April 1, 2021 • 46 mins
What’s it like to live your life so deep undercover, handling secrets that are so sensitive, not even the people who know you best—not your friends, not your siblings, not your parents—can know what you’re up to? Ex-CIA agent Amaryllis Fox spent the better part of her 20s trying to keep WMDs out of the hands of global terror groups—until she became a mother and realized she couldn’t ask her baby daughter to live inside a secret world.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Laura
and I write a dictionary for our own language and
mock the cool kids in our new foreign tongue. Lisa
shows me how to make a spider web string all
over my bedroom and hang bells on it to detect ghosts.
(00:20):
While we sleep. For three months, we're happy. Then the
day after Christmas, my mother sits me down to tell
me that Laura is dead. She was killed while flying
home with her entire family grandmother to infant brother, on
the pan Am flight bombed by Libyan terrorists over lack
of the Scotland. I am eight. I fall quiet for
(00:44):
a long periods. I feel like my head is full
of cotton, feel sleepy and mute and numb. Finally, my
dad teaches me to read the London Times. You have
to understand the forces that took her. It will seems
scary if you do. I think of the faceless monster
on the cardboards spook House, and I know that he's right. Slowly,
(01:08):
my world is filled with a new cast of characters,
Kadafi and Thatcher and Reagan and Gorbachev. They sound like
exotic fairy tale people, wizards and witches and woodsmen living
in distant magical forests, but their storybook showdowns can spill
over into the real world, into my world, and steal
(01:28):
my friends from the sky, so I have to pay attention.
That's Emeralist Fox. You know. If I were writing a
novel about a spy and I had to come up
with a great name for that spy, I'd like to
think I could invent a name as perfect as Ameralis Fox.
But the thing is, Emeralists really was a spy, recruited
(01:51):
by the CIA at the age of twenty one and
working under deep cover for nearly a decade. She's the
author of the memoir Life Undercover, Coming of Age in
the CIA. This is a story about what happens when
being a secret and keeping a secret is a matter
of life and death. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is
(02:20):
family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the
secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep
from ourselves. The landscape of my childhood changed every year,
and I think as a result, eventually I realized that
(02:42):
my landscape was planet Earth, you know, and that whether
it was a suit in the Middle East or it
was a refugee camp in Tanzania, or it was a
beautiful Downton Abbey type house in the countryside and England
that humans and the humans that inhabited them were the same,
(03:05):
you know, and I think that was an enormous gift.
It didn't always feel that way as a kid, being
in a new place every year, but I suppose the
landscape of my childhood was in a sense my family,
because it was the one consistency between all of these
places we moved every year because my dad was an
economist who focused on developing economies and took us with
(03:29):
him to new countries every year. And you know, my
birthday since September, so every year I would know nobody
in a new place to invite over for my birthday.
But it was an amazing range of experience. I think,
looking back on it now as an adult, it seemed
ordinary to me as a child, but it was really
(03:50):
quite magical. Sure it always does. Right our childhoods just
feel like that must be the way the whole world lives, absolutely,
you know, And I think actually it's to milestone when
you realize that there are so many ways to live
a life, and the people who have taken another path
through their life, have from all of the different hills
(04:11):
and valleys that they've been through that we haven't have,
had a completely different vantage point on the terrain, and
have intelligence that they can share with us. But definitely
as a child, I thought, I mean, I knew people
didn't move every year, but I thought that everyone felt
as at home in the world as I did. And
I think it was really sort of getting to university
(04:33):
and realizing that for many people that was kind of
the first time that they had had any horizons beyond
their hometown. Every September when the new school year started,
Amarillis would find herself beginning again. This might be New York,
or in the UK, or Jakarta, Zanzibar, Moscow, Thailand. Each
(04:55):
country had different customs and modes of dress and sights
and smells, and she grew up having to make sense
of it all to witness, learn and adapt. It's such
a primal period and you're kind of trained in a
very primal sense to look for the archetypes that you
need to recognize to survive when you're a young child,
(05:17):
and you look for the caregivers and you look for
the potential friends, and those people exist everywhere, and so
I think in a way that the terrain of my
childhood on the surface looked incredibly varied, but when I
look back on it, it all feels very warm. I
had a great sense of safety in my early childhood.
(05:40):
I think that that changed, as it always does as
we grow up, But in my early childhood and even
beyond that, physically, I felt very safe, even in very
tumultuous environments as a kid, because I've kind of never
known anything else. Describe your mother me. My mother is
(06:03):
a poet at heart. She's an artist. Um, she's English,
and she comes from a very old, you know, kind
of snazzy English family that kind of knows all the
rules about what to say and what not to say,
and what salad work to use and so on. But
in her heart she is this incredibly free thinker and
(06:26):
this really radical poet and artist. She went to a
really interesting school as a child in England called be Dales,
which has a reputation for kind of breaking out of
the stiff upper lip British mold and creating the kind
of the hippie free thinkers of the UK. And you know,
she really gave me a love of the spoken word
(06:48):
and the written word. I memorized poetry all through my childhood,
and that was very much down to my mom. You know,
she had learned poetry growing up in Britain, poetry growing up,
and she walk home from school, skipping classes and walk
home through the meadows reciting poetry. And it was really
important to her. And it is now to me to
(07:10):
have kind of the wisdom of ages past in a
place that no one can ever take it from you.
You know, I think the things that we learned by
heart are hours and even in a terrible circumstance, even
when everything else has been stripped away, you know, no
one can take that. And my mom really gave me
that love of art and literature as a way of
(07:32):
understanding society, challenging society. Tell me about your father. My
father is much more analytical, much more almost like a
human computer, I guess you could say. I as a
child and even now, I sort of always had the
(07:53):
sense of his knowing everything in terms of fact, not
so much always in terms of the life experience or
wisdom emotionally in terms of emotional intelligence. To put those
facts to work in a way that you kind of
might think of as wisdom. But he is incredibly curious
and incredibly intelligent in his capabilities, in his ability to
(08:18):
always be seeking new information and to pull all of
that information in to kind of constantly update his model
of the universe and crunch as many numbers as you
could kind of possibly put in front of him. And
he is in fact an economist by training. He's American.
Grew up in a little small town called Franklin, bill
And upstate New York, and was one of only two
(08:40):
kids in his class to go to college the first,
and his family very different childhood from my mother, you know,
working class, single mother. And he ended up at the
University of Chicago and was kind of a wonder kinds there,
you know, it was loved by all the professors and
advanced really quickly and up being one of the youngest
(09:01):
tenured professors there in his early twenties. And met my
mom that as he sort of moved towards his thirties
and she was much younger, and they just were as
different as two people could be. How did they meet?
They met actually by mistake in a way, and my
dad had been set up on a blind date with
(09:22):
my mother's sister when he was visiting London for business,
and my mother's sister got the stomach flu and and
send my mother instead, and they went to a little
night music to play the musical in the West End
in London and had, you know, by all accounts of
very romantic evening. And then my dad went back to
(09:43):
America and my mom went and traveled around Greece and
Italy as a as a kind of backpacker, because she
was still just fresh out of school. And my dad
wrote to her and kind of, you know, my Mamo
says he drew birds on the top of the paper
in that way that you can write the that looks
like an m you know, and that that seems so
(10:04):
romantic because he is so analytical and not an artist,
and it was sort of his attempt to be romantic
at any rate. He eventually center of one way playing
ticket to Chicago, and she went. And I think it
was such a new world for her, because she was
coming out of the world of country manor houses in England,
(10:24):
surrounded by ideas and art and literature and these kind
of six hundred year old rooms that are incredibly grand,
but like the heat doesn't work, and there are mice
in the covers, you have to knock on it before
you open it, you know, just all the contradictions of
English country life, and suddenly was in the midst of
(10:44):
this kind of intellectual cauldron at the University of Chicago,
where every night they were at a different dinner party
with incredibly articulate, fast, intellectual men and women. But I
think the women in particular really struck my mom because
they were so different from anyone she had come across
before that could just repartee on any topic, and we're
(11:08):
so worldly, and we're ten years older than she was,
because so is my dad, and I think it was
quite bewildering for her at the beginning. I think she
kind of struggled to remember her own worth a little bit.
