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Coming of Age in the CIA
by Amaryllis Fox
Book Reviewed by:Amaryllis Fox's riveting memoir tells the story of her ten years in the most elite clandestine ops unit of the CIA, hunting the world's most dangerous terrorists in sixteen countries while marrying and giving birth to a daughter.
Amaryllis Fox was in her last year as an undergraduate at Oxford studying theology and international law when her writing mentor Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded. Galvanized by this brutality, Fox applied to a master's program in conflict and terrorism at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, where she created an algorithm that predicted, with uncanny certainty, the likelihood of a terrorist cell arising in any village around the world. At twenty-one, she was recruited by the CIA. Her first assignment was reading and analyzing hundreds of classified cables a day from foreign governments and synthesizing them into daily briefs for the president. Her next assignment was at the Iraq desk in the Counterterrorism center. At twenty-two, she was fast-tracked into advanced operations training, sent from Langley to "the Farm," where she lived for six months in a simulated world learning how to use a Glock, how to get out of flexicuffs while locked in the trunk of a car, how to withstand torture, and the best ways to commit suicide in case of captivity.
At the end of this training she was deployed as a spy under non-official cover--the most difficult and coveted job in the field as an art dealer specializing in tribal and indigenous art and sent to infiltrate terrorist networks in remote areas of the Middle East and Asia.
Life Undercover is exhilarating, intimate, fiercely intelligent--an impossible to put down record of an extraordinary life, and of Amaryllis Fox's astonishing courage and passion.
The publisher was unable to provide an excerpt of Life Undercover, but you can read one at Vogue (link opens in a new window).
In clear, elegant prose, Amaryllis Fox describes an unconventional international childhood and a series of choices that lead her to become a CIA field operative. In addition, she covers gritty details of spy craft and takes readers on a journey that isn't normally possible without top security clearance and years of training and sacrifice. Through excellent storytelling, she explains her yearning to make a real difference in the world by preventing terror attacks, but also reflects on her inner doubts...continued
Full Review
(1125 words)
(Reviewed by Karen Lewis).
In Life Undercover, CIA recruit Amaryllis Fox is tasked with disrupting the trade in black-market weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear materials. Since the first (and, to date, only) nuclear bombs to be used in war were dropped on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the world has experienced a proliferation of deadly weapons as the availability of raw materials and technology needed to build large-scale destructive devices has increased.
The United States developed and tested the first nuclear weapons during World War II, deploying atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. Japan subsequently surrendered, ending WWII conflict in the Pacific. Although the nascent United Nations called for an end to...
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