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 memoire, the unexpected spy, from the cia to the fbi. My secret life taking down some of the worlds most notorious terrorists. Tracy will be interviewed by our very own historian and curator, dr. Vince houghton. After their discussion they will open the floor to audience questions and answers. Everyone will have an opportunity to ask their questions this evening. We are also going to ask that if youre trapped in the middle of a row, please put your hand up and we will ensure that you have a mic to answer your questions, but there will be two mics on each side of the auditorium that you can use to answer your question. Again, if you cant get out, just stay where you are at, raise your hand and we will send a mic to you. One other administration notice, if you have a cellphone, anyone have a cellphone here . Probably everybody, right . Please silence it. I will lead by example and make sure mine is silenced. All right. So now i will kick it over to vince and tracy. I think youre going to really enjoy in evenings discussion. Thanks, chris. I want to mention the first time we were introduced to tracy at the museum was when our Educational Team discovered the amazing work that she was doing now as a teacher at a School Called the hawk a day school in dallas. Were going to talk about this later but its extraordinary what she decided to do to challenge young people that i would never i taught at every level from Elementary School all the way up through college and just the gumption to challenge these people is extraordinary. I probably wouldnt have had College Students having them do what you are having them done. She is also on the board of directors for a Nonprofit Organization called girl security which is another way that shes decided to give back to not only her community, but also to her country. So we will hear about more of those later, but i want to kind of jump right in. We actually just had a long conversation if anyone listens to sky cast you will get a chance to hear a longer version of this on tuesday because we just recorded a podcast together. We had a chance to try out some of these questions before we put it in front of a live studio audience and 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 and Everything Else what the process that you had to go through to get this book cleared through the cias publication review board in particular because they can be somewhat problematic, they can be somewhat difficult and if anyone has looked at the book already you will see there are lines redacted that were left inside. In our conversation, though, there was a whole lot more that they didnt want you to put out when you first went through this. How much difficult how much difficulty was it getting this through the prd. So first thank you everyone for coming. I also want to i feel a lot of my former students are in the audience which is really exciting, a lot of girls that took my class, so thank you for being here. So in terms of the publications review board, there were two women that sort of came before me and both of them took about two years to get their books through the prb and i really actually credit them with the easier time that i had. It was extremely important to me, i signed a nondisclosure agreement when i left and i wanted to honor that. I sent it off to them hoping that it wouldnt be what we called denied in full, which means you cant publish this, period. It was not. It came back, though, with in about four months after my initial submission with four complete chapters just black lined. So the cia was actually really great. You can email the prb, there is a lot of places in the cia you cannot, but you can email them back and forth. They wont tell you exactly why, you sort of have to play a game of guesswork so i resubmitted it and it came back with two chapters redacted completely and then a chapter and a half and then finally after i took out one word which was the name of a statue they let that whole chapter through and then the publishers and i decided for people to be able to read. Its tricky because, yes, they dont want you to give away what cities that the cia is operating in if its not widely known but you are allowed the leeway to describe this cities very well. There is a not earn headquarters for intelligence on a river and near where a serial killer killed people in the victorian period. Why they redacted some of the things that they did, i was talking with someone about this, why they redacted some things 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. Maybe they want people to take that extra step of googling for about ten minutes. I dont know. Lets talk about your origins story because it is somewhat different than others. Its the fact that a lot of people who joined cia or National Security institutions wanted to do it from a very early age. You didnt really kind of set out to think about being a cia officer in middle school or high school, although i guess subconsciously maybe you ask a little bit because of what you studied when other people were playing, reading about the middle east, looking at maps when other people were doing normal middle school things. What eventually led you to want to join the agency . So i think to back up a little bit. This would have been, you know, when i was recruited in the mid 90s. Popular culture looks different today than it did then. I did not joe up with quantico or criminal minds or any of those things so i had no preconceived notions about this is what the cia is and this is where i want to work. 