美国国家公共电台 NPR The War On Terrorism, Through The Eyes Of 3 Women At The CIA（在线收听）

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After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the CIA started scrambling to ramp up its counterterrorism operations. That included an infusion of young recruits, many of them women, into an agency long dominated by older men. Three women in the thick of this battle have now each written books about their secretive work, laying out the successes and the shortcomings of the war on terror. NPR's Greg Myre has their stories.

GREG MYRE, BYLINE: When the September 11 attacks hit, Amaryllis Fox was about to start her senior year in college. The next day, she drove to New York to see the smoldering rubble and asked herself, what can I do? Just a few years later, she was an undercover CIA officer tracking extremists.

AMARYLLIS FOX: One of the things that I think we all forget is how incredibly young so many of the intelligence officers really are.

MYRE: Tracy Walder was a sorority sister at the University of Southern California and a news junkie who joined the CIA just weeks after graduation in 2000. The terror attacks the following year accelerated her training.

TRACY WALDER: To be completely honest with you, I had been placed in the Counterterrorism Center not because I was spectacular but because I was young. And so a lot of us sort of newbies were placed in the Counterterrorism Center.

MYRE: These two women, along with a third, Nada Bakos, all have new books that present in detail how they went about this work - like how to create an undercover identity as an art dealer or how to trade coded messages on a Starbucks gift card. And as Tracey Walder explains, it's not easy blending in as a young, blonde American in the Middle East.

WALDER: Sometimes I would have to travel in the trunks of cars just because that was the way that it was. And I was going to stick out no matter what.

MYRE: They all had distinct roles. Nada Bakos entitled her recently released book "The Targeter," which was also her job description. Her mission was to learn everything possible about extremist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a key leader in the Iraq insurgency.

NADA BAKOS: You're looking for information that you can act on. So you give it to whatever action arm that we have at the time, and in my case, quite often it was Special Forces.

MYRE: Zarqawi was ultimately killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2006. Amaryllis Fox writes in her book "Life Undercover" about making her way through the congested streets of Karachi, Pakistan, for a clandestine meeting with extremists. She's trying to learn about a possible attack; they want to discuss U.S. drone strikes that are killing civilians.

FOX: There are electric moments walking into meetings. There are moments of the intense drama that we associate with the war on terror, with the spy world.

MYRE: This war also marked a major shift for a spy agency run by older white men who had specialized in Russia. After September 11, the focus turned to radical Islam. Women were part of this rising generation. Last year, Gina Haspel became the CIA's first woman director. Here she is speaking this past April.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

GINA HASPEL: It is a great time to be a woman at the agency. The head of operations is a woman. The head of analysis is a woman. The head of science and technology is a woman. You might sense a conspiracy here, but...

(LAUGHTER)

MYRE: The three women authors don't see a conspiracy; they see a skill set that many women bring. Again, Amaryllis Fox.

FOX: Some of the traits that we tend to associate with feminine characteristics - you know, intuition, emotional intelligence and to multitask - these are things that make really excellent operations officers.

MYRE: These books are also filled with frustrations. Nada Bakos was on a team looking into possible links between al-Qaida and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

BAKOS: We really didn't find a connection between Iraq and any, you know, larger international terrorist organization that would have really been a - posed a threat to the United States.

MYRE: Which was not what President George W. Bush's administration said when it launched the war against Iraq.

BAKOS: There were moments in my career when I just wanted to go out onto the street and yell exactly everything that I've told the policymaker that they aren't telling the public. I mean, it's incredibly frustrating.

MYRE: Around the same time, Tracy Walder's team made poster-sized graphics showing that Saddam likely did not have weapons of mass destruction. Yet that work was sent to the White House and later morphed into the poster that Secretary of State Colin Powell famously used at the United Nations to argue that Saddam did have such weapons.

WALDER: Obviously, we were horrified. What could we do about it, right? Wasn't much. But I do think that part of that chart, along with the whole WMD case, was used sort of incorrectly as the impetus for the Iraq War.

MYRE: Like all books by former CIA employees, the manuscripts had to be reviewed by the agency. The one by Amaryllis Fox recently caused a stir amid reports that it had not been cleared for publication, yet it was published as planned on Tuesday. All three women left the CIA by 2010 and have moved on with their lives. Amaryllis Fox sometimes travels to Iraq to work with those scarred by violence. Nada Bakos is at a social media company in Seattle. Tracy Walder, whose upcoming book is called "The Unexpected Spy," teaches a course called spycraft at an all-girl school in Dallas. Some students have followed in her footsteps.

WALDER: I've had girls now who work at State Department, CIA, FBI.

MYRE: In the compartmentalized world of the CIA, these three women say they've never met. If they ever do, they'll have a lot to talk about.

Greg Myre, NPR News, Washington.