The Unexpected Spy
Facilitated by Tracy Walder
This event already happened:
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
7:00PM - 8:00PM
Location: Virtual Event via Zoom
The Unexpected Spy: From the CIA to the FBI, My Secret Life Taking Down Some of the World’s Most Notorious Terrorists
Tracy Walder, a Jewish American woman, was recruited by the CIA out of her sorority at the University of Southern California. On 9/11 she was tracking terrorists with President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney or Secretary of State Colin Powell looking over her shoulder. Driven to stop the new breed of terror that war created, Walder picked up her alias identity, flew overseas, and continued the hunt. Walder debriefed al-Qaeda’s top men‚ Jihadists who swore they’d never speak to a woman, particularly an American woman‚ and earned their trust, thus gaining critical and life-saving information. Walder held clandestine meetings in clandestine locales with spies and embedded civilians from other countries. She followed the trails she found across North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.
She would eventually move over to the FBI working in counterintelligence where she faced rampant sexism. The Unexpected Spy is a powerful memoir about a woman who made a career in a male-dominated field and what she’s taken away from it now that she’s no longer in government service.
Tracy Walder is a former Staff Operations Officer (SOO) at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and a Special Agent at the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office specializing in Chinese counterintelligence operations. She sits on the Board of Directors for Girl Security, a nonprofit, non-partisan group that brings national security curriculum to girls in high schools throughout the US.