A highly entertaining account of a young woman who went straight from her college sorority to the CIA, where she hunted terrorists and WMDs “Reads like the show bible for Homeland only her story is real.” –Alison Stewart, WNYC “A thrilling tale…Walder’s fast-paced and intense narrative opens a window into life in two of America’s major intelligence agencies” –Publishers Weekly (starred … intelligence agencies” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
When Tracy Walder enrolled at the University of Southern California, she never thought that one day she would offer her pink beanbag chair in the Delta Gamma house to a CIA recruiter, or that she’d fly to the Middle East under an alias identity.
The Unexpected Spy is the riveting story of Walder’s tenure in the CIA and, later, the FBI. In high-security, steel-walled rooms in Virginia, Walder watched al-Qaeda members with drones as President Bush looked over her shoulder and CIA Director George Tenet brought her donuts. She tracked chemical terrorists and searched the world for Weapons of Mass Destruction. She created a chemical terror chart that someone in the White House altered to convey information she did not have or believe, leading to the Iraq invasion. Driven to stop terrorism, Walder debriefed terrorists–men who swore they’d never speak to a woman–until they gave her leads. She followed trails through North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, shutting down multiple chemical attacks.
Then Walder moved to the FBI, where she worked in counterintelligence. In a single year, she helped take down one of the most notorious foreign spies ever caught on American soil. Catching the bad guys wasn’t a problem in the FBI, but rampant sexism was. Walder left the FBI to teach young women, encouraging them to find a place in the FBI, CIA, State Department or the Senate–and thus change the world.
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“The Unexpected Spy” is the real life story of Tracy Walder’s time in the alphabet agencies, CIA and FBI. This is not a colorless, dry, news-like account, but a vibrant, funny, and frightening look at recent national and international events. I knew I would love this book as soon as Tracy pulled out a box of “Hot Tamales,” my personal favorite candy. She shares that the CIA building has an internal Starbucks, but they do not put names on the cups. Readers also learn the hazards of traveling under an alias on a fake passport with an assumed name and the airline loses your luggage. She admits that she left out a lot, but she also has a lot to tell.
Her first person narrative is casual and friendly, as if a few friends are sitting around eating “Hot Tamales” (of course) and sharing stories. She originally wanted to be a history teacher but decided making history would be better than teaching it. She was all grown up, working to save the world.
She takes readers through the thrills of learning the PIT maneuvers and looking into the woods wondering wonder how many pairs of eyes are watching. She shares the daily trauma of working in counterterrorism, knowing that the people she was chasing were planning murders, multiple murders of innocent people. She could stop them by getting important information. She traveled, ate new foods, took in all the world had to offer, and tried to get rid of the people who wanted to poison and kill all of us.
Her multisensory descriptions pull readers into the locations. “Everywhere you looked, all you saw was white, brown, or beige— different hues of sandpaper. And every surface was as dry as chalk. It sounded like shells crunching beneath our feet as we walked to the makeshift barracks.” She shares her feelings, her accomplishments, but not everything. “This country ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~” (redacted)
I received a review copy of “The Unexpected Spy” from Tracy Walder, Jessica Anya Blau, and St. Martin’s Press. It was compelling and yet easy to read. The stories were frightening, encouraging, and at times funny. Walder achieved her other childhood goal; she is a currently a teacher, and hanging on the wall in her classroom is an American flag that has written in the stripes the names of every person killed on September 11.
Tracy Walder’s The Unexpected Spy is her memoir of her years as a counterterrorism officer in the CIA and a special agent in the FBI in the post-911 world. She makes it clear in the beginning that she wouldn’t reveal any classified information, so I was prepared for the redacted lines. She overcomes childhood obstacles (she had floppy baby syndrome and was expected to be mentally retarded) and eventually heads to a California university and pledges a sorority. At a job fair, she meets a CIA recruiter and thus begins her journey into the world of international spies with both the CIA and FBI. A strong woman, she cares deeply about America and about people and who maintains a global rather than an America-first attitude. Throughout her adventures, she juggles being “womanly” (caring about her hairstyle and wearing lipstick) with her job in a largely male-oriented world. She becomes an avowed feminist as she battles daily with overt sexism in both organizations as men call her,”Malibu Barbie,” because of her California origins and her blonde hair.