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 around in counterterrorism. So i would say that was really cultivated within i watched the peter bergen interview when he interviewed Osama Bin Laden in 1997. That was a huge turning point for me and sort of when i decided i wanted to, i guess, do something about him and so when i applied at that career fair in college that was really the impetus. Most of us in here, unless you are really young, maybe if you are a former student, remember exactly where we were on 9 11, the turning point in many of our lives, for many people its the turning point in their careers. You were already working at cia, in fact, you were at langley the morning of 9 11. This is a question that kind of pops in my head and we kind of talked about how it really hasnt been thought about all that much before but i sat on my couch in 9 11, i had been out of the army for about a month just pissed off because there was nothing i could do about it. I could go back into the army but my knees stunk and i probably wasnt going to work, i could do other things. So a lot of us had this feeling of, oh, my god, we have been attacked, what do i do now . Theres really nothing i can do. To a degree you had an advantage because you couldnt kind of wallow in selfpity about our country has been attacked because you had like a second to do that and a then it was time to get to work. So i think because you made me think about that question a little bit differently. I think, you knew, everyone always asked how i was feeling, thinking, and its not that i was happy that people had died in the World Trade Center but i think you have to almost compartmentalize those thoughts so that you can get on with the mission and get on with the work that you need to do and stop the next attack or gather the evidence that you need to stop the next attack. I think youre right, having the sense of purpose to be able to sort of do something about it even though, you know, maybe you are not stopping the next attack but you can try in a way maybe helped sort of keep us going. You have the unique advantage you werent like the Canada Office of the cia, you moved into what is known as the vault which is ground zero for the war against al qaeda, the war that was created because of 9 11 and when i say ground zero you are working in a small group, you turn around behind you and george bush is standing behind you asking you whats going on or george tenant or condoleezza rice. This is the nerve center of the cia response. How daunting was that as you were 23 at the time or 21. 21 at the time and you have george tenant standing behind you who are we killing tonight, another way to say that targeting or drones, who are we looking at today . Was that something as a 20 whateveryearold it had to be a surreal experience. That was a chapter i was very surprised the cia approved. I submitted it and thought the whole thing would come back redacted and it didnt, so yay. Certainly i was, i guess, bred into that program on september 10th, 2001 and i think for me i was naive and said we will never need to use this and then obviously we did. It was obviously very intense, youre working really long hours, but youre not really thinking about the people that are in the room because if you think about the people that are in the room then you are not focusing on what youre doing which is trying to get people trying to talk around it. So i think you really cant process who is in there and what theyre doing other than tenet who was in there every day and sat in there and hung out with it us, he brought Us Thanksgiving dinner and doughnuts and bagels all the time. He was really great to work with in that environment, but other than tenant, he was the only one that we were super aware of all the time. Let me ask you this because the concept behind this room, this space and im not going to make you say anything you cant say, but this is where you have and i wont out you your politics, but you are a Southern California girl, you were very overt in the book about what direction you lean politically. Im not a fan necessarily of certain administrations but in that room it didnt matter. At that point it didnt matter. We are so used to today and this is not because of this Current Administration but under obama and the end of the bush administration, so used to politicizing Foreign Policy and National Security. This was a moment where it didnt matter where you came from, nebraska, texas or Southern California, everyone was working together without politics. That was actually what was at least so great about the cia when i was there, you know, obviously i grew up in Southern California in a liberal household, but to be honest with you im actually registered independent and the cia the cia sort of helped me move to the middle in a weird way. They didnt purposefully do that, it just helps me think more about the issues not in a black and white way. It was sort of a gray. And 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 is i felt at least the people around me, it was very apolitical. Politics are really taken out of the situation and some people are frustrated who read my before it came out, but had some nice things to say about bush and didnt understand that, but it wasnt about servicing someones political agenda, it was about what my observations were at that time in that moment and that really sort of helped me gain this sort of apolitical insight when it came to Foreign Policy. While you were there there was an event that people dont talk all that much about today and certainly i think since the death of bin laden has become less and less kind of a key moment in the timeline of the early global war on terror and thats shortly after 9 11 when the United States had bin laden pinned down. The last time we knew where he was and this was an outpost in the middle of nowhere called for ra bora. You had a firstperson view of what was going on there. I wonder if you could talk about how that panned out and of course the end, the frustration perhaps that you must have felt having a chance to get the