Then two huge events occur during Amarilla's childhood. First, her
older brother, Ben, her partner in crime, compatriot closest person,
(11:33):
is sent off to boarding school. Ben has learning challenges
and is also exceptionally bright, with the kind of mind
that retains detail history musical scores. Ben and Amarilla's have
always spent lots of time together, haunting museums in various
cities or attending concerts. He is the consistent backdrop of
(11:54):
her childhood, her everything, and then just like that, he's
gone away. He puts a brave face on it, but
e Marilla's is terribly lonely. The family is now living
in London and Marilla's is in the third grade. She
makes new friends, particularly a girl named Laura. Then Laura
(12:16):
and her entire family are killed on PanAm flight one
oh three, blown up by a terrorist bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland.
My mom waited until after Christmas to tell me, so
I always think of it as just after Christmas, but
it was just before. You know. She'd been traveling back
(12:36):
with her mom and her dad and her sister to
go home for Christmas, as so many people on that
flight were, and they were all gone, you know, And
I remember my mom saying it's a blessing that they
were all together, and there's you know, there's no one
left to grieve them. They all went together, and I
just it was just so much to process and to absorb.
(12:56):
I'd never lost anyone really close to me. I'd like
death was kind of a something I'd read about in books,
but I'd never really experienced in a deep way until then.
And it's also the first time that you have any
awareness that there's terrorism in the world, and that's something
like this can happen, and it can happen on purpose.
(13:17):
It can happen on purpose that somebody somewhere who never
knew Laura, never knew me, could make a plan for
some reason that made no sense to any of us
and had nothing to do with our lives and steal
my friend and her entire family from the sky. It
was just so scary and huge, you know. It was
(13:41):
just such a big revelation that really shook my world.
And I think I was really struggling with it because
my dad stepped in, which was quite rare in general.
My mom was very much kind of the heart of
our family, and my dad was sort of, I guess,
more than the mind, but he was often deploying that
(14:02):
mind out in the world doing his work, and wasn't
really a big part of child rearing. But I remember
him stepping in there and introducing me to the newspaper,
and I think he sensed that I needed to make
sense of what had happened. I needed to understand why
somebody had done this thing, and why they had done
(14:23):
it on purpose, and how it might or might not
happen again. And I think I've had a hard time
at the beginning reading those stories as more real than
the kind of fictional stories that I was used to reading.
But I also kind of had this constant, sort of
Damocle's idea hanging over my head that at any given moment,
(14:45):
one of these things might spill over into real life
and do this kind of incredible harm. And so you know,
when I look back on it, it's definitely something of
the kind of end of innocence, but also the beginning
of feeling an urge and desire and need to understand
what was happening in the world, and some sense of
responsibility of kind of understanding it so that maybe someday
(15:08):
I could do some small thing to help it be better.
Will be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Amarellis grows up paying attention to the news to world events.
(15:32):
When she's twelve, her father is working in Moscow and
there is a siege. For a number of panicked hours,
he is unreachable. When he returns safely home, he registers
that Emorrealis needs to see more of what's actually happening
on the ground, so that in its tangibility, it will
be less frightening to her. So on his next trip
(15:54):
to Moscow, during a time of protests and a fight
for democracy, he invite try to join him. I think
it was a great insight on his part. I think
he probably recognized the part of my d n A
that was his, you know, which is this part that
finds things that I can understand and no up close
(16:18):
and personal, much less scary than the kind of shadows
and boogeymen and monsters in the closet. You know. I
also was scared for him going back, and he felt
as though if I could go and see the thing
that was scaring me up close and personal, that I
would understand it, and then maybe there would be some
(16:41):
jagged edges that really were there, but in seeing them
I would not be imagining them as worse than they were.
And he was right about that, not only that time,
but pretty much in every other circumstance thereafter. I mean,
it became, I guess you could say, a coping mechanism
for me every time something really scared me to try
to take it apart and understand it, or to get
(17:02):
to know it better rather than to avoid it. And
that practice has turned out to be a great gift
because I think you know, especially if you fast forward
to today's world where everything is seen through the lens
of media and social media, all of which is kind
of designed to make scary things even scarier for profit.
(17:24):
The habit of sidestepping that narrative and going out and
meeting the scary people or seeing the scary place for yourself,
that's been an enormous gift in my life and making
me feel safer and making me feel better about the
future that's to come. That reminds me of a great
moment in your story where it's like kind of a
(17:46):
perfect metaphor where you describe this little toy vampire bat
that your brother had had and it scared you. You
started dreaming you hated that bat. And what your father
did in that situation, which struck me as so wise,
and it's the same really as as what you're saying
(18:06):
is it's like a childhood version of it. Is he
sat you on the floor and pulled apart the bat,
and I took a part the bat, laid out all
the pieces of the bat, the battery and everything about
what made that bat look scary, and then you write
after that I had never been afraid of him again. Absolutely.
(18:27):
It was a story that I went back to so
often in my mind um as I got older and older,
and things that seemed just as existentially terrifying as that
vampire bat had to me when I was a child.
And I mean, by the way, this thing was really scary.
It had like it had read pretend blood that swirled around,
(18:48):
and it's probiscus and my brother, would you know, bring
it up and squeeze its stomach to get the get
blood swirling. And as it as it approached my arm,
and I was pretty young, I really felt that this
thing was a threat to my survival, you know. And
as I got older, there were other things that I
thought were threats to my survival, and that memory of
kind of okay, but what if you give this the
(19:12):
vampire bat treatment. You know, what if you set out
the towel and you take this thing apart, piece by
piece and figure out that that blood swirling around in
the probiscus is really just a piece of plastic with
red paint, and when it swirls, it looks scary, but
when you take it out, it's not, you know, and
understand what the source of fuel is that's fueling this
(19:32):
what is that battery? And as I got older and
began thinking about the things that scared me in my
own personal life and then the things that scared me
in geopolitics and in security and in the world, that
same idea applies. And it's allowed me to see people
as the humans that they are instead of the kind
of vampire bat that they might feel when you first
(19:54):
hear whatever the threat and the story is, It's like
there was a training ground there almost for Yeah, what
would end up being your path? Yeah? I think my
dad was just trying to get some sleep, honestly, because
I kept having nightmares about this thing. But it turned
out to be a really great life. Lesson A Marillas
grows up to be the kind of young woman who,
(20:15):
as a senior in high school, cuts school because she
hears that Houston Smith is speaking in d C. It's
a rare opportunity to hear Smith, who is one of
the world's most influential scholars in religious studies. So she
plays hoockey and gets a demerit. Can you believe it?
(20:36):
She isn't off somewhere smoking weed or making out with
her boyfriend no, she's educating herself, but hey, that's high school.
Her innerpendulum swings back and forth between her passions and
interests poetry, literature, the space program, a life of public service.
(20:56):
For college, she debates between the Naval Academy and Oxford University.
She chooses Oxford, and when she graduates from Oxford, she
enrolls in a master's program in conflict and terrorism at
Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. So you go to graduate
school at Georgetown and you are recruited by the CIA. Yeah,
(21:20):
I mean it sounds crazy when you say it that way.
I A friend of mine said, you know, it must
be hard if you ever go to therapy, because the
therapist is sort of trained to think that anyone who
thinks they work for CIA is crazy. Um. But the
approach at the time nine eleven had just happened, and
nine eleven for me was an incredibly I guess the
(21:41):
word today is triggering thing in in that obviously was
for all of us an incredible national trauma. I think
on top of that, for me, it brought back Laura's death,
and this idea of terrorism is something that can completely, um,
you know, derail the world old and the lives of
(22:01):
people in it with no warning. And I was in
d C in that day, you know, and the black
smoke over the Pentagon, and my little sisters were evacuated
from the Cathedral school because they thought it might be
a target, and it was. It was all kind of
it felt very reminiscent in odd ways of losing Laura.
