The Unexpected Spy
From the CIA to the FBI, My Secret Life Taking Down Some of the World's Most Notorious Terrorists
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Narrated by:
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Devon Sorvari
About this listen
A highly entertaining account of a young woman who went straight from her college sorority to the CIA, where she hunted terrorists and WMDs
"A thrilling tale...Walder’s fast-paced and intense narrative opens a window into life in two of America’s major intelligence agencies." (Publishers Weekly, starred review)
When Tracy Walder enrolled at the University of Southern California, she never thought that one day she would offer her pink beanbag chair in the Delta Gamma house to a CIA recruiter, or that she’d fly to the Middle East under an alias identity.
The Unexpected Spy is the riveting story of Walder's tenure in the CIA and, later, the FBI. In high-security, steel-walled rooms in Virginia, Walder watched al-Qaeda members with drones as President Bush looked over her shoulder and CIA Director George Tenet brought her donuts. She tracked chemical terrorists and searched the world for weapons of mass destruction. She created a chemical terror chart that someone in the White House altered to convey information she did not have or believe, leading to the Iraq invasion. Driven to stop terrorism, Walder debriefed terrorists - men who swore they’d never speak to a woman - until they gave her leads. She followed trails through North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, shutting down multiple chemical attacks.
Then Walder moved to the FBI, where she worked in counterintelligence. In a single year, she helped take down one of the most notorious foreign spies ever caught on American soil. Catching the bad guys wasn’t a problem in the FBI, but rampant sexism was. Walder left the FBI to teach young women, encouraging them to find a place in the FBI, CIA, State Department or the Senate - and thus change the world.
A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press
©2020 Tracy Walder (P)2020 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"The Unexpected Spy will get wide attention, and deserves it. It will give readers a different, more vivid, and more human idea of the actual work of spying, counter-intelligence, and dealing with terrorism. It will be especially important to young women who are considering this kind of career." (James Fallows at The Atlantic, author of Blind into Baghdad)
"A well-written, engaging memoir, a serious and candid inside view of two enigmatic and significant institutions from a woman's perspective." (Booklist)
"Tracy Walder's The Unexpected Spy is an engaging and thoughtful story of service that will inspire generations of young women to come. Tracy's story is particularly moving because it provides a candid but often untold account of the challenges of serving one's nation amid tumultuous times. As a woman in national security, Tracy offers a glimpse into the rewards and risks of actualizing a dream in a male-dominated space." (Lauren Bean Buitta, founder, Girl Security)
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This searing audio documentary brings listeners deep inside the unforgettable story of MOVE, gaining unprecedented access to surviving MOVE members, elected officials from the era, eyewitnesses, and historians to create an indelible portrait of an American tragedy.
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Balanced Examination of History
- By James Peacock on 08-14-24
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The Autobiography of Malcolm X
- As Told to Alex Haley
- By: Malcolm X, Alex Haley
- Narrated by: Laurence Fishburne
- Length: 16 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Experience a bold take on this classic autobiography as it’s performed by Oscar-nominated Laurence Fishburne. In this searing classic autobiography, originally published in 1965, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and Black empowerment activist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Human Rights movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American dream and the inherent racism in a society that denies its non-White citizens the opportunity to dream, gives extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time.
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it's Nearly perfect
- By Kerry on 09-16-20
By: Malcolm X, and others
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Caffeine
- How Caffeine Created the Modern World
- By: Michael Pollan
- Narrated by: Michael Pollan
- Length: 2 hrs and 2 mins
- Original Recording
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Michael Pollan, known for his best-selling nonfiction audio, including The Omnivores Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind, conceived and wrote Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World as an Audible Original. In this controversial and exciting listen, Pollan explores caffeine’s power as the most-used drug in the world - and the only one we give to children (in soda pop) as a treat.
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Leaves much to be desired
- By Melody H on 02-02-20
By: Michael Pollan
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Mythology: Mega Collection
- Classic Stories from the Greek, Celtic, Norse, Japanese, Hindu, Chinese, Mesopotamian and Egyptian Mythology
- By: Scott Lewis
- Narrated by: Madison Niederhauser, Oliver Hunt
- Length: 31 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Do you know how many wives Zeus had? Or how the famous Trojan War was caused by one beautiful lady? Or how Thor got his hammer? Give your imagination a real treat. This Mega Mythology Collection of eight audiobooks is for you....
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An interesting set of introductions.
- By Kevin Potter on 05-30-19
By: Scott Lewis
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I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t)
- Telling the Truth about Perfectionism, Inadequacy, and Power
- By: Brené Brown
- Narrated by: Lauren Fortgang
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
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Based on seven years of ground-breaking research and hundreds of interviews, I Thought It Was Just Me shines a long-overdue light on an important truth: Our imperfections are what connect us to each other and to our humanity. Our vulnerabilities are not weaknesses; they are powerful reminders to keep our hearts and minds open to the reality that we're all in this together.
