A California sorority girl defied the odds when she found herself drawn into the high-stakes world of CIA elite counterterrorism operations, where she would foil Al Qaeda plots after 9/11 and interview captured terrorists in the Middle East.
When Tracy Walder first arrived at the University of Southern California in 1996, she pursued the normal undergraduate experience by rushing Delta Gamma and easily ‘blended into the crowd’ of other young co-eds.
She thrived in university Greek life, where she was elected vice president of social standards, partied with close friends and would have decorated her room completely in pink if not for her roommate’s protests.
Walder, whose a news-junkie and a lover of history, initially planned to become a school teacher until fate pushed her towards a CIA recruiter at a jobs fair during her junior year.
Tracy Walder (pictured) temporarily left behind her dreams of becoming a teacher to join the CIA – and later the FBI – where she would become an expert in Al Qaeda and confronting captured terrorist associates in the Middle East
At the time, Walder was dressed in a pink top, flip flops and was pushing along a bike Huffy bike when the recruiter asked her the life-changing question, New York Post reports.
‘Do you want to be in the CIA?’ he asked, after Walder handed him a résumé out of partial pity.
‘Yes, I do,’ she said, shocking herself with the honesty of her answer.
Walder recalls the surprising moment in her upcoming memoir, ‘The Unexpected Spy: From CIA to The FBI, My Secret Life Taking Down Some of the World’s Most Notorious Terrorists’, with co-author Jessive Anya Blau.
The CIA would put Walder through series of intense interviews, including two lie-detector tests and interviewing four of her sorority sisters, before they ultimately welcomed her into the ranks of the agency’s elite.
At just 21-years-old, she began her career with the CIA in 2000. In time Walder becoming an expert in al Qaeda, interviewing terrorist associates in the Middle East and well versed in chemical weapons.
Walder (right), pictured with two of her Delta Gamma sorority sisters, attended the University of Southern California and soon became apart of the student Greek culture
Despite becoming entrenched in the world of terrorist networks at the CIA, Walder wrote that she’s feared Osama bin Laden for several years after watching a TV interview with him in 1997.
Those fears suddenly became tangible when Osama bin Laden attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, and killed nearly 3,000 people.
She remembers watching live footage of American Airlines Flight 77 tragically crashing into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
Walder wrote: ‘The plane might as well have crashed into the south side of my body. The pain, the guilt, the sense that my failures were resulting in lives lost . . . erased all other thoughts.’
The 9/11 attacks pushed the CIA to step to the country’s front lines, prompting them to assign Walder to an elite counterterrorism unit solely created to stop al-Qaeda.
‘I was ready to even the score,’ she wrote.
Walder traveled the world in her efforts to foil al-Qaeda’s plans, flitting from Europe to the Middle East and Africa.
She describes dealing with a myriad of challenges, including exhaustion, homesickness and sexism at the hands of men who dubbed her ‘Malibu Barbie.’
Family holidays with her parents in Los Angeles were pushed to the side and Walder worked a rigorous seven-day week.
After the 9/11 attacks in the United States, Walder (pictuerd) joined an elite counterterrorism unit that sent her to Europe, the Middle East and Africa to stop al Qaeda efforts
However, Walder said the White House was only interested in gaining information that connected al-Qaeda to former Iranian President Saddam Hussein.
Unfortunately, there was none.
‘The whole thing felt like a nutty fun-house game,’ Walder wrote.
‘No matter what we reported to the administration, they turned it around, turned it inside out, and spat it back out with some non-truth.’
Meanwhile, she was beginning to have thoughts of settling down and questioned if she could have a family as a spy.
Impulsively, Walder applied for a position at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and got in.
While in the FBI, Walder made a name for herself by unveiling a Chinese husband-and-wife team who were sending military secrets to China.
Operatives Chi and Rebecca Mak had lived in Los Angeles since the 1970s.
‘The Unexpected Spy: From CIA to The FBI, My Secret Life Taking Down Some of the World’s Most Notorious Terrorists’ will be released on February 25
Chi worked for Power Paragon, a company that developed products for the U.S. Navy, while Walder conducted her investigation.
The couple usually kept to themselves and ate their meals on newspapers.
It was Walder’s job to sift through their garbage with clues.
Within the Mak’s trash, Walder, with the help of a Chinese translator, would find an eye-opening piece of information.
Between the greasy pages of discarded newspaper, they found a ‘tasking list [that] clearly identified classified materials that Mak was supposed to supply the Chinese government.’
Chi had been stealing U.S. secrets for decades.
While Walder excelled at her work, her time at the FBI proved to be a bad fit and described the agency as a boys’ club.
‘I was The Girl,’ she wrote, saying that she experienced bullying and hazing from sexist training officers.
In one incident, she was disciplined for wearing a suit that was deemed ‘distracting.’
Walder spent 15 months with the FBI and notes that ‘currently, there are a dozen women who have filed a complaint against the[m] with the Equal Employment Commission.’
In the following years, she’s since given up her government job and has relocated Dallas, Texas, where she works as a history teacher at an all-girls school.
Fighting terrorism was what originally inspired her, but now she’s taken on a new mission of encouraging girls to pursue intelligence roles and deconstruct the agency’s culture.
She wrote: ‘I’m not afraid of big goals.’