And so after all of that, I was really set
(22:25):
on kind of in a way, I guess you could say,
going back to that vampire bad advice of my dad's
from my childhood and trying to figure out, you know,
how do we take this thing apart and figure out
what makes it tick. The agency person who I first
spoke with was a CIA officer, but he was declared,
he wasn't undercover, and he was working as a professor
(22:48):
at Georgetown teaching classes in the subject of intelligence, you know,
what what it means and what its impact is on
geopolitics and so on. So he was kind of openly
teaching students, and so when we first talked, I think
I was so surprised by kind of how humble and
curious and quiet he was, and it was just nothing
like the movies, and he really seemed to have that
(23:11):
same interest that I did in taking this thing apart
and and understanding what drives it and from what the
humanity is behind it, in order to find some way
to make it stop. And that really spoke to me
in a way that I never expected the intelligence world
to be something that I would find any appealing. Like
(23:33):
the CIA officer who is Emoralyss's professor, other CIA officers
she meets strike her as curious, humble, and genuinely interested
in questions beginning with the word why. She begins a
long process of interviews and exams while playing language aptitude tests,
(23:53):
psych evaluations, and polygraphs. At the age of twenty two,
she receives a provisional offer of employment. She has a
friend from Georgetown named Jim, who has also undergone the
arduous application process. The two of them confide in each
other traveled together as they await word. Then Amarillis receives
(24:16):
a cryptic message her security clearance top secret clearance is complete.
She's given instructions to report to CIA headquarters in Langley,
Virginia the following week, and in the meantime to tell
anyone who knows she's applied that she did not make
the cut. She meets Jim that night, looks him in
(24:37):
the eye and tells him her first lie, and then
she starts to cry. He was the last person who
had known her truth, and now she has lost him.
But maybe maybe there's one other person who can know
at least something of the truth of her life. Her
boyfriend from the UK, Anthony, if he's to move to
(24:59):
the STA, it's to be with her. They'll have to
get married, and the Agency will have to approve. This
is what's known as an agency marriage. Anthony has put
through a battery of tests, including a polygraph, and he
passes muster. He and Emoryalis get married, but this doesn't
mean that she can share much with him. The secrecy
(25:21):
continues doing what secrecy does, causing rifts, opening fault lines
to make matters more complicated. A month after their marriage,
Emorialist is moved into the most elite operational training program
on Earth and is sent to a covert base in
Virginia known as the Farm, which is a little like
(25:44):
the CIA meets the Truman Show. It's an incredibly lonely
way to spend your twenties, There's no doubt. I mean,
it's almost like a kind of Russian nesting doll or
something where you're the only person who knows the real
truth of who you are. Is like the little doll
at the center. You know, and the people that you
(26:06):
work with who've trained with you at the farm or
who work on your behalf on your desk back at headquarters,
they kind of know the next level out. And then
the people who work for your cover company and provide
your cover maybe know the next level out. And and
then eventually the people around you in the field don't
(26:28):
know you at all. And the difficult part, I think
the hardest part really is that your family and your
friends from before are in that outer shell layer for
you know, for their protection, for your protection, for everyone's protection.
But for me, it was really difficult and really lonely
(26:49):
to not be able to lean on my mom in particular,
but lean on my family in general and ask their advice.
You know, you're suddenly in some of the most really
complex and challenging moments and scenarios you've ever been in,
with enormous responsibility and obligation, and and then right at
this time where you would need guidance and wisdom from
(27:12):
the people you trust most, you can't ask anybody's advice,
and you can't seek anyone's wisdom because no one knows
what you're doing, and then they can't know what you're doing.
So the farm is really this, as you say, wild
Truman Show simulation, where you know you're you're pretending to
be a first tour officer in a kind of fictional
(27:34):
country for six months um and working on operations against diplomats,
against terrorists, against other spies and every person there from
you know, the sources that you're developing, to the police
officers who are throwing you in the gravel and searching
your car, to the newscasters that are on the twenty
four hour TV news in your bedroom are all actually officers,
(28:00):
officers who are taking a tour away from the field
back home to help train, you know, the next generation
of operatives. And it's an incredible investment that they all make,
and the government makes in all of us. And I
think it's an appropriate investment because once you get out there,
you are so alone, and you have the lives of
(28:20):
other people in your hands, and I mean your own life, yes,
but also the lives of people who are putting everything
at risk in order to warn us about an attack
to warn us about something that is coming down the pike,
um that would put their own life in danger. For sharing.
It was just a small group of us that we're
(28:41):
in this incredible pressure cooker. But at least during training
we had one another to lean on. And then once
we were all out in the field, your sense of
self sufficiency and your self knowledge really has to kick
in because you're the only person who knows you at
that point. Yeah, you know, I'm just sitting here thinking
(29:03):
about what you said before about moving every year and
starting a new school and being in a new country,
and developing the skill set of looking for the caretakers,
looking for the people who will make good new friends,
like the survival skills that were in a way already
(29:24):
taking root in you in a certain way, like you
had to start over again and again and again as
a child, and that must have created a great sense
of self sufficiency that then was at least a piece
psychologically of what made it be possible to be that
tiniest nesting doll. Yeah, I think that's true. I think
(29:48):
my childhood was probably my first training course. In many ways.
There are skills that I was given at the farm. Obviously,
most of what you're doing is is a kind of
actual deep relationship building and how to keep your sources
secure and so on. And then you do the stuff
you see in the movies. You know, the defense of
(30:08):
driving and land navigation. And I qualified on the block
and the m flour even though I never carry the
weapon in the field, but you know, you do all
of that kind of the sexy stuff you see in
the movies. But one skill that I learned there that
was immensely useful to me was meditation. And it it
kind of seems surprising that that would be part of
(30:29):
the spy school training, as it were. But having the
ability to get quiet every day, um in a formal way,
but also in my own head in the middle of
a sequence, when I'm not sitting on a cushion somewhere,
and when I'm in the middle of something that is
unfolding very quickly with a lot of kind of kinectic uncertainty.
(30:49):
To be able to remember the kind of true self
and true purpose in that moment was really the bed
rock that I relied on for so many of those years.
So it was really grateful to have that. I still
it's one of the few things that I learned there
that I still practice on a daily basis, that was
(31:10):
taught as kind of part of the standard issue. Here's
your glock, here's your MPO, Here's how you flip a car,
and here's how you get quiet sitting on a cushion.
You know, we'll be right back. And a realist and
(31:43):
Anthony's marriage doesn't survive her time at the farm. She
returns home to find an empty apartment and Anthony gone.
In the stillness, she says, I was flooded with relief.
She's now working under Nona ficial cover, a coveted dangerous
position and charged with keeping weapons of mass destruction out
(32:07):
of the hands of global terror groups. She travels around
the world, returning home only to switch out bags and
pick up new alias documents. But eventually it's time for
a more permanent cover, and it isn't easy to find
just the right identity for a year old white girl
in places like Yemen, Libya, Pakistan. So Emeralss, who has
(32:30):
grown up steeped in the art world whose parents are collectors,
becomes an art dealer as her cover. She meets her
family for brunch at a cafe and tells them she's
going to try her hand at dealing indigenous art. Her
parents believe it. She hopes al Qaeda will too against
(32:51):
this backdrop, and could there be anything less conducive to
form a lasting relationship. Emeralss has begun and on again,
off again really lationship with a guy named Dean who
also works for the agency. They each understand that by necessity,
they have secrets from one another. A Mailla's continues to
rise to the top of her field and is eventually
(33:13):
asked to take on a highly sensitive six year assignment
in Shanghai, and she and Dean are given a choice.
Either they can go together another agency marriage, or they
won't see one another for the next six years. This
isn't a marriage based on great love as much as
(33:36):
it is on practicality and a bomb against loneliness. I
think as much as it would be kind of romantic
to say that it was all about not wanting to
not see each other, I think it was as much,
maybe more, about not wanting to go alone. You know what,
both of us were looking at long deployments in dangerous places,
(34:01):
doing complicated work that we could not talk to anybody
else about, and the only kind of possibility of having
having a shoulder to lean on and somebody to ask
counsel from. Was to marry someone who you trusted their judgment.
