![]() ![]() "When you leave the CIA, you sign a nondisclosure agreement that anything you write about the agency has to be approved by the publication review board," Walder says. Sorority spy 2 how to#"She knows how to ask the question to lead you down a path you didn't know how to go down."Īfter eight months, the two had a draft, but the real challenge still lay ahead. "Jessica asks the best questions of anyone I ever met," she says. She began to realize the sorts of anecdotes and details that would move the narrative along. "It was like she was in my brain," Walder says. Walder, too, found herself thinking more like Blau. ![]() In one passage, Blau wrote that Walder ate grapefruit at diner breakfasts with colleagues because she was afraid the strange hours she kept could lead her to contract scurvy-this was true, but Walder hadn't said it. In time, their thoughts began to converge. In turn, Walder made it clear that she wanted Blau to be a collaborator, not a ghostwriter, on Unexpected Spy. She poured out her memories in a Google document, and Blau molded them into a narrative. "It's liberating to write in someone else's voice," she says. Blau had previously ghostwritten four books, which she considers a good exercise in experimenting with perspective and voice. Those surprising moments continued to unfold over long phone calls and occasional meetings in Dallas, where Walder lives, and New York, Blau's home. As we talked, little details would come out that she didn't think were a big deal, like she would casually mention a bomb going off." "We started talking and I was thinking, 'Oh my God, this is the coolest person I've ever met.' She's incredibly modest and doesn't have a sense of her greatness. Hearing Walder recount her experiences during that first phone call, Blau was smitten. She eventually began teaching at a private, all-girls high school in Dallas, where she established a class in national security and inspired dozens of girls to go into the field. There she says she was the victim of sexism, being denied deserved job opportunities, and left after a year and a half. She prevented several chemical attacks and raced old cars around a CIA training camp as part of a class nicknamed "Crash and Bang." After four years, eager to have a life outside of work and spend more time in the United States, she left the CIA and joined the FBI. ![]() He offered her tea-although he had none-she handed him an orange, and she somehow managed to elicit vital secrets from him. She describes leaving an American military compound in the trunk of a car so as not to attract attention, then being taken to interrogate a terror suspect in a former warehouse. Walder spent many months at an undisclosed location in the Middle East. Bush often stopped by CIA Director George Tenet would bring the team doughnuts and coffee, an unlit cigar dangling from his lips. The terror attacks brought new urgency to the agency's work, as Walder and her team hunkered down in a room she calls "The Vault," scrutinizing drone images of suspected terrorists to deduce their networks and plans. She started in the agency's counterterrorism division, studying grainy satellite images of the mountains, caves, warehouses, and safe houses where al-Qaida operatives gathered.īy chance, she was assigned to work on a highly classified program-she is barred from giving its name-about two weeks before September 11, 2001. Sorority spy 2 series#To her surprise, she was invited for a series of interviews and was offered a job as a staff operations officer upon graduating in 2000. One day, she biked from her sorority house to a campus job fair and on a whim dropped off a résumé at the CIA table. As a senior history major at the University of Southern California, Walder thought she might become a teacher. ![]() Walder called Blau to sketch out the basics of her story, which would become The Unexpected Spy (St. ![]()
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