Amaryllis Fox: A Life Undercover in the CIA

you well good evening everybody and welcome amaryllis Fox it's such a pleasure to get to talk with you in person this time it is a great pleasure I was seeing just just before that as as an old San Francisco hand your voice is so familiar to me from ours in the radio thank you for all you you do to inform all of us it's our pleasure to put a face with a voice that's so nice of you to say well let me tell you your book was a total page-turner and when I finished it my first thought was I will never complain about my job again I mean well first what does it mean to be in clandestine service at the CIA and to be under non official cover how is that different from other roles at the CIA so the the role of CIA that that sets it apart from the military from really other other parts of the intelligence community is to build human relationships relationships with human sources who are for whatever reason positioned to be able to help us predict or prevent acts of war or acts of terrorism and increasingly that's a really rare and powerful thing in an age of reliance on technical surveillance and technical warfare I always say it's it's sort of like how if you have friends who you follow on social media and then friends that you see once a week for a drink right the friends you follow in social media you know the facts of their life right if they've had a baby or or they they post a photo where they're getting engaged you know those data points but if you see them for a drink every week you know how they feel about all those things you know whether they're afraid to get married or you know they're they're planning to have babies before they announce them and that ability to understand somebody's fears their dreams their hopes their plans and aspirations allows you to to predict geopolitics in a way that the technical data points just can't it's the why instead of the what so human intelligence gatherers CIA officers are tasked with going out and doing this at its best very soulful work of meeting and identifying sources that have the potential to to want to leave this legacy of protecting lives and slowly slowly building enough trust and rapport with these these sources to be able to move them to a place where you can do that work together there are analysts and there are CIA officers who have official cover like for example there a diplomat there's somebody who is known and important enough that in a pinch you can get them out of a hairy situation but if you're in non-official cover aren't you basically I mean you don't have you don't have those those benefits yeah you know one one touchstone that I often offer for people is Argo if you guys have seen the movie Argo right so this is the the the true story of a CIA operation to go into Iran and rescue some Americans and in order to do so they created a fictional film production company right and went in order to in order to you know pretend to location scout but actually they were doing this operational work and the advantage of non-official cover like that is that you can put yourself in places where you are not likely to be as a diplomat or a US government official it explains why you are in the far-flung regions you need to be and to stop many of these attacks or do these kinds of operations the challenge is that you don't have diplomatic immunity right now and you don't have the emotional comfort of a shared work environment where all of the the operational considerations can fall away and you can sit with fellow officers every day and you know get advice share stories be in one another's company so it makes it quite lonely work where there's no one who really fully shares your truth in the training for the work that you did I think also gives a sense of just how dangerous it is I mean you're learning how to use a Glock you're learning out of withstand torture I mean you're you're learning things that as I said make anyone rethink their current table and what they're gonna complain about it but I do remember going and being in my friend's wedding and my wrists were completely raw from learning some some E&E like escape and evasion techniques and being in the in the formal gown and her saying I'm not even gonna ask what that isn't but she had no idea what I was doing at the time she's like what did you spend your there there are some some curious marks that it leaves is there a habit like a surveillance habit or some kind of habit that you picked up from such intense training that you find even today is hard to shake I you know one of the things for defensive is kind of surprising I think given the depictions in the movies is that a lot of what we're taught is to be really boring a lot of the time right because you know yeah not to stand out to be non alerting all of the kind of roof gymnastics and Glocke juggling that you see on the movies you know like that one chase scene through city streets and you know your cover's blown and you're either out of the country or you're in jail and that is not a very efficient or practical way to go about this work so really a lot of what you're doing is for the 90 percent of the time where you're not operational is is being as dull as possible and so I think the operational habits that stick with me are are though is they do drives my husband crazy that I stopped at every orange light right every yellow light because they're very rule-abiding well you're about when you know when you're in a situation where you might have somebody in a car behind you and you do the kind of normal thing that anyone would do which is to skate through that yellow light you you risk that person thinking that you're trying to lose them and is alerting and raises a whole can also just annoy people so so a lot of the behavior is not what you would think from from the screen but it's all there designed to keep you safe so that in the moment where you are ready to to invite this source to to help do this work that both of you have been