Special agent at the l. A. Field office, where she specialized in chinese counterintelligence operations. Tracy lives with her husband and 4 1 2yearold daughter in dallas, texas. This evening tracy will discuss her memory, the unexpected spy, from the cia to the fbi, my secret life taking down some of the worlds most notorious terrorists. Tracy will be interviewed by dr. Vince houghton. After their discussion, they will open the floor to questions and answers. Everyone will have an opportunity to ask questions this evening. Were also going to asked if youre trapped in the middle of a row, put your hand up and well be sure you have a mic to answer your questions, but there will be two mics on each side that you can use to answer your question. If you could get out stay where youre at. If you have a cell phone probably everybody please silence it now. Id lead by example and make sure mine is silenced. Ill kick it over to vincent and tracy. Thank you, chris. The first time we were introduced to tracy was when our Educational Team discovered the amazing work she was doing, now a teacher at the school in dallas. Were going to talk about this later, but its extraordinary what she decided to do to challenge young people i taught at every level just the gumption and challenge of these people is really extraordinary. I probably wouldnt have had College Students do what youre having them do. Shes also on the board of director for a Nonprofit Organization which well talk about as well, which is another way she decided to give back not only to her community, but also to her country. Youll hear about more of this later, but were going to jump right in. If anyone listens to spycast, we just reported a podcast together, so we had a chance to try out some questions before we put it before a live studio audience, as it were. I think one of the most interesting to me. What is the process you had to go through to get this cleared. Ink theres a lot more you they didnt want you to put out. So first, thank you everyone for coming. I feel a lot of my former students its really exciting, so thank you for being here. There were 20 women that came before me it took about two years to get their books through. I credit them with the easier time that i had. So it was extremely important are important to me. I wanted to honor nigh nondisclosure agreement when i left. I was hoping that it wouldnt be denied in full. It was not. It came back, though, in about four months after my initial submission with four complete chapters was the cia is really great. You can email the crb back and forth. They wont tell you why. You have to play a game with guesswork. I resubmitted it, back then chaps were redacted, then a chapter and a half. After i took out one words, 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. Its tricky. Yes, they dont want you to give away what cities the cia is operating in thats not widely known, but you allow the leeway to describe these cities pretty well. Theres a modern headquarters right on the river, this is near where a famous serial killer killed five people in the victorian era. I dont understand why they redacted some of these thing did and didnt redact others. I dont understand the process, but some of them in my opinion its extremely easy to figure out where i am. Lets talk about your origin story. It is somewhat different. It has nothing with you being a authority in Southern California. Its a fact that a lot of people enjoy kriismt o or National Security institutions wanted to do it from an early age. You didnt sit out thinking about being a cia officers. You were reading about the or doing middle School Things what led you to join. This would have been when i was recruited. Popular culture looks different today. I didnt grow up with quantico or criminal minds any of those things i do know i had a i would say that was really cultivated when peter bergen interviewed sosama bin laden. When i applied at that career fair in college, that was really the impetus. You were already working at langley the morning of 9 11. I sat on my couch 9 11, just pissed off i couldnt do anything about it. So a lot of us had this feeling of my god, weve been attacked, what do i do now . To a agree, you had a disadvantage. You could have wallowed in selfpity, but you have a second to do that and then it was time to get to work. I think you almost have to compartmentalize those thoughts so you can get on the with the work you need to do, or gather the evident you need. In a way make it helps keep us going. Grounds for the war again al qaeda, a work that was created because of the 9 11. Youre working in a small group, you turn around and george bush is asking you whats going on . Or george tenet or condoleezza rice. How daunting was that . Youre 23 at the time. 21. And you have who are we looking at today . That had to have been a surreal experience. I was very surprised. I submitted it and thought it could come back redacted, but it didnt. I was read into that program on september 10th, and for me, i was naive and thought well never need to use it. Its obviously intense. Youre not thinking about the people in the room. If you think about the people in the room, youre not focusing on what youre doing so i think you cant process what youre he he brought Us Thanksgiving dinner, doughnuts, bagels all the time. He was really great to work with in that environment, but other than tenet, he was the only one we were superaware of all the time. Let me ask you this, the be yond this space youre a Southern California girl, you mentioned very overt in the book about what direction you lean politically. Im not a fan necessarily of certainly administrations, but at the end at that point it doesnt matter. So it used to take politicizing foreign policy. This was a moment where it doesnt matter where you came from, everyone was working together without politics. That was what was so great when i work there. I grew up in a liberal household, but to be honest, im registered independent. The cia sort of helped moved me to the middle in a weird way. They didnt purposely do that. It just helped me think more about the issues not in a blackandwhite way. It was sort of a gray. What i really liked