And even in that circumstance, we weren't totally both read
(34:22):
in on what the other one was doing, but we
knew enough about each other to at least share, you know,
a pretty significant part of our truth that nobody else
around us knew. And I think we had immense professional
respect for each other and a good, strong friendship and
we have both of those things to this day, and
we share an amazing daughter. So I think ultimately, in
(34:45):
its own funny way, it was the right decision. But
definitely I now look back on it as as a
mom of two girls who I I know we'll fall
in love one day themselves. It was a sign of
how the work and the mission was not only expected
to be the number one priority, but really the only priority,
you know, and anything else, whether it's a relationship or
(35:08):
love or family kind of only was there in as
far as it sort of fit in the space around
that priority, which was the work itself, you know, preventing
whatever the next attack was. And in my case, I
worked on m D and it just you know, the
potential scale of of a disaster that seemed to kind
(35:29):
of drown out everything else. On top of the secrets,
on top of the secrets, and Marillason Dean are both
aware that their house in Shanghai, their every move is
likely bugged, that, as they say, the walls have ears.
So the play acting of the young woman art dealer
(35:50):
must continue even during all hours is an identity she
has to assume through and through. It was a time
that emerging art was sort of suddenly on the fine
art scene in a big way, and I was working
on WMD that had the potential to fall into the
hands of terror groups, which is a required being in
(36:13):
places and mixing with sort of the people that your
average kind of like twenty something, your old white girl
wouldn't necessarily have a logical explanation for being in or
meeting with. And so emerging art seemed like a plausible
reason to be in the places that I needed to
(36:33):
be in. So that was what we want with what
did it feel like camera lists like during those years,
I mean, you had such a sense of purpose for
a very good reason. But I keep on going back
to that image of the tiniest nesting doll of you know,
you were close to your family and they didn't know
where you were, or vaguely they knew where you were,
(36:54):
like what you were doing? What allowed you to stay
as steady as you did? I mean, I think it
was this constant kind of how can I do this?
But also how can I not? And you know, each
step you get farther in and then you're in this
place where you actually have the operational ability to build
(37:15):
a relationship with a source within a terror group or
within an arms network that has the potential to prevent
an attack where hundreds, maybe thousands or more Laura's you know,
which is how I'm thinking of it at this front.
But I had lost and their families will die, you know,
not just on our side, by the way, but on
all sides of this thing. And I think it became
(37:39):
a way of trying to make things right in some
small way, or do right by this friend who never
got to make choices about what she was going to
do as as a grown up, you know. And it
wasn't just Laura, but I think this idea of so
much lost potential, and especially once I had my daughter,
that the idea of how much there is to lose
(38:03):
through conflict. You know what it means to really love
another human being, which I think you understand in a
kind of completely new way once you have a child,
And what that means for the mothers and fathers on
all sides and in all places who are affected by
division and by conflict. And how can each of us
do some tiny part, you know, to get ourselves to peace.
(38:27):
That became a real preoccupation and purpose for me. But
I think with it was the recognition that you can't
ask a source to put their life on the line
unless you can look them in the eye and say,
there is nothing in my life more important than keeping
you alive. And I got to the point, you know,
(38:48):
towards the end of that decade, once I had my daughter,
where I began to realize I couldn't honestly, honestly say
that anymore. And I felt like maybe that meant that
this sort a particular form of service for me had
to really come to an end, and I had to
entrust it to the next generation of amazing kids. And
they are kids, We were kids, you know, we're so
(39:10):
young the people who do this work. But it came time,
I think, to pass the Baton at that stage. In
two thousand nine, when Emorless is not quite twenty eight,
she returns to the States with her family. This was
initially so Dean could undergo and advanced surveillance course, but
the agency marriage is fraying, and so is Amoryless sense
(39:34):
that she can balance being a spy was being the
mother of a very young child. Did you know when
you returned that that was it, that you weren't going
to go back? Maybe in some deep place in my soul,
but I don't think i'd really practically grappled with it
(39:54):
or come to that conclusion. I mean I was at headquarters,
working there in support of some things that were happening
in the field, well, thinking about what what my next
tour would be, which is pretty typical. You know, you
spend some time rebuilding relationships at at headquarters and kind
of doing some support work there while you figure out
what you're going to do next, And people do that
(40:16):
with multiple tours throughout their career. But I think as
I was there and thinking through what another tour would mean,
and that it would necessarily as so he got older,
I mean asking her to participate in secrets in some
form or another that I realized I couldn't ask that
(40:38):
of her. I could ask it of myself, but I
couldn't ask that of her, And that there were other
forms of service out there, you know, And I wasn't
exactly sure what that would look like or what was next,
but I think I began to sense that period of
service in that form of service for me was drawn
to an end. So now she's back. She's given nearly
(41:00):
a decade of her life to the CIA, and Amarillis
is done after years of building alias after alias, cover
after cover, secret after secret. What was it like to
sit down with her parents, her brother, the people who
had been imagining one life while she was living quite another,
and to tell them the truth? It was? It was
(41:23):
a great relief for me to tell them, but I
think in large part because I could do it with
it being in retrospect, right. I could tell them this
thing that I knew would be very scary, especially for
my mom and say, and then we all lived happily
over und you know, you know, I don't think that
my family was as shocked as kind of maybe you
(41:47):
might be if you had a different kind of daughter
or had raised her in a different kind of way.
But I think, you know, if I remember back to
nine eleven and the decision to go to George Shown
and study the causes of terrorism, the thing that I
gave up in order to do that was going back
to the type of these border and pursuing a career
(42:07):
as a human rights and war journalists focused on the
conflicts in northern Burma, and so I don't think they
ever expected me to kind of be an accountant. So,
but it was an immense relief to be able to
kind of reclaim real intimacy. And I had never felt
as though we were strangers to one another, even though
(42:32):
they didn't know these kind of very important facts of
my life. For a while, we were still intimate soulmates
throughout all of that. My mom is my best friend
in the world. But it makes it a lot easier
when you can actually really open up all of those
nesting doll layers and look into one another's faces again. Um, so, yeah,
(42:55):
it was a it was a beautiful moment. We were
out on a boat. Actually, I thought it was easiest
to be able to do it in a place where
we could have a whole conversation without interruption and with
without the ability of anyone to walk away. I think
in so many cultures there's a period during the transition
to adulthood where you go through some kind of experience
(43:19):
in the wilderness, or some kind of service to your
country or your community, or a period of fasting and growth.
And in a weird way, this was all of those things,
you know, And it was wonderful to be back in
real life, in the arms of my family, but knowing
that I had served, and that I had grown, and
that I had learned enormously, learned so many things, and
(43:44):
was kind of ready to return to life as a
grown woman when I had really left as a child.
Here's Amarillis reading a brief passage from her book about
those remarkable years. When I'm invited to speak publicly about
my work, my body physically revolts, like jerking my fingers
(44:07):
back from a hot stove. I get it. The journalist jokes,
you want to keep all your lessons locked up so
only you can enjoy them. No, I laugh, I'm just
scared of. I pause of. He prompts me. Every instinct
and every piece of training I've ever undergone is in
opposition to this moment. What will happen if I tell
(44:29):
the world the truth, spill that most secret of secrets,
but always soldiers and spies, all the belching, booming, armored
juggernauts of war, all the terror groups, and all the
rogue states, that we're all just pretending to be fierce
because we're all on fire with fear. What will happen
if I speak those words out loud? Will I get hurt?
(44:52):
Will Zoe get hurt? Will our life be disrupted all
over again? But then I remember my daughter came up
at me and laughing. I think of the white flowers
on the table in Karachi, and the girls sitting in
their dusty circle outside Mosco, of the prisoners here at
home making amends to their victims and themselves, of the
(45:14):
gang members removing their tattoos of nothing. I answer, and
instead of hiding, I sit in front of a camera
and tell the truth. Family Secret is a production of
I Heart Media. Dylan Fagin and Bethan Macaluso are the
(45:37):
executive producers. Andrew Howard is our audio editor. If you
have a secret you'd like to share, leave us a
voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming bonus episode.
