She also discusses her decision to leave the cia to become an fbi special agent, 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. I am the executive director of the International Spy museum. I am excited to introduce this program with former c. I. A. Officers officer, fbi special agent, now author, tracy walder. Tracy joined the cia straight out of college and served as a staff Operations Officer the counterterrorism 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 four and a halfyearold daughter in dallas, texas. This evening, tracy will discuss her memoir, the unexpected supply unexpected spine unexpected spy. Interviewed by our very own historian and curator. After the discussion, they will open the floor to audience questions. Everyone will have an 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 you have a mic to answer questions to ask your questions but there on each sideics of the auditorium you can use. If you cant get out, stay where you are at and raise your hand. One other administration of administrative notice. Pleasehave a cell phone, silence it. I will lead by example and make sure mine is silenced. I will kick it over to vince and tracy. I think you will enjoy this evenings discussion. Thank you. The first time we were introduced to tracy was when our Educational Team discovered the. Mazing work she was doing it is extraordinary what she decided to do, to challenge young people. I have taught at every level, from Elementary School all the way through college. The gumption and challenge is extraordinary. I would not have had College Students doing it so it is interesting. She is also on the board of directors for a Nonprofit Organization called girl security, which we will talk about as well, another way she has decided to give back to not only her community but her country. We will hear more about those later but i want to jump right in. We had a long conversation, if anyone listens to spy cast. We record a podcast. We had a chance to try out some of these questions before we put it in front of a live studio audience, some of them worked better than others but one that was interesting to me, certainly as an author myself and as someone who has dealt with redaction and classification, the process you had to go through to get this book cleared through the cias publication review board, in particular because they can be somewhat problematic and difficult. Anyone who has looked at the book already, there are lines that were redacted that were left inside. There was a whole lot more they didnt want you to put out. How much difficulty was it, getting this through the prb . Tracy first, everyone, thank you for coming. I want to recognize one of my former students in my in the audience. Thank you for being here. In terms of the publications review board, there were two women that came before me. Both of them took about two years to get their books through the prb and i credit them with the easier time that i had. Prbing my book through the was externally important to me. Them, justff to hoping it would not be what we called denied in full, which means you cannot publish this period. It was not. It came back about four months after my initial submission with four complete chapters just flatlined. The cia was actually really great. Back andmail them forth. They will not tell you exactly why. You have to play a game of guesswork. I resubmitted it and it came back with two chapters redacted completely and then a chapter and a half and finally, after i took up one word, which was the name of a statue, they let that whole chapter through and then publishers and i decided the way it was was intelligible enough for people to be able to read. Vince it is tricky because, yes, they do not want you to give away what cities that the cia is operating in if it is not widely known, but you kind of allow the leeway to describe the cities pretty well. Like there is a modern headquarters for their intelligence right on a river and this is near where a famous serial killer killed five people in the victorian era. Oh, victorian, i should not have said that out loud. I am not talking about london at all. Tracy i will never understand why they redacted some of the things that they did. I was just talking to someone about this. Why they redacted some things and did not redact others, i do not understand the process. Some of them, in my opinion, it is extremely easy to figure out where i am. Vince maybe they want people to take that extra step of googling for about 10 minutes. Tracy i do not know. Vince lets talk about your origin story because it is a somewhat different than others. It has nothing to do with you being in a sorority in Southern California. It is the fact that a lot of people who join cia or National Security institutions wanted to do it from a very early age. You did not really set out to think about being a cia officer in middle school or high school, although subconsciously i guess maybe you did a little bit because of what you studied. When other people were playing, you are reading about the middle east. You are looking at maps when other people were doing normal middle school things. What eventually led you to want to join the agency . Tracy i think to back up just a little bit, this would have been, you know, when i was recruited in kind of the mid1990s. Popular culture looks really different today than it did then. I did not grow up with quantico or criminal minds or sort of 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 really large interest in the middle east and in counterterrorism. So i would say that was really cultivated sort of 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. So when i applied at that career fair in college, that was really the impetus. Vince