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I'm sure its great if you are a mother ....
- By Leslie A Hill on 08-09-11
By: Brené Brown
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The Strange Death of Europe
- Immigration, Identity, Islam
- By: Douglas Murray
- Narrated by: Robert Davies
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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The Strange Death of Europe is a highly personal account of a continent and culture caught in the act of suicide. Declining birth rates, mass immigration, and cultivated self-distrust and self-hatred have come together to make Europeans unable to argue for themselves and incapable of resisting their own comprehensive alteration as a society and an eventual end.
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Fear-mongering
- By Kat Cat on 01-22-19
By: Douglas Murray
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Just 70 years ago, the Gulf nation of Qatar was a backwater, reliant on pearl diving. Today it is a gas-laden parvenu with seemingly limitless wealth and ambition. Skyscrapers, museums and futuristic football stadiums rise out of the desert and Ferraris race through the streets. But in the shadows, migrant workers toil in the heat for risible amounts. Inside Qatar reveals how real people live in this surreal place, a land of both great opportunity and great iniquity.
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In Stasiland, Anna Funder tells extraordinary stories of ordinary people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship, and of those who worked for its vicious secret police, the Stasi. She meets Miriam, who as a 16-year-old was accused of trying to start World War III. She visits the regime’s cartographer, a man obsessed to this day with the Berlin Wall, then gets drunk with the legendary “Mik Jegger” of the east, once declared by the authorities “no longer to exist.”
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A Great Achievement
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Terrible book. Feminazi Propaganda
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The CIA is looking for walking contradictions. Recruiters seek people who can keep a secret, yet pull classified information out of others; who love their country, but are willing to leave it behind to head into dangerous places; who live double lives, but can be trusted with some of the nation's most sensitive tasks. Michele Rigby Assad was one of those people. As a CIA agent, Michele soon found that working undercover was an all-encompassing job. The threats were real. The mission was a perilous one. Trained as a counterterrorism expert, Michele spent over a decade in the agency.
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Deceptive title and sample.
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The excellent prose
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Just released, about 80% through this story
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Looking for a place in History?
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The Perfect Weapon is the startling inside story of how the rise of cyberweapons transformed geopolitics like nothing since the invention of the atomic bomb. Cheap to acquire, easy to deny, and usable for a variety of malicious purposes, cyber is now the weapon of choice for democracies, dictators, and terrorists. Two presidents - Bush and Obama - drew first blood with Operation Olympic Games, which used malicious code to blow up Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, and yet America proved remarkably unprepared when its own weapons were stolen from its arsenal.
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mix of information and propaganda
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Black Ops
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Impressive and Inspiring!
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Forty years ago, following the appointment of their professors to the federal bench, a tiny group of conservative law students at Yale Law School worried that their ideas might disappear from intellectual discourse in this bastion of liberal thought. They set out to fill that void. But they ended up achieving way more than that. Over the next few decades, the Federalist Society became an integral tool in the larger conservative movement, with political, judicial, and social repercussions ending in the conservative capture of the Supreme Court and the election of Donald Trump to the presidency.
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Disturbingly Timely
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For all of India's myths, its sea of stories and moral epics, Indian history remains a curiously unpeopled place. In Incarnations, Sunil Khilnani fills that space, recapturing the human dimension of how the world's largest democracy came to be. His trenchant portraits of emperors, warriors, philosophers, film stars, and corporate titans - some famous, some unjustly forgotten - bring feeling, wry humor, and uncommon insight to dilemmas that extend from ancient times to our own.
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Great listen, the author is biased
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The Recruiter
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If you ever wondered who becomes an American ambassador and why, this is the book for you. This updated and revised edition of Jett’s classic book not only provides a timely overview of American ambassadorship for Foreign Service Officers, aspiring diplomats, and interested citizens, but also calls for much-needed reform, describing the dire implications of failing to change our ambassadorial appointments process for the future of American diplomatic practice and foreign policy.
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Excellent
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The Moscow Rules
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Antonio Mendez and his future wife, Jonna, were CIA operatives working to spy on Moscow in the late 1970s, at one of the most dangerous moments in the Cold War. Soviets kept files on all foreigners, studied their patterns, tapped their phones, and even planted listening devices within the US embassy. In short, intelligence work was effectively impossible. The Soviet threat loomed larger than ever. The Moscow Rules tells the story of the intelligence breakthroughs that turned the odds in America's favor.
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Interesting, clean, pro-CIA history
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To Catch a Spy
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In To Catch a Spy: The Art of Counterintelligence, James M. Olson, former chief of CIA counterintelligence, offers a wake-up call for the American public and also a guide for how our country can do a better job of protecting its national security and trade secrets. Olson takes the listener into the arcane world of counterintelligence as he lived it during his 30-year career in the CIA.