Our number is one secret, zero that's secret, and then
the number zero. You can also find us on Instagram
(46:00):
at Danny Writer, Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family
Secrets Pod, and Twitter at fami Secret Spot. And if
you want to know about my family's secret that inspired
this podcast, check out my New York Times bestselling memoir Inheritance.
(46:23):
For more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Laura
and I write a dictionary for our own language and
mock the cool kids in our new foreign tongue. Lisa
shows me how to make a spider web string all
over my bedroom and hang bells on it to detect ghosts.
(00:20):
While we sleep. For three months, we're happy. Then the
day after Christmas, my mother sits me down to tell
me that Laura is dead. She was killed while flying
home with her entire family grandmother to infant brother, on
the pan Am flight bombed by Libyan terrorists over lack
of the Scotland. I am eight. I fall quiet for
(00:44):
a long periods. I feel like my head is full
of cotton, feel sleepy and mute and numb. Finally, my
dad teaches me to read the London Times. You have
to understand the forces that took her. It will seems
scary if you do. I think of the faceless monster
on the cardboards spook House, and I know that he's right. Slowly,
(01:08):
my world is filled with a new cast of characters,
Kadafi and Thatcher and Reagan and Gorbachev. They sound like
exotic fairy tale people, wizards and witches and woodsmen living
in distant magical forests, but their storybook showdowns can spill
over into the real world, into my world, and steal
(01:28):
my friends from the sky, so I have to pay attention.
That's Emeralist Fox. You know. If I were writing a
novel about a spy and I had to come up
with a great name for that spy, I'd like to
think I could invent a name as perfect as Ameralis Fox.
But the thing is, Emeralists really was a spy, recruited
(01:51):
by the CIA at the age of twenty one and
working under deep cover for nearly a decade. She's the
author of the memoir Life Undercover, Coming of Age in
the CIA. This is a story about what happens when
being a secret and keeping a secret is a matter
of life and death. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is
(02:20):
family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the
secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep
from ourselves. The landscape of my childhood changed every year,
and I think as a result, eventually I realized that
(02:42):
my landscape was planet Earth, you know, and that whether
it was a suit in the Middle East or it
was a refugee camp in Tanzania, or it was a
beautiful Downton Abbey type house in the countryside and England
that humans and the humans that inhabited them were the same,
(03:05):
you know, and I think that was an enormous gift.
It didn't always feel that way as a kid, being
in a new place every year, but I suppose the
landscape of my childhood was in a sense my family,
because it was the one consistency between all of these
places we moved every year because my dad was an
economist who focused on developing economies and took us with
(03:29):
him to new countries every year. And you know, my
birthday since September, so every year I would know nobody
in a new place to invite over for my birthday.
But it was an amazing range of experience. I think,
looking back on it now as an adult, it seemed
ordinary to me as a child, but it was really
(03:50):
quite magical. Sure it always does. Right our childhoods just
feel like that must be the way the whole world lives, absolutely,
you know, And I think actually it's to milestone when
you realize that there are so many ways to live
a life, and the people who have taken another path
through their life, have from all of the different hills
(04:11):
and valleys that they've been through that we haven't have,
had a completely different vantage point on the terrain, and
have intelligence that they can share with us. But definitely
as a child, I thought, I mean, I knew people
didn't move every year, but I thought that everyone felt
as at home in the world as I did. And
I think it was really sort of getting to university
(04:33):
and realizing that for many people that was kind of
the first time that they had had any horizons beyond
their hometown. Every September when the new school year started,
Amarillis would find herself beginning again. This might be New York,
or in the UK, or Jakarta, Zanzibar, Moscow, Thailand. Each
(04:55):
country had different customs and modes of dress and sights
and smells, and she grew up having to make sense
of it all to witness, learn and adapt. It's such
a primal period and you're kind of trained in a
very primal sense to look for the archetypes that you
need to recognize to survive when you're a young child,
(05:17):
and you look for the caregivers and you look for
the potential friends, and those people exist everywhere, and so
I think in a way that the terrain of my
childhood on the surface looked incredibly varied, but when I
look back on it, it all feels very warm. I
had a great sense of safety in my early childhood.
(05:40):
I think that that changed, as it always does as
we grow up, But in my early childhood and even
beyond that, physically, I felt very safe, even in very
tumultuous environments as a kid, because I've kind of never
known anything else. Describe your mother me. My mother is
(06:03):
a poet at heart. She's an artist. Um, she's English,
and she comes from a very old, you know, kind
of snazzy English family that kind of knows all the
rules about what to say and what not to say,
and what salad work to use and so on. But
in her heart she is this incredibly free thinker and
(06:26):
this really radical poet and artist. She went to a
really interesting school as a child in England called be Dales,
which has a reputation for kind of breaking out of
the stiff upper lip British mold and creating the kind
of the hippie free thinkers of the UK. And you know,
she really gave me a love of the spoken word
(06:48):
and the written word. I memorized poetry all through my childhood,
and that was very much down to my mom. You know,
she had learned poetry growing up in Britain, poetry growing up,
and she walk home from school, skipping classes and walk
home through the meadows reciting poetry. And it was really
important to her. And it is now to me to
(07:10):
have kind of the wisdom of ages past in a
place that no one can ever take it from you.
You know, I think the things that we learned by
heart are hours and even in a terrible circumstance, even
when everything else has been stripped away, you know, no
one can take that. And my mom really gave me
that love of art and literature as a way of
(07:32):
understanding society, challenging society. Tell me about your father. My
father is much more analytical, much more almost like a
human computer, I guess you could say. I as a
child and even now, I sort of always had the
(07:53):
sense of his knowing everything in terms of fact, not
so much always in terms of the life experience or
wisdom emotionally in terms of emotional intelligence. To put those
facts to work in a way that you kind of
might think of as wisdom. But he is incredibly curious
and incredibly intelligent in his capabilities, in his ability to
(08:18):
always be seeking new information and to pull all of
that information in to kind of constantly update his model
of the universe and crunch as many numbers as you
could kind of possibly put in front of him. And
he is in fact an economist by training. He's American.
Grew up in a little small town called Franklin, bill
And upstate New York, and was one of only two
(08:40):
kids in his class to go to college the first,
and his family very different childhood from my mother, you know,
working class, single mother. And he ended up at the
University of Chicago and was kind of a wonder kinds there,
you know, it was loved by all the professors and
advanced really quickly and up being one of the youngest
(09:01):
tenured professors there in his early twenties. And met my
mom that as he sort of moved towards his thirties
and she was much younger, and they just were as
different as two people could be. How did they meet?
They met actually by mistake in a way, and my
dad had been set up on a blind date with
(09:22):
my mother's sister when he was visiting London for business,
and my mother's sister got the stomach flu and and
send my mother instead, and they went to a little
night music to play the musical in the West End
in London and had, you know, by all accounts of
very romantic evening. And then my dad went back to
(09:43):
America and my mom went and traveled around Greece and
Italy as a as a kind of backpacker, because she
was still just fresh out of school. And my dad
wrote to her and kind of, you know, my Mamo
says he drew birds on the top of the paper
in that way that you can write the that looks
like an m you know, and that that seems so
(10:04):
romantic because he is so analytical and not an artist,
and it was sort of his attempt to be romantic
at any rate. He eventually center of one way playing
ticket to Chicago, and she went. And I think it
was such a new world for her, because she was
coming out of the world of country manor houses in England,
(10:24):
surrounded by ideas and art and literature and these kind
of six hundred year old rooms that are incredibly grand,
but like the heat doesn't work, and there are mice
in the covers, you have to knock on it before
you open it, you know, just all the contradictions of
English country life, and suddenly was in the midst of
(10:44):
this kind of intellectual cauldron at the University of Chicago,
where every night they were at a different dinner party
with incredibly articulate, fast, intellectual men and women. But I
think the women in particular really struck my mom because
they were so different from anyone she had come across
before that could just repartee on any topic, and we're
(11:08):
so worldly, and we're ten years older than she was,
because so is my dad, and I think it was
quite bewildering for her at the beginning. I think she
kind of struggled to remember her own worth a little bit.