most of us in here, unless you are really young, maybe some of your former students, remember exactly where we were on 9 11. It is kind of a turning point in a lot of our lives. For many people, it is the turning point in their careers, the decision to go in a direction. You are already working at the cia. You are at langley the morning of 9 11. This is a question that popped in my head. I sat on my couch on 9 11. I had been out of the army for offt a month, just pissed that there is nothing i could do about it. I could go back in the army, but my knee stunk. A lot of us had this feeling of we have been attacked appeared what do i do now . There is nothing i can do. To a degree, you had an notntage because you could wallow in selfpity about our country being attacked because you had a second to do that and then it was time to get to work. Made me think about that question differently. How i waslways asks feeling and thinking. Happy people had pride in the world trade center, but you have to cart mental eyes compartment allies those thoughts so you can get on with the mission and work you need to workd stop the next attack gather the evidence you need to stop the next attack. Of purpose to do something about it, even though maybe you are not stopping the next attacker you can try in a weight helps keep us going. In a way keeps us going. Vince you move into the vault, which is ground zero for the war against al qaeda, the war that was created because of 9 11. Are i say ground zero, you working in a small group. You turn around and george bush is asking you what is going on. This is the epicenter. This is the nerve center of the cia response. How daunting was that . You were 23 at the time. Tracy 21. Ince 21 at the time who are we killing today . You are not allowed to say that. Who are we looking at today . It had to have been a surreal experience. Tracy that was a chapter i was surprised the cia approved. I submitted it and i thought the whole thing would come back redacted. I was read into that program on september 10, 2001. I was naive and said, we will never need to use this. Obviously, we did. It was intense. You working long hours. You are not really thinking about the people in the room. If you think about people in the room, youre not focusing on what you are doing. You really cannot process who is in there and what other than who is in there every day. He brought Us Thanksgiving dinner and doughnuts and bagels all the time. He was really great to work with in that environment. , he was theenant only one we were super aware of at the time. This the concept behind world and space, and im not going to make you say anything you cant say, but this is where you have you are a Southern California girl. Aboutntioned in the book what direction you lean politically. I am not a fan necessarily of certain administrations, but in that room i did not matter. We are so used to today. This is not just because of this current administration. So used to politicizing Foreign Policy and National Security. These were moments where it did not matter where you came from. Everyone was working together. What was great about the cia when i was there. I grew up in Southern California in a liberal household, but i am registered independent. Helped move me to the middle in a weird way. They did not purposely do that. Aboutt told me think more issues not in a blackandwhite way. It was sort of a gray. What i liked about my time there i served under clinton and bush. What was so great about that experience is i felt at least people around me, it was very apolitical. Politics were taken out of the situation. Thatpeople are frustrated i had nice things to say about bush and they did not understand that, but it was not about political agenda. It is about what my observations were at that time in that moment. That helped me gain this apolitical insight when it came to Foreign Policy. Vince while you were there, there was an event people do not talk about much today and certainly has become less and less a key moment in the timeline of the early global war on terror. That is shortly after 9 11, when this is antes outpost in the middle of nowhere. You had a firstperson view of what was going on there. Talk a little about how that panned out and the frustrations perhaps he mustve felt having a chance to get the guy who kind of caused 9 11 but having him slip through your fingers. Tracy what was interesting about that was i was reading another book at the time i was writing that chapter about someone in the Ground Forces there. It was easy to use what i was doing and marry it with what he was doing and i think that is one way i got the chapter approved. I do not know. It was frustrating. We were working seven minutes on, seven minutes off because it was so intense, what we were doing. That, would have thought once we lost him, that it would have been screaming, yelling. That did not happen. It was like the air had gone out of the room. What people did what they went into their offices i will never know. In the room, it was like the sales went out of it and we carried on doing what we were supposed to be doing. Vince this will be a theme we will investigate again and again. When i think about your work, in eastern time in the United States in langley, virginia, whereas the action is taking place sometimes 5, 5, six hours ahead of where you are, sometimes more than that. This is not a normal 9to5 job where you drive to work and then get off in time for dinner. Youre working shifts that start in the middle of the night, that do not allow you to be in normal human being. How draining was that . It was nonstop. We talked to the briefer of president bush. I asked him when did your day start prior to 9 11 . 