protected throughout the process of development as you talk about trying to be boring your identity your fake identity was as an art dealer and you were living in Shanghai and you literally had the Chinese government surveilling you but you had a housekeeper who worked for the government who lived with you right during that time and so you had to be as normal as possible while you're going out and trying to infiltrate you know illicit arms deals and and networks in the Middle East as well I mean you were traveling to to the Middle East as you're doing this and I remember this moment that you talk about where a CIA officer presents you with a photo of you crying and it had been taken by the Chinese survey lers but because the CIA was surveilling the Chinese they had that image and they said what was going on here with you and it was this very private moment for you you were crying alone and the fact that it was just like these levels of surveillance and just the intensity of how intimately they watched every move in your life how did you how did you act normally how are you able to create a life for years knowing that you had that level of surveillance it is very immersive and at times very lonely because in a way when when there's that degree of presence everywhere it's almost nowhere I mean you're you're really alone in in your truth for the most part I understand from friends of mine who are actors that it's sort of similar to method acting right where you really have to kind of immerse yourself in in the role or the version of yourself that you are at that time I think that I had because I started so young this idea that you know at the end of all this when I left when I drove out the gates for the last time that all of those different versions of myself that I'd had to keep straight would kind of fall away and I would like magically be this integrated authentic version of myself that was completely present with every person and what I actually found is that in many ways mning different versions of ourselves isn't just for intelligence officers this thing that had felt really unique to me and maybe had heightened stakes for me in in the field was actually the same thing that I saw my friends and my sisters and other people doing where you know there's there's the one version of themselves on their Instagram account and another version for their parents and another version for their boss and this temptation to kind of lock the armor down and seem stronger or cooler than we are right which we all feel that and certainly in geopolitics there's that tendency and so I think in a way it prepared me for the same challenges as we all face in everyday life Wow for that degree of social media or image shaping I guess that we we do now as a result of social media you also mentioned it was a really interesting way I think to characterize the role of a CIA officer which was this very human role this this role of getting to know someone so intimately can you talk about how you did that and just tell the story of the man that you befriended and then ultimately turned to become an asset for you who was an illicit arms arms dealer how you how you like the specific human vulnerabilities that you were able to key in on with this person that created the connection needed for him ultimately to to trust him yeah so the character who's referred to as Jakob in the book is a really interesting example and several of the operational characters have a few composite elements from in order to preserve their identity but Jakob was a really important for me to include because it he really does illustrate the the power of understanding the human motivations that drive violence or drive criminal activity in this case he he was a very imposing brutish figure of a man and yet he had this very lyrical singing voice and I actually heard a singing voice before I saw his face and so as as I approached him on on the street he was singing and he turned around and had this kind of brutalist Stalinist kind of face and tattoos but his voice sounded really sorrowful and kind of had this folk song quality to it that felt almost nostalgic even though it wasn't from my own childhood and I had the sense right away that there was some other depth or layer to him that that his face really bolide and over the course of over the course of developing him and getting to know him I asked him about a ring that he wore and that had a lamb on it and he said that it he wore it because it reminded him of his grandfather and to be to be strong and I said oh you know your grandfather was strong and he said no you know I wanted him to be aligned but but he was a lamb and he was was taken tortured and eventually killed by the authoritarian government in the Eastern European country that he came from back in in the Communist era and he said it with this kind of dismissive almost disgust as though he had been raised to be stronger than that but underneath it I sort of sensed that there was there was a respect for the heroism of this man who had died for his values in in such a violent way and over the course of the time that we built that relationship I saw more and more of that glimmer in him of this idea that he wanted to leave a world for his kids that was less likely to give rise to authoritarianism the less likely to give rise to the kind of policing activity that had taken his grandfather and to be able to connect for him the work that he was doing in the arms-dealing world with the potential ramifications for his kids in his country far away took a little bit of time but the more that he understood that an attack anywhere in today's globalized society gives governments everywhere the ability and the tendency to crack down harder both in authoritarian regimes and in Western liberal pluralistic democracies as we've seen since 9/11 here and in Europe and if he truly wanted to move his his country beyond this legacy that had taken his grandfather selling weapons that could be used in an