Then two huge events occur during Amarilla's childhood. First, her
older brother, Ben, her partner in crime, compatriot closest person,
(11:33):
is sent off to boarding school. Ben has learning challenges
and is also exceptionally bright, with the kind of mind
that retains detail history musical scores. Ben and Amarilla's have
always spent lots of time together, haunting museums in various
cities or attending concerts. He is the consistent backdrop of
(11:54):
her childhood, her everything, and then just like that, he's
gone away. He puts a brave face on it, but
e Marilla's is terribly lonely. The family is now living
in London and Marilla's is in the third grade. She
makes new friends, particularly a girl named Laura. Then Laura
(12:16):
and her entire family are killed on PanAm flight one
oh three, blown up by a terrorist bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland.
My mom waited until after Christmas to tell me, so
I always think of it as just after Christmas, but
it was just before. You know. She'd been traveling back
(12:36):
with her mom and her dad and her sister to
go home for Christmas, as so many people on that
flight were, and they were all gone, you know, And
I remember my mom saying it's a blessing that they
were all together, and there's you know, there's no one
left to grieve them. They all went together, and I
just it was just so much to process and to absorb.
(12:56):
I'd never lost anyone really close to me. I'd like
death was kind of a something I'd read about in books,
but I'd never really experienced in a deep way until then.
And it's also the first time that you have any
awareness that there's terrorism in the world, and that's something
like this can happen, and it can happen on purpose.
(13:17):
It can happen on purpose that somebody somewhere who never
knew Laura, never knew me, could make a plan for
some reason that made no sense to any of us
and had nothing to do with our lives and steal
my friend and her entire family from the sky. It
was just so scary and huge, you know. It was
(13:41):
just such a big revelation that really shook my world.
And I think I was really struggling with it because
my dad stepped in, which was quite rare in general.
My mom was very much kind of the heart of
our family, and my dad was sort of, I guess,
more than the mind, but he was often deploying that
(14:02):
mind out in the world doing his work, and wasn't
really a big part of child rearing. But I remember
him stepping in there and introducing me to the newspaper,
and I think he sensed that I needed to make
sense of what had happened. I needed to understand why
somebody had done this thing, and why they had done
(14:23):
it on purpose, and how it might or might not
happen again. And I think I've had a hard time
at the beginning reading those stories as more real than
the kind of fictional stories that I was used to reading.
But I also kind of had this constant, sort of
Damocle's idea hanging over my head that at any given moment,
(14:45):
one of these things might spill over into real life
and do this kind of incredible harm. And so you know,
when I look back on it, it's definitely something of
the kind of end of innocence, but also the beginning
of feeling an urge and desire and need to understand
what was happening in the world, and some sense of
responsibility of kind of understanding it so that maybe someday
(15:08):
I could do some small thing to help it be better.
Will be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Amarellis grows up paying attention to the news to world events.
(15:32):
When she's twelve, her father is working in Moscow and
there is a siege. For a number of panicked hours,
he is unreachable. When he returns safely home, he registers
that Emorrealis needs to see more of what's actually happening
on the ground, so that in its tangibility, it will
be less frightening to her. So on his next trip
(15:54):
to Moscow, during a time of protests and a fight
for democracy, he invite try to join him. I think
it was a great insight on his part. I think
he probably recognized the part of my d n A
that was his, you know, which is this part that
finds things that I can understand and no up close
(16:18):
and personal, much less scary than the kind of shadows
and boogeymen and monsters in the closet. You know. I
also was scared for him going back, and he felt
as though if I could go and see the thing
that was scaring me up close and personal, that I
would understand it, and then maybe there would be some
(16:41):
jagged edges that really were there, but in seeing them
I would not be imagining them as worse than they were.
And he was right about that, not only that time,
but pretty much in every other circumstance thereafter. I mean,
it became, I guess you could say, a coping mechanism
for me every time something really scared me to try
to take it apart and understand it, or to get
(17:02):
to know it better rather than to avoid it. And
that practice has turned out to be a great gift
because I think you know, especially if you fast forward
to today's world where everything is seen through the lens
of media and social media, all of which is kind
of designed to make scary things even scarier for profit.
(17:24):
The habit of sidestepping that narrative and going out and
meeting the scary people or seeing the scary place for yourself,
that's been an enormous gift in my life and making
me feel safer and making me feel better about the
future that's to come. That reminds me of a great
moment in your story where it's like kind of a
(17:46):
perfect metaphor where you describe this little toy vampire bat
that your brother had had and it scared you. You
started dreaming you hated that bat. And what your father
did in that situation, which struck me as so wise,
and it's the same really as as what you're saying
(18:06):
is it's like a childhood version of it. Is he
sat you on the floor and pulled apart the bat,
and I took a part the bat, laid out all
the pieces of the bat, the battery and everything about
what made that bat look scary, and then you write
after that I had never been afraid of him again. Absolutely.
(18:27):
It was a story that I went back to so
often in my mind um as I got older and older,
and things that seemed just as existentially terrifying as that
vampire bat had to me when I was a child.
And I mean, by the way, this thing was really scary.
It had like it had read pretend blood that swirled around,
(18:48):
and it's probiscus and my brother, would you know, bring
it up and squeeze its stomach to get the get
blood swirling. And as it as it approached my arm,
and I was pretty young, I really felt that this
thing was a threat to my survival, you know. And
as I got older, there were other things that I
thought were threats to my survival, and that memory of
kind of okay, but what if you give this the
(19:12):
vampire bat treatment. You know, what if you set out
the towel and you take this thing apart, piece by
piece and figure out that that blood swirling around in
the probiscus is really just a piece of plastic with
red paint, and when it swirls, it looks scary, but
when you take it out, it's not, you know, and
understand what the source of fuel is that's fueling this
(19:32):
what is that battery? And as I got older and
began thinking about the things that scared me in my
own personal life and then the things that scared me
in geopolitics and in security and in the world, that
same idea applies. And it's allowed me to see people
as the humans that they are instead of the kind
of vampire bat that they might feel when you first
(19:54):
hear whatever the threat and the story is, It's like
there was a training ground there almost for Yeah, what
would end up being your path? Yeah? I think my
dad was just trying to get some sleep, honestly, because
I kept having nightmares about this thing. But it turned
out to be a really great life. Lesson A Marillas
grows up to be the kind of young woman who,
(20:15):
as a senior in high school, cuts school because she
hears that Houston Smith is speaking in d C. It's
a rare opportunity to hear Smith, who is one of
the world's most influential scholars in religious studies. So she
plays hoockey and gets a demerit. Can you believe it?
(20:36):
She isn't off somewhere smoking weed or making out with
her boyfriend no, she's educating herself, but hey, that's high school.
Her innerpendulum swings back and forth between her passions and
interests poetry, literature, the space program, a life of public service.
(20:56):
For college, she debates between the Naval Academy and Oxford University.
She chooses Oxford, and when she graduates from Oxford, she
enrolls in a master's program in conflict and terrorism at
Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. So you go to graduate
school at Georgetown and you are recruited by the CIA. Yeah,
(21:20):
I mean it sounds crazy when you say it that way.
I A friend of mine said, you know, it must
be hard if you ever go to therapy, because the
therapist is sort of trained to think that anyone who
thinks they work for CIA is crazy. Um. But the
approach at the time nine eleven had just happened, and
nine eleven for me was an incredibly I guess the
(21:41):
word today is triggering thing in in that obviously was
for all of us an incredible national trauma. I think
on top of that, for me, it brought back Laura's death,
and this idea of terrorism is something that can completely, um,
you know, derail the world old and the lives of
(22:01):
people in it with no warning. And I was in
d C in that day, you know, and the black
smoke over the Pentagon, and my little sisters were evacuated
from the Cathedral school because they thought it might be
a target, and it was. It was all kind of
it felt very reminiscent in odd ways of losing Laura.