This is a eye-opening glimpse into the attitudes of American governmental agencies, and it’s harrowing that they can treat women in such a nasty misogynist manner. She switched from the CIA to the FBI and was treated horribly there. When the sexism grew too much, she armed the next revolution by teaching girls how to negotiate their way through such hostilities and how to seek out the truth.
Walder’s account was highly personal and humorous at times. An exceptional read and highly recommended.
Thanks to netgalley, St. Martin’s Press and the author for the ebook-ARC.
I enjoy fictional spy-espionage novels, and I was very happy to receive this ARC about the “real thing.” The memoir covers Tracy Walder’s CIA recruitment and training, moving on to time spent at Langley and eventually her work tracking down some truly nasty bad guys. Not so much a suspense-thriller spy novel as a look at the CIA’s inner workings. Much was redacted but it didn’t take away from her story, and I found it to be well-written and an interesting glimpse, albeit a personal one, into what goes on but doesn’t make the media headlines concerning terrorism worldwide.
Her horrible (blatantly misogynistic) treatment during the time at the FBI was infuriating but not surprising. The conclusion was hopeful, and Walder seems to be quite happy in her new position.
This is a memoir of someone that spent roughly 5 years in the CIA and 2 years in the FBI. It is an interesting journey, but a lot of red flags pop up when you read the book. Often without fail, when someone (including myself) tells their own story/journey there is always a splash of hyperbole. I don’t have any counterpoints from other individuals in the book to attest to what Tracy is saying so I as the reader have to take it at face value.
Let’s start with the title. She WAS NOT A CIA SPY. She was an AGENT who went around the world openly collecting and interviewing individuals within CIA field offices and other country counterpart agencies to get data on terrorist planning chemical attacks. That is not the same as covertly collecting information. I would place her one above an analyst (i.e., a person who looks at the data and come up with conclusion – more noble in my opinion to what she was doing) and one below of what a spy is.
Throughout her career she claims misogyny, anti-American sentiment, interagency jealousy, etc that created barriers for her. She claims due to her strong confidence and early childhood bullying, she was able to standup to these people, work through it and succeed. I certainly can believe it, but to what extent? Could it be that her personality was off putting to individuals? I sense subtle undertones of victimization. Most these statements and concerns come from her brief stint in the FBI. When the reader gets to the FBI phase of her career, you cannot help get the sense of bitterness. Nothing really worked out for her. I read her reasons, but I would love to her the FBI version of her attitude and work ethic.
Interesting story, but the title is misleading. It should read “misogyny and how I overcame it while working in the CIA and FBI for which I use my experience to help young girls do the same”. However, that title wouldn’t have sold as many copies and I wouldn’t have read the book either.
I struggled a bit with this one… From the descriptions, both in the blurb and from the publicist who introduced me to it, I expected a very different story – this did not read like fiction, it was not a spy story per se nor fast-paced throughout. While it painted a fairly involved picture of one agency (CIA), it did not do much other than offer a dark snapshot into the other (FBI). And it did all of those things with redactions that sometimes involved entire paragraphs…
In a quick aside – the redactions bugged me. A lot. They felt contrived, like a plot device that was intended to gin up extra tension and a sense of overarching drama without having to actually write it into the story. It came across like a way to avoid writing around what the government didn’t want her to say explicitly because it was easier than having to rewrite after the censors told her no…. I appreciate the need for keeping certain details out of the popular press, if they would impact (or potentially impact) the safety of individuals or the integrity of missions. So write the story with those details removed – but don’t just write the same story and cross random bits of that story out.