attack anywhere were was going to endanger that that goal and he could in fact be a part of his grandfather's legacy in instead working to prevent the attacks that would allow that kind of an authoritarian crackdown and it took a long time to be able to to to kind of nurture the flicker of that understanding inside of him and give him the courage to make that leap but that is the the work that human intelligence officers do and it's very it's very quiet and it takes a long time and officers do it you know in meetings in countries all around the world every day and one of the really challenging things about the work is never actually knowing when it's successful you know it's very easy to know when it fails right because the attack happens but but when we think about it being successful and there you know there's another scene in the book where it's another meeting really equally quiet soulful connect meeting but in that case the objective is to to do anything possible to either delay or prevent what we had heard was a planned attack and in those cases which happen all around the world every day you actually don't know whether first of all the information you got that the attack was planned is reliable real authentic secondly you don't know whether whatever weapon was supposed to have changed hands actually did whether that weapon was real or was a scam because these scams happen all over the world whether it was in working order if it was real weather even if it was in working order these organizations had somebody with enough familiarity with that technology to actually deploy it and then if all of that was established whether in fact the attack didn't happen not because of the work that we did but because perhaps a different target was picked or a different date was chosen for some you know strategic or logistical reason so it's very conditional and difficult to know on any given day whether a particular operation was in fact successful but it's the the human connection that that drives that when it is given the fact that I think it's so important if you're in something as stressful and consuming as the work that you do as a CIA officer how do you motivate yourself and when success is so rare or unclear even if it happens it's it's a difficult thing to never know on a given day whether what you've done net net was positive for for short and long term life saved or not you know and I think that's the challenge any individual human has of not being able to to see the collective from the bird's-eye view if short-term a an adversary is taken off the plane are the lives that were saved by that operation worth whatever potential future adversaries were created by that attack you know whether through grief or alienation or revenge and that was a that was a trade-off that was front of mine for for all of us on a regular basis I think more than what motivated me to do it it was the question of knowing that especially once I had my daughter there were other mothers on all sides of this conflict whose kids you know we're walking to school down these very streets the question was sort of more how not to do it and I think that was the case for for all of the kind of brothers and sisters that I came up with and many of them are still at it it's it's a long-term calling because I don't think there's any given day where you can say you know job done well kids really have an incredible way of changing your orientation to the world of dumb pay for sure and I'm kind of hearing a little bit of what I think is the through line to those realizations as an officer and the peace work that you're doing now you've talked a little bit about the small subtle things that can predict unrest in a town or city and so and we'll talk a little bit about what those small subtle things are but I think also just this question of it it shows you how you could potentially address the unrest but it also makes me realize in reading some of the examples that you've shared how it feels like the potential for unrest is everywhere all the time so talk a little bit about the subtle things that you like to point to as examples that people should look at in terms of creating an environment that would be ripe for some kind of conflict or unrest and this is beyond not necessarily war per se but just yeah the kind of initial unrest creates larger well I think there are two things really I think they're environmental factors and then human human behavior human response factors and in the former category this was a lot of the work that I was doing as a graduate student when I first came to the agency was looking at historical data and and identifying correlations that might not seem evident right away but that historically had been tied to terror attacks or terror planning in regions that didn't want the groups there but weren't able to get rid of them and they were very informative and interesting data points things like the percentage beneath liveable wage that a border guard gets paid and therefore the potential for graft for for giving a bribe to a border officer and crossing illegally so they would be susceptible to exactly you know if you if you are being paid a quarter of what it takes to survive I often equate it with being a waiter or waitress here where you're expected to work for tips and and many border officers and other government officials in many parts of the world are expected to work for tips you know their salary is actually set to allow for the fact that it will be padded in this way and when you when you see the correlation between that and these security challenges you realize hey here's something that by paying people more and some you know other other work that needs to be done around corruption in these countries isn't this a cheaper more efficient way than waiting until the problem is such that you have to go in and and pay in both lives and treasure with with an actual military response but actually increasing wages for example as we've learned here there's