about my time there, i served under clinton and bush, and tenet was there under both of them, which was great. What was so great about that experience, i felt at least the people around me, it was very apolitical. Politics were taken out of. I had some nice things to say about bush, but it waujt about servicing someones political agenda. It was about my observations at that time in that moment, and that really sort of helped me gain this apolitical insight when it came to foreign policy. While you were there, there was an event that people dont talk about much today. Certainly since the death of bin laden has been less and less a key moment, thats shortly after 9 11, when United States had bin laden pinned down. You talked about a first person view of what was going on there, i wanted to talk about how that panned out, and of course about the frustrations perhaps you must have felt, having a chance to get the guy who caused 9 11, but having him slip through your fingers. What was interesting about th that, it was easy to footnote what i was doing and marry it with what he was doing, but it was frustrating minutes. It was a seven minutes on, serve minutes off, because it was so intense. I think people would have thought once we lost him that, you know there would have been cursing, screaming yelling, and that really didnt happen. It was like the air had just gone out of the room. What people did when they went to their offices ill never know, but in that room, the sail completely went out of it and carried on what we were supposed to be doing. This will come up again and again throughout the conversation, but when i think about your work, youre operating in eastern time in the United States in langley, virginia, whereas the actual action is taking place sometimes five, five and a half, six hours ahead of where you were, so this is not a normal 9 00 to 5 00 job. Youre working shifts that really doesnt allow you to be a normal person. I asked mark morel, when does what happened on 9 12 . Hes like, i woke up around midnight to start my day. It seems like impossible to keen up over a long period of time. I think it is. I think thats one of the reasons i ultimately left, but just an anecdote, i am not a night person, im a morning person, so that schedule is always difficult for me. I would always have my best friend to wake me up. It was hard for me to sometimes you just have to change your whole body clark. I agree with mike, if it was a proverbial 9 00 to 5 00 job before that, and that went out the wind. A relatively stressfree job to arguably the most stressful job, hunting down bioterrorists who are trying to create weapons of mass destruction to kill hundreds of thousands of people around the world. When you moved over to the wmd group, what i thought was fun frommy the book is those of us who study mass destruction like years in school,s you spent two weeks and they send you out and say go find bad guys you guys have their ph. D. In Nuclear Physics or things like that, but we did more kind of crude toxins and poisons, so i think they thought if we if it was that that would be enough training for us to understand what al qaeda was trying to procure. This is what keeps people up at night. Boy weapons, how much but through that twoweek point in school, when you came out were you even more worried about this . I think now my poor students that have to do a twopage threat assessment and they know what im doing about in my class theyre still that they have to do that. I know you want me to say that the cia has foiled them all, but i think its very difficult to track biological weapons. It requires a lot of stuff. In my opinion, biological questions, you can get them in parts, its easy. What becomes problematic is maybe people arent trying to put the entire piece of the puzzle together. I think thats where were probably going to slip up one day. All you readily need is an air conditions vent. At worse case, a ship with containers sailing into a port really, i would guess theyre not trying to really procure one because of what you need. When you com combine someone leech wesleep well t guys. Youre welcome. You have to be on the ground in areas of the world to understand the culture, understand the people, and so you this is really the first time in your career that you started being forward deployed, spending a lot of time in these countries that you cant talk about by name in the book. Yes, i did. I thought some people would disagree. Everyone has their own experience at the cia and the fbi, i felt very prepared, at least from a cultural standpoint, in those countries. Thats one thing i thought they did extremely well. Prey paring you is one thing. The frustrations you might have experienced, you talk about it in the book being both the woman side of things, youre in developeding countries that sometimes have fundamentalist islam as a connect behind their governing system, but also they werent quite taking things as seriously as they should have been. For me, there was one Intelligence Service that called us malibu barbie, but it didnt bother me that much. My colleagues were so great, this is the one you need to talk to. I always felt very supported by my colleagues. What really frustrated me was times getting cables back, and we knew someone was transiting a country, im so sorry, but we dont work on suddndays, and as result you cant locate that person anymoor. You have a known bad guy going through europe kwan country, or in a european country, you know where hes at and either they dont work on sundays or theres not enough evidence. Theyre not going to attack albuquerque albuquerque, but maybe brussels, or a place youre trying to warn. This 2002, 2003, that seems crazy. I highlighted it and put it in my cubical. It was very frustrating. The iraq war in 2003, this is probably something you dont like talking about, but you had a unique role in the leadup to the war. Not on purpose, your job was to look at the networks that were being developed and figure out the linkage. At no time in any did you say theres any linkage to iraq, but what happened ill set the scene. You see colin powell in front of the united nations, and all of a sudden whats happening. Just to