The redactions tended to come in groups and some were quite long – paragraphs and multiple lines on page after page. And really, what is the point of redacting an entire paragraph? I appreciate that there are details that the CIA wouldn’t want her to reveal – although a number of things she “couldn’t” mention were fairly easy to deduce if you paid even the slightest bit of attention to world news and/or stereotypes – but rather than feeling like a way of keeping certain specifics safe, it felt like a way of emphasizing that she knew things we didn’t… Obviously she does, she worked there. We get it. But leaving those bits in disrupted the flow of the narrative. It was jarring to keep having to stop and start around words, lines, or paragraphs, particularly when it wasn’t even obvious what was being kept out or why. It felt like a game of “guess what’s missing” rather than a way to keep secrets secret. And this wasn’t a narrative that did well with additional hurdles…
Which brings me to my next major issue – the pacing. I liked the way this one opened and was cautiously optimistic in the beginning, but the story felt bogged down in details and procedure in fairly short order, and I felt my attention flagging at random points throughout. Perhaps it’s because we know so much of what was learned about WMD and Zarqawi and Iraq now. But perhaps it’s because I found the constant reminders of her sorority girl background unnecessary and distracting. I get it. She wears pink and likes dressing up. And I get that those are, to her, important parts of her personality – and that they become more important as her tale progresses. But throughout much of the book those details feel thrown in rather than intentionally interwoven. By the time they become more relevant, as a result of the abysmal behavior of those she encountered at the FBI (seriously, WTF?! that was wild…),those tidbits were no longer being mentioned and the outlandishness of her treatment outshadowed those earlier details to such an extent that it all felt disjointed and cobbled together. It felt uneven in style and substance – from a great professional experience of a horrifying time in American history with fluffy details peppered in like color commentary, to a horrifying experience of unprofessionalism at the hands of her “superiors” that was stripped of all fluffiness and personality. Her FBI tale was presented as a more horrible experience than her hunt for WMDs, and I found that cognitively dissonant, even if on a personal level it may have been her reality… It jarred me and not in a good way.
And speaking of jarring, there’s the last third of the book as a whole. The CIA bits were by far the most involved of the book and the most interesting to me. The FBI was much less well developed and, as mentioned, oddly disjointed considering the detailed descriptions of process involved in the CIA section. While I appreciate that Walder spent much more time with the CIA, and that time was apparently much better spent on all levels, it affected the pacing of the narrative to skip around in descriptive levels and style so much. If the CIA bits were a love letter to the agency, the FBI was a trolling internet comment war. And then there’s the “after bits” – which are a Twitter feed by comparison. Suddenly she’s married, with a child, and a consultancy/teaching gig helping young girls get more involved in public and world affairs. No mention on how, why, or what got her there really. No details on anything, just the narrative equivalent of an Afterword blurb appended by a stranger… It felt like a completely different author wrote each of the three segments of this book, with different objectives, styles, and goals for each. It felt odd and disjointed and left me confused and dissatisfied, like I don’t really know what just happened.
On the whole, this one didn’t work for me. The book just never seemed to decide what it wanted to be or hit its stride. I gave it three stars, but that’s a bit of a rounding up. I was intrigued by the promise but it never quite delivered…
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my obligation-free review copy.
I just finished the audio version of this book and, wow, so fascinating! What an interesting life Tracy has lived. It was fascinating to read about global terrorism from the point of view of someone so deeply involved with it. The redacted bits were a bit disappointing, but also completely understandable. They won’t keep me from recommending this book. I kind of wish spy school was available online. I’d sign up in a heartbeat!
I received a free electronic ARC of this memoir/biography on January 9, 2020, from Netgalley, authors Tracy Walder/Jessica Anya Blau, and St. Martin’s Press. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read ‘The Unexpected Spy’ of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work. This should be required reading for 14/15-year-old kids of both sexes.
Most of the glass-ceiling-breaking women we read about are hard as nails and just as tough as Bruce Willis. Tracy Walder wears bright lipstick and peek-toes killer heels. AND gets the job done. I appreciated the flack she endured over her time in the CIA and especially the FBI experience. Balanced on top of the problems she had in school, it is remarkable that she was able to pull this off.
But the Tracy Walder that gets ALL my respect is the teacher at an all-girls school because we can only change that which we understand well enough to get behind. The girls taught by Ms. Walder will approach the world with a full arsenal of knowledge and tools to combat prejudice of all forms, from all sides. The battle will be tougher in peek-toed heels, but she certainly gets the job done, as will her students.
Wow. Very, very interesting. I had a hard time putting this one down, all I wanted to do was find excuses to listen. I felt like Walder did a fantastic job explaining her life growing up as well as her jobs in the CIA and FBI. Isn’t it interesting how “we’re all on the same team” doesn’t always apply in the job field? I’d love to sit down with Walder and just have a long talk about her life but I suspect most of it would be redacted. She still seems like a person you’d want to get to know and have by your side.