a lot of socio-economic shifts that sometimes need to take place to even be able to do something as simple as raise the wage up abort absolutely and those shifts can often be another contributing factor which is what makes the whole thing so complex like any other of the factors that historically is tied to data is is anything that indicates to a social change so one of them that was interesting in the Middle East was the percentage of or the ratio of hookah bars to madrasahs and how fast that ratio is changing and so you know people take time often to adjust to social evolutions and when social change happens too quickly for some people it can feel jarring and the response can be seeking out some group that feels familiar that still values you that still prioritizes you that still prioritizes your beliefs we certainly are seeing that here at home and different in in different extremist realms in our own society but talked about specifically what who could the proportion of hookah bars to madrasah is that shifting what does that indicate well you know the in in areas whether it's one way or the other in areas where madrasahs have been prevalent that that's a very religious conservative community seeing seeing more of the kind of entertainment oriented you know pleasures of the flesh kind of places turning up in your neighborhood can be very jarring and vice versa when we see areas that have been very pluralistic and open to two different ways of gathering socially yes move much more into a conservative religious posture too quickly that also can be jarring so you're talking about these significant it indicates cultural shifts cultural differences potential strife it feels like you're almost describing the u.s. it's something that I think we need to be so aware of and it's one of the reasons that I think it's important to talk about these lessons learned post 9/11 overseas because increasingly they do feel relevant to me domestically I mean the other when I said they're the physical and then the emotional contributing factors I see many of those as a result here in in the US and Western Europe today as well these are things like feelings of alienation of humiliation shame those are really really powerful motivating factors for violence and we forget you know sometimes I think we like to to kind of think of it as playing risk where it's it's you know removed from the messy world of human emotions and just becomes a game of you know strategic cleverness but the reality is that every one of these acts is is actually planned and executed by human beings and those human beings are coming from their own set of experiences and have their own set of emotional needs and when those needs include feeling heard feeling valued in a time where they are struggling with shame humiliation alienation many people will believe things or participate in things that they wouldn't otherwise and I think you know not to get too deep into the psychology but it's something that we used to think about a lot that many psychologists will tell you that most fears boil down in one way or another to the kind of core human fear of mortality right it will I you know I'm not going to be here forever so given that I'm here now a will people remember me be do i matter does the fact that I'm here matter and the the kind of scream i matter hear me see me it's what we see with graffiti on city streets right it's a very primal human impulse and when it goes frustrated for for too long it can express itself in spasms of violence I think Joker I just saw Joker the the film this week and I think it it does an extraordinary job actually of narrating the feelings that I often heard in the debriefing room that caused abhorrent acts of violence but in their in their earliest seeds before they grew into something so toxic were really feelings of of needing to be seen and heard in an environment where they weren't it the AQ Khan example that we talked about earlier I think is a really powerful one where AQ Khan Network is responsible for nuclear weapons proliferation in a way that we've never seen before that not just state programs but even even Rogue rogue states and and non-state actors and his backstory when you hear him tell it despite the fact that what he has done has has put the world at risk in a way that probably no single other human has actually when you look at the potential ramifications he talks about being a teenager and having saved up for a fountain-pen and being on a train crossing the the new border to Pakistan and the Indian guard when he took his customs card saying oh that's a nice pen I'll take that to anyone no I saved up for that you know you can't do that in his okay I you know watch me and took the pen and walked away and in his teenage mind he was so angry that he was powerless to stop this thing that felt so unfair that he said you know I I will never be powerless again Pakistan will never be powerless again and this you know metastasized into this terrible desire to create the Pakistani nuclear program and in so doing to obtain the uranium for it from the uranium deposits in Libya and so to trade nuclear components with Libya to do that on and on and on this this monster kind of grew out of control and I think that origin story you know while while there was a lot of blue water between the pen and the nuclear program it's such an important one for us to remember that these tiny moments of choosing to treat somebody with respect or or not can have huge ramifications down the road but so what is the solution I mean are we supposed to suddenly start respecting the violent faction of the Auld right you know I like what do we what do you do to try to avoid something like somebody some of that something like that festering and turning ultimately to violence especially if someone manages to access weapons it's it's really difficult right it's ongoing work the the I think the ideal time of course to have have those moments of respectful dialogue is before