And so after all of that, I was really set
(22:25):
on kind of in a way, I guess you could say,
going back to that vampire bad advice of my dad's
from my childhood and trying to figure out, you know,
how do we take this thing apart and figure out
what makes it tick. The agency person who I first
spoke with was a CIA officer, but he was declared,
he wasn't undercover, and he was working as a professor
(22:48):
at Georgetown teaching classes in the subject of intelligence, you know,
what what it means and what its impact is on
geopolitics and so on. So he was kind of openly
teaching students, and so when we first talked, I think
I was so surprised by kind of how humble and
curious and quiet he was, and it was just nothing
like the movies, and he really seemed to have that
(23:11):
same interest that I did in taking this thing apart
and and understanding what drives it and from what the
humanity is behind it, in order to find some way
to make it stop. And that really spoke to me
in a way that I never expected the intelligence world
to be something that I would find any appealing. Like
(23:33):
the CIA officer who is Emoralyss's professor, other CIA officers
she meets strike her as curious, humble, and genuinely interested
in questions beginning with the word why. She begins a
long process of interviews and exams while playing language aptitude tests,
(23:53):
psych evaluations, and polygraphs. At the age of twenty two,
she receives a provisional offer of employment. She has a
friend from Georgetown named Jim, who has also undergone the
arduous application process. The two of them confide in each
other traveled together as they await word. Then Amarillis receives
(24:16):
a cryptic message her security clearance top secret clearance is complete.
She's given instructions to report to CIA headquarters in Langley,
Virginia the following week, and in the meantime to tell
anyone who knows she's applied that she did not make
the cut. She meets Jim that night, looks him in
(24:37):
the eye and tells him her first lie, and then
she starts to cry. He was the last person who
had known her truth, and now she has lost him.
But maybe maybe there's one other person who can know
at least something of the truth of her life. Her
boyfriend from the UK, Anthony, if he's to move to
(24:59):
the STA, it's to be with her. They'll have to
get married, and the Agency will have to approve. This
is what's known as an agency marriage. Anthony has put
through a battery of tests, including a polygraph, and he
passes muster. He and Emoryalis get married, but this doesn't
mean that she can share much with him. The secrecy
(25:21):
continues doing what secrecy does, causing rifts, opening fault lines
to make matters more complicated. A month after their marriage,
Emorialist is moved into the most elite operational training program
on Earth and is sent to a covert base in
Virginia known as the Farm, which is a little like
(25:44):
the CIA meets the Truman Show. It's an incredibly lonely
way to spend your twenties, There's no doubt. I mean,
it's almost like a kind of Russian nesting doll or
something where you're the only person who knows the real
truth of who you are. Is like the little doll
at the center. You know, and the people that you
(26:06):
work with who've trained with you at the farm or
who work on your behalf on your desk back at headquarters,
they kind of know the next level out. And then
the people who work for your cover company and provide
your cover maybe know the next level out. And and
then eventually the people around you in the field don't
(26:28):
know you at all. And the difficult part, I think
the hardest part really is that your family and your
friends from before are in that outer shell layer for
you know, for their protection, for your protection, for everyone's protection.
But for me, it was really difficult and really lonely
(26:49):
to not be able to lean on my mom in particular,
but lean on my family in general and ask their advice.
You know, you're suddenly in some of the most really
complex and challenging moments and scenarios you've ever been in,
with enormous responsibility and obligation, and and then right at
this time where you would need guidance and wisdom from
(27:12):
the people you trust most, you can't ask anybody's advice,
and you can't seek anyone's wisdom because no one knows
what you're doing, and then they can't know what you're doing.
So the farm is really this, as you say, wild
Truman Show simulation, where you know you're you're pretending to
be a first tour officer in a kind of fictional
(27:34):
country for six months um and working on operations against diplomats,
against terrorists, against other spies and every person there from
you know, the sources that you're developing, to the police
officers who are throwing you in the gravel and searching
your car, to the newscasters that are on the twenty
four hour TV news in your bedroom are all actually officers,
(28:00):
officers who are taking a tour away from the field
back home to help train, you know, the next generation
of operatives. And it's an incredible investment that they all make,
and the government makes in all of us. And I
think it's an appropriate investment because once you get out there,
you are so alone, and you have the lives of
(28:20):
other people in your hands, and I mean your own life, yes,
but also the lives of people who are putting everything
at risk in order to warn us about an attack
to warn us about something that is coming down the pike,
um that would put their own life in danger. For sharing.
It was just a small group of us that we're
(28:41):
in this incredible pressure cooker. But at least during training
we had one another to lean on. And then once
we were all out in the field, your sense of
self sufficiency and your self knowledge really has to kick
in because you're the only person who knows you at
that point. Yeah, you know, I'm just sitting here thinking
(29:03):
about what you said before about moving every year and
starting a new school and being in a new country,
and developing the skill set of looking for the caretakers,
looking for the people who will make good new friends,
like the survival skills that were in a way already
(29:24):
taking root in you in a certain way, like you
had to start over again and again and again as
a child, and that must have created a great sense
of self sufficiency that then was at least a piece
psychologically of what made it be possible to be that
tiniest nesting doll. Yeah, I think that's true. I think
(29:48):
my childhood was probably my first training course. In many ways.
There are skills that I was given at the farm. Obviously,
most of what you're doing is is a kind of
actual deep relationship building and how to keep your sources
secure and so on. And then you do the stuff
you see in the movies. You know, the defense of
(30:08):
driving and land navigation. And I qualified on the block
and the m flour even though I never carry the
weapon in the field, but you know, you do all
of that kind of the sexy stuff you see in
the movies. But one skill that I learned there that
was immensely useful to me was meditation. And it it
kind of seems surprising that that would be part of
(30:29):
the spy school training, as it were. But having the
ability to get quiet every day, um in a formal way,
but also in my own head in the middle of
a sequence, when I'm not sitting on a cushion somewhere,
and when I'm in the middle of something that is
unfolding very quickly with a lot of kind of kinectic uncertainty.
(30:49):
To be able to remember the kind of true self
and true purpose in that moment was really the bed
rock that I relied on for so many of those years.
So it was really grateful to have that. I still
it's one of the few things that I learned there
that I still practice on a daily basis, that was
(31:10):
taught as kind of part of the standard issue. Here's
your glock, here's your MPO, Here's how you flip a car,
and here's how you get quiet sitting on a cushion.
You know, we'll be right back. And a realist and
(31:43):
Anthony's marriage doesn't survive her time at the farm. She
returns home to find an empty apartment and Anthony gone.
In the stillness, she says, I was flooded with relief.
She's now working under Nona ficial cover, a coveted dangerous
position and charged with keeping weapons of mass destruction out
(32:07):
of the hands of global terror groups. She travels around
the world, returning home only to switch out bags and
pick up new alias documents. But eventually it's time for
a more permanent cover, and it isn't easy to find
just the right identity for a year old white girl
in places like Yemen, Libya, Pakistan. So Emeralss, who has
(32:30):
grown up steeped in the art world whose parents are collectors,
becomes an art dealer as her cover. She meets her
family for brunch at a cafe and tells them she's
going to try her hand at dealing indigenous art. Her
parents believe it. She hopes al Qaeda will too against
(32:51):
this backdrop, and could there be anything less conducive to
form a lasting relationship. Emeralss has begun and on again,
off again really lationship with a guy named Dean who
also works for the agency. They each understand that by necessity,
they have secrets from one another. A Mailla's continues to
rise to the top of her field and is eventually
(33:13):
asked to take on a highly sensitive six year assignment
in Shanghai, and she and Dean are given a choice.
Either they can go together another agency marriage, or they
won't see one another for the next six years. This
isn't a marriage based on great love as much as
(33:36):
it is on practicality and a bomb against loneliness. I
think as much as it would be kind of romantic
to say that it was all about not wanting to
not see each other, I think it was as much,
maybe more, about not wanting to go alone. You know what,
both of us were looking at long deployments in dangerous places,
(34:01):
doing complicated work that we could not talk to anybody
else about, and the only kind of possibility of having
having a shoulder to lean on and somebody to ask
counsel from. Was to marry someone who you trusted their judgment.