This is a great book about a girl who wants nothing more than to blend in and not be noticed. Then, comes 9/11 and she decides to change career tracks and work for the CIA. She talks about when she did while in the CIA, and it’s very interesting! If you want a great spy story, don’t miss this one!
I thought that this book had promise but fell just short of fully delivering. I did enjoy the track of the author going from a sorority house to the CIA, but it felt superficial, almost more like a sorority girl wrote it as opposed to a seasoned undercover agent. I understand that redactions were necessary, but there were other parts that I think could have been more descriptive to make up for the redactions. As a result, I did not get as much insight as I had hoped to from reading the promos. Still, it is a decent example of dispelling stereotypes and pursuing one’s dreams. This review is based on a pre-release digital ARC courtesy of NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press, and all thoughts are my own.
Are you looking for something different? Are you looking for adventure? Intrigue? Travel? Someone who doesn’t give up?
STOP AND READ THIS BOOK! Talk about an amazing memoir. I had to take my time reading this, as The Unexpected Spy is an understatement for who and what Tracy was and is. The subject matter is heavy at times, but told with such heart and feeling, you actually can imagine what it was like to meet the Georges, or go through the agony and misogyny of Quantico.
Understandably redacted at times, you follow Tracy through her government life, and seriously, I want to sit down with her at Starbucks somewhere and ask questions. And sit in on Spycraft!
What a great book! This is the first book that I have read by Tracy Walder and I sure it will not be my last! It grabs your attention right from the get go and holds it to the very last page. Everyone should read this book! Thanks for the great book Tracy!
(4.5/5) This is a fantastic book! I’m absolutely in awe of Tracy Walder’s experience while in the CIA and FBI, and now as a history teacher. She is, in my opinion, a wonderful role model for those young students she is teaching. Her story is absolutely fascinating and eye-opening. This is a book not to be missed. I highly recommend it.
Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for the review copy.
Tracy Walder applied to the CIA for a job while still in college at USC. She was selected and trained to protect innocent people around the world from being killed by terrorists. A good deal of her work was done at a desk in Quantico, but a much of it was also done in foreign countries working with others who were just as focused and determined to keep the world safe. At one point in her career with the CIA, Ms. Walder decided to apply to the FBI, hoping to be able to settle down in one location and have fewer secrets from those she loved. Her training at the FBI was difficult, but the sexism and bullying from her trainers made it much worse. Fortunately, upon completion of her training, she was granted a position near her parents’ home in California and she spent several years working there. Ms. Walder ultimately left the FBI to teach at an all girls private school. Her story is fascinating and disturbing and very clearly illustrates what an intelligent and talented woman she is.
Thank you to Netgalley, the authors Tracy Walder and Jessica Anya Blau, and the publisher St. Martin’s Press for a free digital ARC of this very interesting book. This is my honest opinion.
This book is a nice reminder that far beneath today’s news headlines, there is a quiet cadre of ethical, hard-working and dedicated patriots working to keep us safe.
The Unexpected Spy will get wide attention, and deserves it. It will give readers a different, more vivid, and more human idea of the actual work of spying, counter-intelligence, and dealing with terrorism. It will be especially important to young women who are considering this kind of career.
A compelling and well-written memoir that takes the reader on a journey from the CIA’s ‘Farm’ and its ‘black sites’ to the FBI’s training academy.
The Unexpected Spy is an interesting book about a young woman who is recruited by the CIA right out of college. Imagine a Southern California sorority girl, young, blond, and introverted working for the CIA – pretty unbelievable, but you need to believe it, because that is exactly what Tracy Schandler Walder did. Not only did she work for the CIA, but she did it masterfully, interrogating terrorists, mapping terrorist cells around the world, and protecting thousands of lives in the process. When the travelling challenged her desire to have a family, she left her beloved CIA for the FBI, where sadly, the experience of the treatment of women there was so bad that Tracy had to leave. Turning her sights to teaching young women and sharing her experiences with them was the next part of her career.