radicalization but we can't always rewind and go back to that there is amazing work being done on this there's a group called life after hate that is is actually organized by former extremists who who go and take those who've been radicalized and and sort of bring them back from the brink Sasha hawlucha does the same thing out of the UK with those who are exploring Islamic extremism but I think more broadly and are just everyday interactions the the responsibility on each of us is to try to be alert to some tiny sliver of common ground right the ability to take off the adversarial hat for a minute and find some small thing that you connect on that's separate from what you disagree about and what you disagree about is still gonna be there believe me but you know you could talk about sports for a second you can talk about national parks for a second there's going to be something I promise you as wild as it might seem to think that you and somebody with these abhorrent views whichever flavor they might be share something in common I promise you you do and sometimes the hard work is is trying to find what that is so that you can have an exchange that establishes enough respect and dialogue that when you return to these very serious issues that you disagree on the the the not is a little bit looser and you're able to kind of begin to untangle it a little bit and it's hard and long work you you don't fix these things in one conversation but I I do think we should all feel really empowered to to make these changes in the future by the by the dignity with which we treat one another today given what you have learned about human nature and what to watch for you were about to enter an election year the dialogue is likely to get much coarser as a result of it I mean are you hopeful for our country I read at one point that the one thing that keeps you up at night now is the polarization in this nation that the division and what feels like a powder keg ready to explode with just a little more discord or just the perfectly placed state sponsored campaign the the threat that keeps me up at night you know I think that the terror groups are still out there the rogue states are still out there we still have geopolitical adversaries but we also have you know one of if not the strongest military industrial come the military intelligence complex but also military industrial complex in the world to to predict and to prevent and if necessary to respond to those kinds of threats but what our adversaries have done recently and yes I mean Russia I also mean groups like Isis and others is realizing correctly that they are outgunned and outspent on the battlefields and though they're not gonna win in a traditional conflict against the United States but that shrewdly they have figured out there is a much more efficient and effective way which is to sow this discord and allow us to to tear the house down from within and it's something I think we need to be very alert to because it it's not just about one particular issue or one particular candidate if we look at the ads that were funded in the Russian example these are the most extreme sides on both sides of every wedge issue you know we have pro-life and pro-choice ads black lives matter and you know police protection ads on and on and on down the line and the clear the clear of objective is to to move voters away from the center to either side and and sow discord in that way and every time that we have a you know middle school food fight on cable news which you know is is fairly frequent these days I think we're playing right into that strategy and it it really seems to me that the military and intelligence complex can't save us from this one you know this one is on each and every one of us and I think finding common ground with one another is really the greatest active patriotism any of us can engage in right now well we've been collecting questions yes we've been collecting questions from the audience and I wanted to incorporate some of them now this very first one is from dr. Patrick Reilly first thank you for your bravery are you concerned about the potential reciprocity of the current administration and outing yourself in this public way sincerely a fellow colleague in the IC I mean I think I I think dr. Reilly might be alluding to to some extent too that it's been reported that you did not have official permission from the CIA to publish her book and to publish all of these secrets can you clarify that don't worry about any you know actions by this administration against you sure I'm you know this book didn't actually you know out me to use his words um my my service has been out out since 2016 and you know they agency multiple times has has confirmed it to reporters in writing and so that this this process has been a very long one but began there before before putting pen to paper to write this book I had guidance around what had to be changed and omitted and it was a fair amount you know that there the operational scenes here as it says on the first page of the book the names and locations have been changed but also operational details and and identifying details have been in some cases you know composite eyes in order to retain the truth of the lessons of these interactions knocked into me but to ensure that there's nothing in there that shouldn't be in there the other the other thing I think that made this easier for me as a process and it is I think a challenging process for many people is the fact that it's it's really a personal story and this is a story about the evolution of my perspective about how we should be going about resolving this war it's also the story of becoming a wife and a mom and juggling those responsibilities with the role that we all feel or the you know the pressure we all feel to make the world that our kids are gonna inherit a safer place and a lot of the book you know for anyone who who hasn't had a chance to read it is is really about that journey that that we all share I think