in an entirely different field, as she explains in episode seven of True Spies. The beginning of my career was not in disguise. It was the photography that pulled me in.

As part of the CIA's Office of Technical Services, John Amendez provided countless agents with the technology they would require for their assignments.

We were the gadget people of the CIA. We were the technical officers who provided anything technical you needed for your operation, you would come to see us. If you wanted a sub-miniature camera that would fit in a writing pen, if you wanted disguise, if you needed false documents, it was unbelievable the kinds of resources we had.

And her speciality during the height of the Cold War? It was in really small cameras, sub-miniature cameras we called them. Our own unique cameras that only we had. One of our cameras was called a Tropel. It was a sub-miniature camera. It was so small that you could put it in a fountain pen. You could put it in a key fob. You could take a hundred pictures.

Inside of the camera was a film cassette, and on that film cassette were a hundred black dots, and each dot was a page of text. And, you know, loading that film and developing that film and printing that film was an art. But as a tool during the Cold War, those cameras stood right shoulder to shoulder with any satellite system we had overhead. Yet it wasn't so much the technology itself that impressed Jonna.

It was the stakes at play for the agents out in the field who depended on it. You are reminding yourself when you're developing this film that comes in from a foreign agent, for instance, you're reminding yourself in the dark, in the dark room, that the man that took these photographs took an enormous risk to himself, maybe his family, to get that information and to get it to you.

Because once he's photographed the secret documents, that's only the beginning. Now he has to communicate it to you, and that's where a lot of the danger lies, is in passing that information from him to us. In this instance, he's giving us, say, a roll of film. But to get that roll of film, he can't just walk up to us and hand it to us. He has to somehow conceal the film. Maybe he puts it somewhere. Maybe he puts it...

Behind a toilet tank in a pub. And then the American case officer knows where it's going to be, goes in and picks it up. All of that, every bit of that is fraught with danger. It was reducing that danger and keeping everybody safe that was the constant challenge. Of course, not every player is out in the field putting their neck on the line to uncover secrets.

In fact, sometimes the most important figures in intelligence operations of international proportions are far removed from the action and aren't even strictly speaking spies. We're not linked to any intelligence service. We don't get tips, we don't get clues. We're not even an old-fashioned journalist organization, a media organization that has its network of sources that leak.

So all we can do is wait for some sort of shred of evidence to appear publicly and then we take it from there. As a key member of Bellingcat, an investigation hothouse that specializes in open source intelligence, Christo Grozev admits in episode 16 of True Spies that he has more in common with a journalist than an undercover agent.

But that didn't stop him from playing a decisive role in one of the biggest stories of espionage of the 21st century, the poisoning of Russian former double agent Sergei Skripal on UK soil. Committing a crime like this in the United Kingdom is probably the worst idea on earth because it's completely dotted and littered with security cameras. An open source analyst like Christo feeds off the kind of intel that is theoretically available to all.

No espionage required, should you know where to look for it. In the days after the Novichok poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, two men were quickly identified by CCTV footage as key suspects, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Bozyarov. According to an interview they gave on Russia Today, they were completely innocent, nothing more than two ordinary citizens taking in the sights of picturesque Salisbury.

Krzysztof Grozew wasn't buying it, so he began the arduous task of uncovering their true identities. And the skill set he employed? Well, let's just say that any spy could learn a thing or two from this piece of tradecraft.

There were a couple of schools-only institutes, as they called them, that prepared elite spies with good training of foreign languages and a grasp of understanding how the West works. And one of them was the Far Eastern Military Institute in Khabarovsk. Khabarovsk, by the way, is about as far east as you can go in Russia. Thousands of miles from Moscow. An eight-hour flight. And this is where Christo started looking. Digitally, of course.

We actually spent a few nights looking at Facebook photographs of its graduates, looking for a glimpse of a younger version of Bushirov to hopefully see him there.

We had allocated the sort of yearbook photos by year. So we spent a good three nights going through thousands of different photographs, also photographs posted on the social media groups of the school graduates and alumni. This painstaking digital legwork eventually bore fruit. A picture of a man bearing a resemblance to Bashirov, obviously on military assignment in a war zone.

It was against the background of a mountain in a place that looked like the Caucasus. And it was a group of five or six people in military attire. And we were told that this is most likely Chechnya, one of the mountains in Chechnya, where there had been two long-running wars. And the time of the photograph was given to us as somewhere between 2001 and 2004. It was a start. They could narrow their search.

Someone who had graduated from the military academy in Khabarovsk, who had then served in Chechnya. And we found, by sheer luck, a reference in a military magazine, a reference to a hero of Russia who had graduated the Far Eastern Military Institute, who had fought on three assignments at three different times in Chechnya, was wounded there, and was one of the sort of one of the graduates that the Institute was most proud of.