I enjoyed the way Tracy was portrayed in the book – at times, self-conscious and not sure of her herself, and at other times, strong and confident – usually in the performance of her duties. She also described herself as blond, liking lipstick, fashion, the color pink, and getting her hair highlighted. I think these descriptions made her more human and down-to-earth, letting us know that she still wanted normalcy in her life, in the midst of the hard war-torn world in which she operated. It made her real to me. Also, she was under 25 years old and facing some of the worst situations you could imagine, and facing it with professionalism.
There are parts of the book where we see Tracy having fun (during various training experiences), or walking / running alone in a foreign city. Again, these instances show us a different side of Tracy than what we might think of when we think of a CIA operative.
After reading this book, I was fortunate to hear Tracy and Jessica speak at The Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore. What an amazing experience hearing about their process in writing this story, and hearing Jessica discuss her next chapter in life. I am privileged that I was able to hear them discuss this book.
This book is not only about Tracy’s life as a spy, but also about the empowerment of women – and how we still must fight to be accepted in certain areas where men still treat women as less than equal, as happened to Tracy at the FBI. I know I will be thinking about Tracy’s bravery and her work to make us all safer for a long time.
All opinions are my own.
#TheUnexpectedSpy #TracyWalder #JessicaAnyaBlau #NetGalley #IvyBookshop #MacMillan #StMartinsPress
This highly readable. absorbing memoir has already received a huge number of reviews, so I don’t feel I need to summarize Tracy Walder’s background, or the general layout of the book.
It’s a very intense look at her experiences overseas while a CIA Agent as part of the Poison Squad (her name–I have no idea if that is a real thing). There were some very grim descriptions (severed heads, anyone?) but what I found most disturbing was the hate-filled misogyny aimed at her, especially during her FBI training. From her perspective, she was already judged for being a woman, a Jew, and blonde. At the FBI she was ostracized for being part of the CIA.
Her motivation for writing this book seems to be aimed at women, young women especially, whose brains and talent and skills are so very needed to fix this world full of toxic masculinity. Which sums up Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Otherwise she largely stays away from politics, outside of a few remarks here and there. Her focus was on her experiences as an agent of the CIA and then of the FBI, and the people she encountered within the service, and as targets.
It can be unnerving at time, and also moving, such as the incident after she fell down a stone stairway and lay in a military hospital bed at an undisclosed Middle Eastern hotspot. While she was there, a bombing happened elsewhere and a bunch of local women were badly wounded, suffering burns over most of their bodies.
As she lay in the hospital bed, she turned her head to meet the eyes of the woman next to her, whose face was badly burned. Walder describes how she stayed there, blending their gazes, their breathing even synchronized, a conscious effort after a nurse told her quietly that none of the women had made it–and they didn’t have hope for this one either. But Walder wanted to give this woman as much human contact as she could until the end, and did.
The only negative observation I have to make is the long bits of redacted text marked with tons of ~~~~~. A substitute word such as thingy or McGuffin could have served just as well for the short bits, and as for the long paragraphs of ~~~~, they were unnecessary. It was sufficient to state at the outset that portions of her memoir were redacted for security reasons; this was not a report, or even a white paper, with footnotes noting every resource. The memoir was full of opinion, emotional reactions, and changed names, so the ~~~ seemed pointlessly intrusive.
But other than that I found it an absorbing read, and I hope that women like her are paving the way for a new generation of women.
The Unexpected Spy was a fine, surprising, and enlightening read. Tracy Walder was a girly-girl from southern California, a Delta Gamma at USC, not the kind of young woman to join the CIA. And yet, she was passionate about history and politics, and when she approached a CIA recruiting booth at a campus job fair, she picked up a brochure, read it, and thought WHY NOT? Her memoir is an adventure from mapping terrorist groups on computer to surviving 9/11 to espionage in some of the world’s most dangerous locales where she brought down terrorists and WMDs. We get all the scoop on those mysterious, vanishing WMDs in Iraq, and all kinds of great inside gossip. Through it all, Tracy remains cool, detached, collected, and determined to make the world a better place. Her experience with the FBI was somewhat less gratifying, but you really need to read this book and find out for yourself! Thanks to Netgalley for an ARC ebook for review.