The Unexpected Spy

Starred review from November 11, 2019
Walder spins a thrilling tale in her debut memoir of her life in the CIA and FBI. As a sorority student at the University of Southern California in 2000, Walder visited a job fair and was surprised to find herself interested in a career with the CIA, where she soon found work. Shortly after 9/11, Walder became staff operations officer in the Weapons of Mass Destruction office of the CIA’s al-Qaeda detail and later worked on unraveling a terrorist network reaching from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Russia to France and the U.S. Walder tells her story in rapid prose and, adding to the tension, she includes blacked out blocks of text that had been redacted by the CIA during its vetting of her book. Wanting more life stability, Walder joined the FBI in 2004, which didn’t require as much travel but where she did encounter sexism. While there, she worked on a massive counterintelligence case involving Chi Mak, a Chinese spy who is still imprisoned for passing U.S. military secrets to China. She left a year and half after joining, and became a teacher at an all-girls high school in Dallas. Walder’s fast-paced and intense narrative opens a window into life in two of America’s major intelligence agencies.

November 15, 2019
A former CIA agent chronicles her story. While attending a career-day event with her sorority sisters at the University of Southern California, Walder stopped at a recruiting table for the CIA. One of her sisters challenged her, " 'I thought you wanted to be a history teacher.'...'I did, ' I said. And then I thought, but making history would be way better than teaching it." The author was certainly there when history was made. On 9/11, she was inside CIA headquarters in Langley when all the chatter they'd been hearing about Osama bin Laden exploded into specific tragedy. In this debut memoir, Walder brings a you-are-there intimacy to her accounts of visits from George Bush ("he was always kind and cracked jokes, even as the tension mounted") and Thanksgiving dinner delivered by George Tenet ("the food was amazing"). Often, the author was the youngest person in the room and one of few females, and she suggests that her politics were more liberal than those of many of her colleagues. Throughout the narrative, she leaves no question about her devotion to the agency and how misunderstood she feels its role has been. (She submitted her manuscript for CIA vetting and made the decision to publish it with passages and even whole paragraphs redacted.) Indeed, Walder fiercely defends the CIA, particularly as the Bush administration focused its attention on Iraq rather than targeting terrorists elsewhere. Regarding the CIA's being blamed for faulty intel about weapons of mass destruction, she writes, "not a single bit of anything my team turned in was faulty. How it was changed and twisted by the White House was faulty. The CIA did not betray the White House. The White House betrayed the CIA." Walder subsequently shifted from the CIA to the FBI, which she liked a lot less and eventually left. She now teaches at an all-girls high school, helping new generations prepare to confront the institutional misogyny they will likely face. A mostly breezy read through some undeniably challenging and threatening circumstances.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 1, 2020

Walder provides a resolute account of her years as a CIA special agent and a counterintelligence officer in the FBI. Her career at the CIA began shortly before 9/11. Compelled to help stop further attacks, the author left the relative safety of a job at CIA headquarters to go undercover in the Middle East as a counterterrorism specialist tracking al-Qaeda. After many successful missions, Walder returned to United States to be closer to family; she took a job with the FBI and was instrumental in bringing down a foreign spy who was trading national intelligence. Although Walder found spycraft fulfilling, she could not abide what she found to be rampant sexism. She eventually left the Bureau to become a teacher who made a point of encouraging young women to pursue careers in government agencies, such as the CIA and FBI, which have traditionally had relatively few women in high-ranking positions. VERDICT Walder's candid story will connect with readers curious about counterterrorism work and seeking an inspirational account of a woman seeking to change the balance of power in not only a male-dominated field but the world.--Mary Jennings, Camano Island Lib., WA

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2019
From Southern California University's Delta Gamma sorority to the CIA's offices in Virginia, Walder (who uses her maiden name, Schandler, herein) recounts her experiences in counterterrorism. She was recruited by the agency just prior to 9/11, and her work was integral to discovering and apprehending terrorists working to attack the West with chemical and biological weapons. That work is still classified, and sections of text are redacted by the CIA; however, she ducked the black marker to clearly state that the Bush administration falsified her team's work to justify their invasion of Iraq. Travel, secrecy, and being cut off from normal human relationships proved too much for Schandler, so she switched to the FBI to catch spies in Los Angeles, only to find the bureau's misogyny impossible to bear. Her career since has centered on her teaching and empowering young women to defy expectations. With coauthor Blau, Walder has created a well-written, engaging memoir, a serious and candid inside view of two enigmatic and significant institutions from a woman's perspective, and a powerful tool for Walder's hoped-for revolution. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)