as parents and spouses of that tension and you know the other thing to remember though it makes me feel old is that this is all this uh this is 15-20 years ago you know so I I was kind of in some ways the last the last of the I guess Cold War generation I mean I joined after 9/11 but my teachers were all sort of old cold warriors and our work was really before biometrics and facial recognition and all of these challenges were out on the playing field everyday and so you know it's almost nostalgic when you look at the tradecraft that I was learning the stuff that like you could you know you still had like a wig and glasses this is stuff that yeah doesn't fly anymore I love the example of if you wanted if somebody wanted to meet with you you gave them a Starbucks card and then you would check to see if they bought a latte and then like within 24 hours but it's a very different it's a very different challenge now and one that the trade craft has I'm sure evolved enormously since since I've left to counter but no I mean for me I was much more a sharing of these interactions and also a call to service really especially for young women because I just feel like the the Hollywood depictions of young women in national security work are so demeaning and incomplete in the sense that they kind of make them like incredible warrior at sweating either don't see them right or I mean they're they're either you know male characters or the female characters you know seem to be kind of this femme fatale archetype with like thigh high boots kicking doors down right and you know I get that it's sort of exciting popcorn Fair but the reality for for young women who are finishing up school and thinking about how they want to serve their community in their country is you know if they are a substantive intelligent soulful person who wants to do meaningful work they're not seeing those films and thinking yes this is for me right and I really do believe that each of us if if we get quiet and and listen to ourselves have a unique called a service to our community to our country and it's different for everyone but I wanted I wanted young people of color young women people who don't see themselves in these roles on the screen to know that not only should they consider them but they're actually needed more than anyone else and your story has been picked up by Apple is that right a brie Larson will be playing you as well so you there will be you will be on screen yeah brie is really a force of nature she's one of those you know rare actors who not only could have done every role she's played in real life but could have done them all at once her brain is electric she's got an incredibly strong moral core and she's very very aware of what's happening in the world and what the challenges are she and I are really interested in what conflict looks like when it's it's waged and resolved by women in contrast to men and so I think you can expect this project to be very entertaining but a lot more authentic and and in-depth than some of the the previous representations of this kind of work on screen when is it supposed to come out next year is the filming and so likely I guess the year after but I don't I don't have the the I don't think there's a firm date yet because the writers room is up and running now but it's an extraordinary team with a lot of women and a lot of voices from the countries where where we'll be working well let me ask you this question from Myra given the attitude of the president today is it more difficult for the CIA to do its job the president seems not to trust our intelligence that's a much nicer way than I would have potentially phrased that but yes there has been a lot of talk about how President Trump is essentially debased the intelligence agencies findings with regard to Russian interference in the election and I remember very early on because I interviewed Leon Panetta first show I think was related to North Korea but in doing research for that I remembered how how he felt about the president standing in front of that wall of stars for fallen CIA officers and talking about the crowd size of his inauguration and so yeah what's been the impact on the CIA is it harder as Myra asked to do its work well I left a decade ago so I you know any any perspective I can offer I think is is what was your routes outside into it well I will tell you this I think that the intelligence community realizes that they are a part of a tradition of government that will outlast any particular holder of any particular office and I think that is messy and as difficult as it is for us as a country to go through it the the the system is working you know information of concern has been put in front of representatives of the people and they are assessing it on its merits we can hope and the the the process will run its course I think that the the intelligence community is full of grown-ups and I think that they understand I think that they understand that they they have in some sense a higher and longer term calling and that they need to continue to do the important work that they're tasked with and the allow the the checks and balances as messy as they are to watch an action to to continue to grind towards a resolution here well this audience member asks can you maybe talk about any thoughts you have on Burma or Myanmar it's an interesting question and I I wanted to ask this to you because you spend the beginning part of the book talking about this very unique opportunity that you had to to interviewing us on Suki and of course things have changed dramatically in terms of how she is perceived as a result of the range of Muslims so I'm curious if you want to sure yeah I'm the chair that I have of her is currently upside down on our photograph table to really dress but yeah she was she was and is an important milestone and for me in recognizing in my own life that you know a the power of truth-telling can bring an authoritarian military to its knees which as an 18 year old