252 SEPTEMBER 2019 VOGUE.COM
Up Front Spy Games
code words that identify the cable’s subject matter and allow those
with access to find it in the Agency’s classified search. And we
add the classification itself, a single judgment call that for all time
determines who will be able to read our words and when. With ever
more exercises under way, the hour we finish our daily cables grows
later and later. There’s a peace to the Farm at night, when the day’s
humidity has settled and the hum of distant traffic gives way to
insect song. There are bikes parked at each building to be picked
up and dropped at random. Each night, I print out the last of my
cables and saddle up whichever bike looks least likely to lose its
chain. I push off from under the streetlight, oddly Dickensian, like
Tumnus’s lamp in Narnia, alternate pedaling and coasting, listen
to my breath merge with the wind It is the only moment I am alone.
Then I am outside the lecture hall, pressing my day’s work into a
pigeonhole and winding my way toward sleep.
The pace of our training ops ramps up as the weeks pass by.
We add land navigation, trekking for days to meet our assets,
armed with nothing more than a
ziplock-covered map, a compass, and a
rainproof notebook. We learn defensive
driving, our instructors teaching us how
to flip cars by tapping a spot above their
rear wheel and respond when swarmed
by armed militia fighters or trapped at
an ambush. They leave fake roadside
bombs around campus for us to identify
by pulling over and popping our trunk.
Fail to do so and they assume we would
have been toast, which means as far as
the Farm is concerned, we are.
Toward the end of the course, we
begin to mix in weapons qualifications.
Glock and M4. Training in urban
combat scenarios, peppered with
dummies—some legitimate targets,
most dressed as local men, women, and
children. Hit a civilian and we’re out.
Even the actual targets have to be given
first aid as soon as we complete our
objective or the compound is secured.
It’s not clear if the point of that policy
is compassion or to keep the adversary
alive for interrogation, but there’s something confusingly tender
about it, the nursing of wounds we ourselves have just inflicted.
We learn to use tourniquets to stem the fake bleeding and cover
sucking chest wounds with supermarket bags, duct-taped to a
patient’s skin as their pierced lung heaves and rasps beneath.
“Excellent work,” an instructor tells me at the end of an exercise
responding to a checkpoint ambush. I look down at my target
dummy. His dishdasha is soaked with blood and ripped open from
throat to navel. Across his chest is a plastic bag with the word
walmart taped across his heart.
On a day we don’t know is coming, a siren blares across the
base. It means the simulation is over. The explosions stop. The
interrogations shut down. The instructors playing terrorists and
cabinet members get up mid-meeting and walk away.
We stand there for a minute, in the deadened aftermath of the
fake town square, like survivors of an apocalyptic event, unsurewhat to do now our world has evaporated. And then a two-
day period of limbo kicks in. It’s been weeks since we’ve had
time to ourselves. We split off, alone. Uncertain whether we’ve
made the cut, uncertain whether it was all for nothing. And if
we did make it, even then, what was it for? It’s unnerving, how
suddenly the game of pretend can end.I
go to see Dan, my training branch chief. He tells me I’ve
been assigned to the portion of the Counterterrorism
Center responsible for keeping nuclear materials out of the
hands of terrorists. It’s one of the hardest and most coveted
assignments in the class. He pours me a drink. The assignment
is an honor, he tells me, but it’s no picnic. The nature of my
assignment means no diplomatic immunity. No all-important
official passport to bail me out of trouble like a golden get out
of jail free card tucked in my pocket. No comfort of working
in an embassy every day, surrounded by people who share my
truth. I’ll be alone, without a safety
net, in the most dangerous places
on Earth. But I’ll have the best
shot at doing what I signed up
to do—preventing the most
catastrophic attacks.
Dan sends me outside to pack
into the van with the others
who made the cut. We’re on our
way across the vast wilderness
of the base to a solitary, covert
airstrip, where we’ll become the
newest graduates of the most
elite operational training on
Earth. Someone blares “It’s the
final countdown” on the stereo.
Everyone is singing. I slide the
window open, and the air is hot
and fast and my heart is outside of
me. Then we arrive at an airplane
hangar full of chairs, with an
American flag hung over the
stage. The director of the training
program arrives by helicopter,
and one by one we cross the stage,
shake his hand, and lay brief eyes on the diplomas we’re not
allowed to take home.
A sunset, a sunrise, and a lot of alcohol later, we pack up
our fictional lives and head back to D.C., dozing in happy
exhaustion in the dark warmth of the blacked-out bus.
Amid the cookie-cutter condos outside the city, I brace myself
to face reality in the form of Andrew. But I find our apartment
empty, a few remaining things in boxes and a note saying our cat
is at the local humane society.
Andrew is gone. And in the stillness, I’m flooded with relief. @Excerpted from Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA by
Amaryllis Fox, to be published by Knopf in October. Copyright
© 2019. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. *All names
except that of the author have been changed; certain details have
been altered for the sake of security.