4 30. Ally woke up around what happened on nine 12 some gender 12 september 12 . I woke up around midnight. Tracy it is one of the reasons i alternately im a morning person, so that schedule was different difficult for me to keep up. I would have my best friend come over and wake me because it was hard sometimes. You have to change your whole body clock. I agree with mike. Proverbial 9to5 kind of job and then that went out the window. From ayou went relatively stressfree job hunting terrorists to the most stressful job i can imagine, hunting down bioterrorist 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. Wmd group,ved to the those of us that have studied weapons of mass destruction spent years in school. I studied physics for a long time. You spent two weeks in Poison School and then they sent you out and said, go find bad guys. Is a little different than that the guys who works the new program, they had their phd in Nuclear Physics and things like that. More toxins and poisons. It would be thought enough training for us to understand what al qaeda was trying. Vince this is what keeps people up at night. Not Nuclear Weapons. Nuclear weapons are difficult to create, to deliver. , if you drive by the pentagon at 3 00 in the morning and there are lights on, people are worrying about a buy weapons attack. Bioweapons attack. To do ay students had threat assessment in my class on bioterrorism. They had to do that. It does keep people up at night. I know you want me to say it is because the cia has spoiled them all but it is difficult to track biological weapons. Stuffrequire a lot of about launch systems, those kind of things. Biological weapons come at you can get them in parts. You can order them off amazon, home depot. It is unfortunately not that difficult. Will becomes problematic is maybe people are not putting the entire piece of the puzzle together. That is where we are probably going to slip up one day. All you really need is an air conditioning vent. The problem with Nuclear Weapons if you need a delivery system. I would guess they are not trying to use Nuclear Weapons because what you need. Vince when you combine someone easy willing to kill themselves with the ease and access of Nuclear Weapons, it becomes very scary. , guys. Ell tonight you kind of have to be on the ground in these areas of the world to truly do this, to understand the culture, the people. Time in yourirst career you started being deployed places, spending time overseas, in these countries that you cannot talk about my name in the book. Tracy i did. Everyone has their own experience in the cia and fbi. Prepared at least from a cultural standpoint in those countries. That was one thing i thought they did extremely well. Vince preparing you is one thing. The frustrations you might have experienced having to cooperate with local intelligence agencies you talk about in the book it side ofth the womans things in developing countries that tend to have fundamentalist islam as a tenant in their governing system but also that they were not quite taking things seriously as they should have at the time. What ended up being more frustrating for you . Tracy you wanted me to get mad about the sexism. One called me malibu barbie. It did not bother me much because my colleagues were so great about being she is the one you need to talk to. To continue calling her malibu barbie, go ahead, but you are going to continue to deal with her. Gettingstrated me was cable. We do not work on sundays. That was frustrating. As a result, we cannot locate that person because they do not want to work on a sunday. Vince you have a known bad guy going through a european country or in a european country. You know where he is at. They either do not work on sundays or there is not enough evidence to arrest the person. Going tonot probably attack albuquerque or chicago. They are going to attack thesels or china or in people youre trying to warn. And they are like, sunday is our day off. I can understand that today may be, but in 2002 that seems crazy. That cable andd highlighted it and put it on my cubicle. It was frustrating. Lets talk about what should have been the most frustrating moment of your career. If it was not, i do not understand. That is the iraq war. This is probably something you do not like talking about. You had a unique role in the lead up to the iraq war. Not on purpose. Your job was to look at some of these bioweapons networks being howloped and figure out they work around. At no time did you say there was linkage whatsoever to iraq, but what happened you turn the tv on, you see colin powell and the United Nations and what has happened . Tracy a lot of times what we would do is make checks. Who is at the top of this network and how are they connected . I have no idea if they still do it, but that was a thing we used to do. The tocsin in poison network was had ag complicated, so we cool printer. We can make big charts. We put it on the outside of our cubicles. Vince cia gets the best printers. Tracy we put it on the outside of our cubicles just so we could always look at it and keep everything straight. Had come through our office and wanted a copy of this and it was given to them. That chart ended up being used by colin powell to justify the invasion. It was a misuse. Vince it was not that chart exactly, right . Tracy the title of the chart was changed. You can look it up. This was Something Else i was surprised the cia let me put in. Maybe it is because it absolves them. I do not know. But the not perfect, title of the chart was something different. It said iraq bio if you look it up, that is what it said. Vince can you say if the word iraq was only trouble for . Chart before . Tracy it was not. Thee how did you not call New York Times tracy the next day . The New York Times th