was an electrifying idea for me that's how older you were when you in that's right so I went in as an aspiring baby journalist and interviewed owing Sun Tzu Chi while she was under house arrest in 1999 for which I was detained by the Burmese military and then deported and that that experience really demonstrated for me that this one you know physically tiny woman whose hand fit in mine like a child's when I met her could could say words on tape for an hour or two and that could be subversive enough to to bring you know military trucks down the street to put us in the back and sew up the canvas and take us to to detention on our way out of the country and not that idea that truth is more powerful than the gun I think was seated with me then but it also made the the idea of her letting down those that you know had believed for so many decades a lot harder for me when it happened I I had not been back in Burma since I was detained in 1999 and I went back for these recent elections which I guess in 2015 or 16 and stood on the same street outside NLD headquarters where we had been picked up for doing that interview by a military truck and I have video of it on my phone but it was shoulder to shoulder in every direction as far as you could see with people singing democracy songs waving the the fighting peacock flag which would have been sufficient to get you arrested you know back in 90 9 and from you know that's that's an incredibly quick evolution in a country speaking of you know social change causing unrest and and a retreat to to partisan politics that's really exactly what we've seen in Burma where Facebook was hugely important in bringing about the Democratic changes their Facebook was also hugely important in sharing the disinformation that pulled pulled the Christian and Muslim community and apart from the Buddhist majority and fueled this horrendous violence that we've seen at times with you know burning tires being put over religion Muslim women as they tried to flee and so on and so I think it's a cautionary tale and it reminds me that you know no one is free until everyone is free and as many decades as ensued she's been away from her family in difficult conditions to bring her people to freedom I hope that that she will reconsider bringing some of them and not all of them to that place well here's a follow up Jeanne writes I've worked in Myanmar with orange a refugee refugees and other ethnic youth how can we shift the youth affected by systemic violence to understand the other whom they've been taught to hate that's a really important question and it's actually a lot of what I focus on at the moment I haven't had the chance to do that in Burma I would love to I've been working with Sunni and Shiah kids a little bit in in the Middle East who are in somewhat of the same situation where you know they they have the the choice really to be another link in a long chain of generational violence that's handed from one generation to the next or to choose to be the generation that rejects the wars of their parents but that's not a choice that is immediately apparent sometimes I was talking with a brilliant group of young people just before this conversation was seeing to them that really they are the generation this this group of teenagers and young adults now that is the first that the Internet has been so woven into their daily life from day one that they're really the first that unlike every previous human generation up until now from time immemorial that has by necessity been separated vertically by geography this is the first ever generation that can be separated horizontally by age globally and say we as young people worldwide reject this that are the other policy of our parents or inherited hatred of our parents and I think what we've seen with Greta's climate movement is really evidence of that and really extraordinary at a watch and I I think in hope that we are gonna see a lot more of that when you know as young people realize that the mistakes that are being made by their seniors now are there they're going to be left to to tackle and it's important for them to to not blindly follow the the decisions hatreds wars of their parents what we can do to help I think in Burma and in the Middle East and others is to matterr tools we can to young people to have those conversations because I think the desire and the spark is there the tools that we learned in the intelligence community the the the tools that you know human collectors learn in training are in many ways applicable right this is the idea of how do we create dialogue with the people we fear how do we build commonality with someone that hates us and we were taught to hate and if we can take those same tools that we use for geopolitical purposes and and repurpose them in this way where we give young people and others the the empowerment to reach out across divisions and create connections even if it's again a tiny sliver of common ground then I think we will have we will have arms the next generation to do the work that I can feel them trying already to do well I think this audience member Steve would like you to get even more granular about the tools that you learned as a serious er in the sense that he writes to what extent might it be possible for people in this room and beyond to learn and use a CIA technique to connect with and shift the thinking of extreme groups here in the US and actually I love this too because I think I'd love to hear a technique it would probably make me a better interviewer well you know one of the peculiar things about agency training I remember thinking like you would you would be taught a technique and it would have a name and everything and then you'd be like but that's just like a completely natural thing that you do but that's you know in a way you you kind of need to pull apart regular human interactions and understand them in order to understand their value I mean I remember like being told tactical parking and it's just like backing