guy that kind of caused 9 11 but having him slip through your fingers. So that night what was really interesting about that was i was reading another book at the time that i was writing that chapter about someone who was in the Ground Forces that were there and so it was actually really easy to footnote to be able to use what i was doing and marry it with what he was doing and thats how i got the chapter approved. I dont know. It was frustrating. We were working seven minutes on, seven minutes off because it was so intense what we were doing. I think people would have thought that 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 sort of just gone out of the room. What people did when they went to their offices i will never know, but in that room it was just sort of like the sails completely went out of it and we just carried on doing what we were supposed to be doing. This is something that we will investigate again and again and again throughout this conversation, but when i think about your work in the vault, youre operating in here in the United States in langley, virginia, whereas the actual action is taking place sometimes 5, 5. 5, you know, 6 hours ahead of where you are, maybe sometimes more than that. So this is not a normal 9 00 to 5 00 job. This is not something where you have to scratch the dog behind the ears in the morning and drive the gw parkway to work and getting home for dinner. Youre working shifts in the middle of the night, shifts that dont allow you to be a normal human being. How draining was that . We talked to mike morell famously because he was the briefer of president bush, i asked him, you know, when did your day start prior to 9 11 . He was like i usually woke up around 4, 4 30. What happened on 9 12, i woke up around midnight to start my day. It seems almost impossible to keep up over a long period of time. I think it is and, again, i think its one of the reasons that i ultimately left, but just an anecdote i am not a night person, im a morning person so that schedule was really difficult for me to keep up. I would always have my best friend come over to my apartment and wake me up because it was really hard for me sometimes you just have to change your whole body clock. I completely agree with mike, your proverbial 9 00 to 5 00 job before that and then that all went out the window. You went from a relatively stressfree job haunting terrorists from the vault to the most stressful job i can imagine hunting down bio terrorists who are trying to create weapons of mass destruction to kill not only a couple thousand people but hundreds of thousands of people around the world. When you moved over to the wmd group, what was funny from the book was those of us that have studied weapons of mass destruction went years in school, i studied physics for a long time to understand nuclear policy. You spent two weeks at school and they sent you out to go find bad guys. Yes. Its a little bit different. Those are people who had their ph. D. S in Nuclear Physics so i dont want to your Work Experience but we did more toxins and poison. So ricin. It was Poison School and that was two weeks that that would be enough training for us to understand what al qaeda was trying to procure. This is really what keeps people up at night. I mean, the idea not Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Weapons are incredibly difficult to create, to deliver, but bio weapons, you drive by the pentagon at 3 00 in the morning and theres lights on because people are there worrying about a bio weapons attack. How much going through that two week school when you came out were you even more worried about this. I think youve just helped my poor students that had to do their 15page threat assessment and they know what im talking about in my class on bioterrorism feel very vindicated that they had to do that. So it does keep people up at night. I know you wanted me to say its because the cia was foiled them all but i think its difficult to track biological weapons, i think nukes are easy is probably not the right word but it requires a lot of stuff, it requires launch systems, all those kinds of things, in my opinion biological weapons you can get them in parts, its very easy, order them off amazon, home depot is unfortunately not that difficult. I think what becomes problematic is that maybe people arent putting the entire piece of the puzzle together and i think thats what were going to probably slip up one day. All you really need is an air conditioning vent. And the trouble of course with Nuclear Weapons is you need a delivery system. You need at worst case a ship, you know, with containers that sails into a port. Bio terrorists really as we guess they are not trying to procure one because of what you need. When you combine someone willing to kill themselves with the ease and access of bio weapons it becomes a very scary proposition. I agree. Sleep well tonight, guys. Youre welcome. Whats really extraordinary and i think that i didnt quite have a great understanding of this before i read the book is you kind of have to be on the ground in those areas of the grow under to truly do this. Kind of understand the culture, understand the people and so you really the first time in your career that you started being Forward Deployed places, spending a lot of time overseas, a lot of time in these countries that you cant talk about by name in the book. Yes, i did. And i felt i know some people would disagree with me, again, everyone has their own experience at the cia and fbi, but this was mine, i felt very prepared at least from a cultural standpoint in those countries. That was one thing i thought that they did extremely well. Preparing you is one thing, the frustration through might have experienced through having to cooperate with local intelligence agencies, you talk about in the book being