And even in that circumstance, we weren't totally both read
(34:22):
in on what the other one was doing, but we
knew enough about each other to at least share, you know,
a pretty significant part of our truth that nobody else
around us knew. And I think we had immense professional
respect for each other and a good, strong friendship and
we have both of those things to this day, and
we share an amazing daughter. So I think ultimately, in
(34:45):
its own funny way, it was the right decision. But
definitely I now look back on it as as a
mom of two girls who I I know we'll fall
in love one day themselves. It was a sign of
how the work and the mission was not only expected
to be the number one priority, but really the only priority,
you know, and anything else, whether it's a relationship or
(35:08):
love or family kind of only was there in as
far as it sort of fit in the space around
that priority, which was the work itself, you know, preventing
whatever the next attack was. And in my case, I
worked on m D and it just you know, the
potential scale of of a disaster that seemed to kind
(35:29):
of drown out everything else. On top of the secrets,
on top of the secrets, and Marillason Dean are both
aware that their house in Shanghai, their every move is
likely bugged, that, as they say, the walls have ears.
So the play acting of the young woman art dealer
(35:50):
must continue even during all hours is an identity she
has to assume through and through. It was a time
that emerging art was sort of suddenly on the fine
art scene in a big way, and I was working
on WMD that had the potential to fall into the
hands of terror groups, which is a required being in
(36:13):
places and mixing with sort of the people that your
average kind of like twenty something, your old white girl
wouldn't necessarily have a logical explanation for being in or
meeting with. And so emerging art seemed like a plausible
reason to be in the places that I needed to
(36:33):
be in. So that was what we want with what
did it feel like camera lists like during those years,
I mean, you had such a sense of purpose for
a very good reason. But I keep on going back
to that image of the tiniest nesting doll of you know,
you were close to your family and they didn't know
where you were, or vaguely they knew where you were,
(36:54):
like what you were doing? What allowed you to stay
as steady as you did? I mean, I think it
was this constant kind of how can I do this?
But also how can I not? And you know, each
step you get farther in and then you're in this
place where you actually have the operational ability to build
(37:15):
a relationship with a source within a terror group or
within an arms network that has the potential to prevent
an attack where hundreds, maybe thousands or more Laura's you know,
which is how I'm thinking of it at this front.
But I had lost and their families will die, you know,
not just on our side, by the way, but on
all sides of this thing. And I think it became
(37:39):
a way of trying to make things right in some
small way, or do right by this friend who never
got to make choices about what she was going to
do as as a grown up, you know. And it
wasn't just Laura, but I think this idea of so
much lost potential, and especially once I had my daughter,
that the idea of how much there is to lose
(38:03):
through conflict. You know what it means to really love
another human being, which I think you understand in a
kind of completely new way once you have a child,
And what that means for the mothers and fathers on
all sides and in all places who are affected by
division and by conflict. And how can each of us
do some tiny part, you know, to get ourselves to peace.
(38:27):
That became a real preoccupation and purpose for me. But
I think with it was the recognition that you can't
ask a source to put their life on the line
unless you can look them in the eye and say,
there is nothing in my life more important than keeping
you alive. And I got to the point, you know,
(38:48):
towards the end of that decade, once I had my daughter,
where I began to realize I couldn't honestly, honestly say
that anymore. And I felt like maybe that meant that
this sort a particular form of service for me had
to really come to an end, and I had to
entrust it to the next generation of amazing kids. And
they are kids, We were kids, you know, we're so
(39:10):
young the people who do this work. But it came time,
I think, to pass the Baton at that stage. In
two thousand nine, when Emorless is not quite twenty eight,
she returns to the States with her family. This was
initially so Dean could undergo and advanced surveillance course, but
the agency marriage is fraying, and so is Amoryless sense
(39:34):
that she can balance being a spy was being the
mother of a very young child. Did you know when
you returned that that was it, that you weren't going
to go back? Maybe in some deep place in my soul,
but I don't think i'd really practically grappled with it
(39:54):
or come to that conclusion. I mean I was at headquarters,
working there in support of some things that were happening
in the field, well, thinking about what what my next
tour would be, which is pretty typical. You know, you
spend some time rebuilding relationships at at headquarters and kind
of doing some support work there while you figure out
what you're going to do next, And people do that
(40:16):
with multiple tours throughout their career. But I think as
I was there and thinking through what another tour would mean,
and that it would necessarily as so he got older,
I mean asking her to participate in secrets in some
form or another that I realized I couldn't ask that
(40:38):
of her. I could ask it of myself, but I
couldn't ask that of her, And that there were other
forms of service out there, you know, And I wasn't
exactly sure what that would look like or what was next,
but I think I began to sense that period of
service in that form of service for me was drawn
to an end. So now she's back. She's given nearly
(41:00):
a decade of her life to the CIA, and Amarillis
is done after years of building alias after alias, cover
after cover, secret after secret. What was it like to
sit down with her parents, her brother, the people who
had been imagining one life while she was living quite another,
and to tell them the truth? It was? It was
(41:23):
a great relief for me to tell them, but I
think in large part because I could do it with
it being in retrospect, right. I could tell them this
thing that I knew would be very scary, especially for
my mom and say, and then we all lived happily
over und you know, you know, I don't think that
my family was as shocked as kind of maybe you
(41:47):
might be if you had a different kind of daughter
or had raised her in a different kind of way.
But I think, you know, if I remember back to
nine eleven and the decision to go to George Shown
and study the causes of terrorism, the thing that I
gave up in order to do that was going back
to the type of these border and pursuing a career
(42:07):
as a human rights and war journalists focused on the
conflicts in northern Burma, and so I don't think they
ever expected me to kind of be an accountant. So,
but it was an immense relief to be able to
kind of reclaim real intimacy. And I had never felt
as though we were strangers to one another, even though
(42:32):
they didn't know these kind of very important facts of
my life. For a while, we were still intimate soulmates
throughout all of that. My mom is my best friend
in the world. But it makes it a lot easier
when you can actually really open up all of those
nesting doll layers and look into one another's faces again. Um, so, yeah,
(42:55):
it was a it was a beautiful moment. We were
out on a boat. Actually, I thought it was easiest
to be able to do it in a place where
we could have a whole conversation without interruption and with
without the ability of anyone to walk away. I think
in so many cultures there's a period during the transition
to adulthood where you go through some kind of experience
(43:19):
in the wilderness, or some kind of service to your
country or your community, or a period of fasting and growth.
And in a weird way, this was all of those things,
you know, And it was wonderful to be back in
real life, in the arms of my family, but knowing
that I had served, and that I had grown, and
that I had learned enormously, learned so many things, and
(43:44):
was kind of ready to return to life as a
grown woman when I had really left as a child.
Here's Amarillis reading a brief passage from her book about
those remarkable years. When I'm invited to speak publicly about
my work, my body physically revolts, like jerking my fingers
(44:07):
back from a hot stove. I get it. The journalist jokes,
you want to keep all your lessons locked up so
only you can enjoy them. No, I laugh, I'm just
scared of. I pause of. He prompts me. Every instinct
and every piece of training I've ever undergone is in
opposition to this moment. What will happen if I tell
(44:29):
the world the truth, spill that most secret of secrets,
but always soldiers and spies, all the belching, booming, armored
juggernauts of war, all the terror groups, and all the
rogue states, that we're all just pretending to be fierce
because we're all on fire with fear. What will happen
if I speak those words out loud? Will I get hurt?
(44:52):
Will Zoe get hurt? Will our life be disrupted all
over again? But then I remember my daughter came up
at me and laughing. I think of the white flowers
on the table in Karachi, and the girls sitting in
their dusty circle outside Mosco, of the prisoners here at
home making amends to their victims and themselves, of the
(45:14):
gang members removing their tattoos of nothing. I answer, and
instead of hiding, I sit in front of a camera
and tell the truth. Family Secret is a production of
I Heart Media. Dylan Fagin and Bethan Macaluso are the
(45:37):
executive producers. Andrew Howard is our audio editor. If you
have a secret you'd like to share, leave us a
voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming bonus episode.
Our number is one secret, zero that's secret, and then
the number zero. You can also find us on Instagram
(46:00):
at Danny Writer, Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family
Secrets Pod, and Twitter at fami Secret Spot. And if
you want to know about my family's secret that inspired
this podcast, check out my New York Times bestselling memoir Inheritance.
(46:23):
For more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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