into a parking space like things so some things do just have names for the sake of having them but one that you know one but that always sticks with me because it seems so obvious on the face of it as something called give to get which is the notion that when you're you're trying to connect with somebody or even two to coax some information about a potential you know in this case attack or whatever the case may be out of them that often it's important to to be vulnerable to give of your own information first and the reason that I mentioned that is that I found it to be really valuable in as a technique to teach these young people where you say when you're in a place where you're both digging your heels in and disagreeing with one another sometimes we expect the other person to realize they're wrong first right and if you can pause and explain an instance where your thinking has evolved and you realize that you made a mistake you were unfair you were unjust that can can often soften the conversation enough for this other person to feel safe about getting to that same conclusion where they - you know maybe need to evolve their thinking on certain points sometimes you know sometimes we forget the power of vulnerability and of being a raw human being right where we show our weakness we show our softness and we show our mistakes and that allows other people to to feel safe doing the same even one thing that my my mother taught me when I was really little and is really stuck with me is people rise or stoop according to our expectations of them and I really do believe that that's true I think that if you go into a conversation express you know expecting somebody to to be hateful you'll often find a greater likelihood that they are if you expect to find some commonality with them you often will find that you do you know we hit what we look at as as they say in defensive driving courses and I think you know just like Chekhov's gun right like don't introduce a gun to a scene unless you you plan to use it it's like a rule of thumb for for writers and I think it's true of all of our interactions so we we end up being responsible for not only our own behavior but more than we like to think the behavior of others I think there's that quote around our greatest fear is not that we're powerless but that were powerful beyond measure and I think we we all do bear some responsibility for one another's actions and responses and as much as we can expect even our adversaries domestically in political life and overseas to be the humans that they could be the more that we find that they become that well this person asks what do you think background experience personality made you effective in your CIA job or career I know that they were drawn to you and recruited you because you did this great paper while you were at Georgetown working on conflict and terrorism that helped use data to determine where the next terrorist attack or violence could explode but over the course of your time with the CIA you learn different strategies so I'm curious what you do think made you effective at your work you also suggested earlier that more women almost as if there was something intrinsic to that I don't know if that's the case but I just like I do think I do think there is something I mean separately I think there are two separate questions but I do think there's something intrinsic in feminine problem-solving or that what we would traditionally associate with feminine problem-solving even though it's present in all he mean based on the experience of being a woman in this country yeah I mean I think that the the ability to solve problems through emotional intelligence intuition multitasking some of the things that we traditionally associate with the feminine in in all of us those are really critical traits for the human intelligence officer and I think they make women particularly well suited to the work and what made you particularly I mean just to finish that point no but I do I am so heartened to see women in all of the leadership roles of the agency right now right this is a really momentous moment in history where where we have a female director but also female directors beneath her of each of the directorates and I think that's very exciting and very hopeful for me personally you know I one thing you notice in training is that everyone has things that they just aren't naturally gifted at and they're all different and then there are things that have to be learned right and for me you know I I learned all of the the things that you have to around surveillance detection and all of that stuff but they weren't things that that I grew up I wasn't you know particularly like naturally predisposed to to situational awareness or surveillance detection for me I think it was much more seeing people you know Kay really connecting with people being curious about people and a lot of that came from moving a lot as a child especially overseas where I found that I had to be able to to connect with friends quickly and to see who they were beyond whatever window-dressing of kind of accent or dress or cultural habits were in a particular country when I arrived my birthday was in September so if I was you know I would start a new school year not know anyone and it was about being able to strip all those things away and really see people and connect with them and I think that that's that's what we need more of in our in our geopolitics is the the ability to create dialogue through through some common ground in that way well I think that's a good place to end it on behalf of world affairs I want to ask our audience to join me in thanking amaryllis Fox for being here today [Music]

Channel: World Affairs

Views: 40,762

Rating: 4.6742082 out of 5

Keywords: World, Affairs, cia, intelligence, middle east, china, spy, activism, activist, surveillance, peace, conflict, terrorism, politics

Id: qUZvS4sX0kM

Length: 59min 30sec (3570 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 24 2019