back up a bit, a lot of times what we would do is make charts to keep straight who is at the top of the network and how they are connected. That was a very regular thing we used to do. Toxin poison that was getting complicated, so we decided it was a really large chart. We have this really could printer, and we would put it on the outside of our cubicles, just so we could always look at it and keep it straight. It was cells, areas in the world that people were working, and someone had come through or office and wanted a copy of the chart. It was given to them. That chart ended up being used by colin powell to sort of justify the invasion. It wasnt that chart exactly, right . It was that exact chart. The title of the chart was changed. It was something i was surprised that they let me put in, but maybe its because its resolved. Theyre i dont know. But the title was something different. What was it originally . I dont think i can say that. Okay. What would it end up being . It says a rock bio, i mean, if you look it up, thats what it says. Can you say if the word iraq was on the chart before . It was not. It was not. How did you not call the New York Times the next day. Someone on twitter called me a coward, actually, for not doing that. Maybe i am. I dont know. I was 23. Im not excusing that, but i think for me i have so much respect for my colleagues and for the agency that thats really not the right thing to do, and that really wasnt the right time to do it. I dont feel regret about the decision i made, but i know people will disagree with me. I think what we were the most concerned about was all of those people that we were looking for, we were looking for them to include them. And i think thats where we were upset with, great, now, theyre all going to go underground, were going to lose all of our intelligence, and get information on them. We wont be able to perhaps stop future attacks, and so i think in the immediate, thats what we were upset about. Its almost impossible in 2020 to, with any kind of, you know, honor, to go back to 2003 and say you should have done something different. It seems ridiculous at this point, so i didnt want to come across. Anyone calling you a coward cant put themselves in your shoes back in 2003. Let me ask you, change directions almost completely because part of what i think is really interesting about especially being posted oversea, and being in this job where youre constantly inside a small room, helping people across the world, are you thinking about day, night, falling asleep, how do you maintain a sense of self . How do you keep being tracy, versus, you know, the ci operative thats trying to catch bad guiys. Did you constantly have to kind of stop and say take a step back, take a breath, well remember where we came from, you know, root for the trojans, playing a Football Game or Something Like that, just a reminder of who you are . So, yes, i dont really think i was that cerebral about it. For me, it was more just things like planning for the future, like being in a war zone and calling my mom to see if she can make me an appointment to get my roots done when i got home. Things like that, but its okay to be a girly girl. Lots of women are that are at the agency, and thats totally fine. I think another thing that i did, im very very into the usc very much, and one of the things that i did was i had callers send the bomb dogs that were in one of the places im at. Somewhere theres a bunch of bomb dogs that have usc trojans on them. This segues to the question about your transition, when you leave the cia, youre leaving a high note, catching bad guys, the pinnacle of a 20 whateveryearold career, you decide to leave it and move on to an entirely Different Agency with an entirely different mind set and focus. Why . So i loved the agency. It was really positive about it. But maybe that was for the better. I think the ripe old age of 25, 26, i wanted more stability in my life. I dont know why back then, and i wanted, i really was passionate about working Counter Terrorism, and i thought maybe i can do that but do it, and work one of the large offices and be able to stay there and so thats why i made that switch. Youre positive about the cia, its counter intuitive. There are so many books that are saying rah rah, the fbi, and your experiences at fbi werent all that great, certainly your training, which, you know, were not very far from quantico, virginia, the mythical place, the hrt, and bau, and the marine corps, but thats the Training Center for the fbi, you went there not in the 1930s or 40s or 50s, but a decade ago. Tgs almost like you were there when Jay Edgar Hoover was in charge. Its extraordinary, the kind of ran kor you got at the fbi. I had come from the cia where i had no issues between the genders. And i think i was almost naive that the fbi would be the same way. Theyre all part of the same community, and it could not have been more not like that. You used a phrase that made total sense to me. It was junior high all over again, clicks, people back stabbing and the teachers were the ring leaders of all of this. It wasnt just you dealing with a jealous potential coworker, the instructors themselves were pushing this narrative that you shouldnt be there. I think the narrative all started on my very first day at the academy. I dont know if they still do this, but youre kind of in a theaterish type of room with desks and everybody has to stand up and introduce themselves. I stood up and said my name and where i used to work, and introduced myself. Everyone rolled my eyes, and started calling me a liar, that i never had worked at the cia. You had to come there to do my background check. You can pull up my its really not that hard. Its really not that difficult. So with that narrative, it was like before i even could get out of the gate, thats what had happened, and as ridiculous as that sounds, thats what everyone perpetuated the entire time that i was there. It was more than that. Some of the stories are out of the 1950s, where you did a perfect interrogation exercise and then got chided because your pig of an instructor thought you were too good looking basically. What had happened, and again, i dont know if quantico