Being a hero of Russia is a big deal. It's the highest award available to any Russian citizen, conferred by the President himself. More importantly for Bellingcat, this particular hero of Russia had a name: Anatoly Chapiga. Could this be their man?

The hardest evidence we were hoping to get was a copy of a passport file under the name of Anatoly Chepiga that would have the identical photograph that we had seen in the passport file of Bushehrov. It took a few more days to find someone who could get them a copy of that passport file. It was worth the wait.

This was the moment when all of that trawling through thousands of pictures paid off. We got a file in the name of Anatoly Chepiga and it had a photograph of a younger version of the person we had seen in the Russia Today interview. Bingo. There you have it. All the proof you need to show that the innocent sightseer in Salisbury and the elite decorated Russian spy are one and the same person.

A key turning point in this international espionage whodunit. And a valuable entry point to the world of open source intelligence gathering. A world that Gina Bennett knows well. My name is Gina Bennett and what I do is a very complicated question. As we discover in episode 22 of True Spies, Gina is a legendary CIA analyst.

Like Christo, she spends her days trawling through data and documents, joining the dots, piecing together a narrative, looking for the answers that hide in plain sight. Our role is not to track with the rest of the national security apparatus. It's to look where everybody else isn't looking and to be aware and warn where other people aren't seeing the problems. Is this something you could do?

Do you have the patience, the resilience, the attention to detail, the confidence that somewhere in that haystack there really is a needle? I used to just draw things on massive big pieces of paper. You know, where we heard something here, where we heard something there, and just start to see the picture of it. I'm a very visual thinker, and so I like to see things pictured on a map or, you know, some kind of flow. It's like...

These tiny little pieces of a puzzle and you don't really have the picture yet, but you just have a sense that you're picking up on pieces that you really need to pay attention to and not lose sight of. If Gina sounds a little obsessive, like someone using pieces of string to link clues on a cork board, well, it's because she is. And for good reason. There's a lot at stake in this line of work.

Unlike Christo, who was trying to untangle a tragedy that already happened, it's Gina's job to peer into the future and prevent the next incident from taking place altogether. And in 2001, after a couple of years of troubling activity from a terrorist organization known as Al-Qaeda, she felt a terrible sense of foreboding.

We had told the world, including the US, that the system was blinking red in 1999 and nothing happened. At the same time, we're seeing this system blinking red, and from what we're seeing, that system blinking red is saying in the United States, there's going to be attack in the United States. On September 9, 2001, a politician and military commander called Ahmed Shah Massoud

is assassinated in Afghanistan. And Gina is convinced something big is about to happen. There's no question we had a sense of doom because of that. It was hard for us to believe that was a random thing. In other words, we believed al-Qaeda had successfully committed an assassination against one of the key former party leaders of the Afghan Mujahideen.

who also happened to be our closest working partner in Afghanistan. So it was really hard not to feel like the other shoe was about to drop. And when the other shoe did drop, it was beyond the powers of Gina and her colleagues to do anything but stop in their tracks and watch.

So it's a beautiful day in Virginia. And, you know, the first thing you do as a warning analyst when you get to work is start reading everything that has happened in the 12 hours that you've been gone or however many hours, eight hours, whatever it's been. So, you know, the morning is mostly just taking in information and trying to sort out which of it you have to pay attention to in the next hour or two or, you know, next day, whatever. And then shortly before nine in the morning,

there are reports of an aircraft flying into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Now, at the time, it was like everyone knows, it was considered a collision. You know, there was no indication at the moment that it was intentional. So we are all trying to figure out how that could possibly happen. And then the next plane hits the South Tower just 17 minutes later, and Gina understands immediately what's happening.

You can't see that and think that was a coincidence. I mean, it's just not possible. So it's in that moment when we see the other plane hit that we realize exactly what this is. There's nobody in the counterterrorist center at that moment who didn't know what this was. This was the plot. This was the system blinking red. This was the attack. I mean, I did not see the first plane hit because I was, you know, at my desk already plowing through my material for the day, but...

When the second plane flies straight into that building, there was just no way there was any other explanation. And this is what they have wanted. This is what they have been trying to do since, you know, 1993. Perhaps the most valuable lesson of all in this whirlwind tour of tradecraft, no matter how well you've been trained, no matter how good your instincts, no matter what resources are available to you,

There will always be scenarios beyond your control. Crises that you cannot contain. Catastrophes that shake the very foundations of your life as an operative. But it's the moments after everything goes wrong that will define you. So, you know, we immediately go to what we have to do. We know what we have to do. Nobody has to ask us. We know immediately.

You got to figure out who else, where else, what's next. Start building the case of, you know, who it was, how they did it. I mean, it's just gather, gather, gather again, those dots, those fragments of information. Because, you know, from our perspective, it's not about who done it. It's about what's next and how do we stop it? After all, a spy's work is never done. I'm Vanessa Kirby.

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