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Horrible Narrator
- By NN on 10-01-19
By: James M. Olson
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The Main Enemy
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A landmark collaboration between a thirty-year veteran of the CIA and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, The Main Enemy is the inside story of the CIA-KGB spy wars, told through the actions of the men who fought them. Based on hundreds of interviews with operatives from both sides, The Main Enemy puts us inside the heads of CIA officers as they dodge surveillance and walk into violent ambushes in Moscow. This is the story of the generation of spies who came of age in the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis and rose to run the CIA and KGB in the last days of the Cold War.
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A masterpiece of espionage history
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By: Milton Bearden, and others
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Confessions of a CIA Spy
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What can you learn from a CIA spy who spent his career artfully manipulating regular people to steal high-value secrets? Plenty! In this explosive book, former intelligence officer Peter Warmka unveils detailed methodologies that he and other threat actors use to breach the security of their targets, whether they’re high-profile individuals or entire organizations.
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Eye opening and thought provoking!
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What listeners say about The Unexpected Spy
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- JPALJ
- 11-22-20
LOVE TO SEE IT
Timely, one-of-kind journey alongside the compelling life of a brilliant, rugged, and inspired American who just happens to be a woman, and a DG to boot.
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- Kathryn Parsons
- 05-22-20
Stagnant Narration Dries Out Fascinating Memoir
Tracy Walder writes in great (and I mean nearly annoying detail) the key experiences of her career that lead her to a successful career in counter terrorism all over the world and here at home while proving that a woman can do anything and more than men can. While the story can get dry in places, the sterile, monotonous narration turns a multifaceted story into a something with as much interest as the owners manual of a car -important yet dull.
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- Yankee Tango
- 12-09-20
Excellent recount
I loved this book. It may seem cliche, writing about a career in intelligence after leaving, but I thought this was an interesting perspective from, as the title states, an unexpected source. The author's tenure was relatively short, so it feels very much un-jaded and is more youth focused. If you're a college student debating a career in intelligence I feel like this would be a better read than some long tome about the spymasters of yore (though admittedly, I am neither a college student, nor interested in intelligence work).
I played a game with myself as I was listening to the book - she doesn't give names for some of the locations she describes but she does describe certain features of some of the places. I did countless google searches afterwards trying to ascertain what some of these places were and have a couple guesses.
I would've liked it more if the author herself had narrated it (I always prefer this for first-person auto-biographical type books) but the reading is totally fine.
I thank her for her service and wonder if she can cut onions without tearing up.
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- Ray M. Johnson
- 03-28-20
This is an ok book.
Fair, too much information about herself and not info about herself. One needs only the. First chapter.
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- Tom Woodson Jr
- 10-19-23
It had so much potential…
Tracy’s story is compelling and highlights the many challenges women face in their careers. I was truly saddened by how horribly she was treated in the FBI. What I was disappointed by was her need to identify women by their physical attributes. After the way she had been treated, it seemed odd she would treat these women in that way. The story could have been just as effectively told without that and suffers by it. The repetitive mentions of the fact certain sections were cut out by the CIA became distracting. It could have been handled once in the beginning. Instead, it continually disrupted the narrative.
Tracy accomplished a great deal in her short time with both agencies. The choice of narrator does not match that image. The narrator’s cadence and approach to the material makes Tracy sound a bit like a valley girl.
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- Dave Snell
- 07-10-24
Alternate Title
I felt this book could have been retitled: ‘(paragraph/section/word) Redacted, CIA Review’
In the cases where this was the case, why not reword or write those redactions in a manner where it is not included in the final product. It takes away from flow of the story, especially in the audio book.
I appreciate the authors story, having been a part of the GWOT in the IC. Just think the reliance on redacted sections took away from parts of the story and told me a lot about the author.
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- A B
- 04-05-20
Oy with the redaction
I was 'gifted' this book and it took me a long time to get used to 'cia word redacted'. Enough already. But I was impressed by the situation the author described and I learned a lot. It was a decent book, just the constant distractions of 'work redracted' wasn't cool.
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- Jeri Fritz
- 11-17-20
Stunning storyteller
Mesmerizing. Fascinating account of a California girl in the CIA and FBI. Hard to put down. Loved this book
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- Infringed
- 06-01-21
Interesting subject matter
Good insight into the covert world. Holds your interest and delivers as promised. My only criticism is the author could use a bit of humility, gets off-putting.
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-24-22
Very impactful
I thought this was a great and interesting book! I had tears in my eyes at the end, because the author found an awesome way to impact other women from her experiences. I wish the CIA wouldn’t have redacted a bunch like others mentioned, but I didn’t find it impacted the overall story and I was still curious to find out the ending. Thanks for your work, Tracy! Very interesting life you’ve lead and continue to do so!
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