Introduction

“Fast and thrilling . . . Life Undercover reads as if a John le Carré character landed in Eat Pray Love." —The New York Times

Amaryllis Fox's riveting memoir tells the story of her ten years in the most elite clandestine ops unit of the CIA, hunting the world's most dangerous terrorists in sixteen countries while marrying and giving birth to a daughter

Amaryllis Fox was in her last year as an undergraduate at Oxford studying theology and international law when her writing mentor Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded. Galvanized by this brutality, Fox applied to a master's program in conflict and terrorism at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, where she created an algorithm that predicted, with uncanny certainty, the likelihood of a terrorist cell arising in any village around the world. At twenty-one, she was recruited by the CIA. Her first assignment was reading and analyzing hundreds of classified cables a day from foreign governments and synthesizing them into daily briefs for the president. Her next assignment was at the Iraq desk in the Counterterrorism center. At twenty-two, she was fast-tracked into advanced operations training, sent from Langley to "the Farm," where she lived for six months in a simulated world learning how to use a Glock, how to get out of flexicuffs while locked in the trunk of a car, how to withstand torture, and the best ways to commit suicide in case of captivity. At the end of this training she was deployed as a spy under non-official cover--the most difficult and coveted job in the field as an art dealer specializing in tribal and indigenous art and sent to infiltrate terrorist networks in remote areas of the Middle East and Asia.

Life Undercover is exhilarating, intimate, fiercely intelligent--an impossible to put down record of an extraordinary life, and of Amaryllis Fox's astonishing courage and passion.

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of October 2019: While Amaryllis Fox’s memoir of her years as a CIA covert agent reads like a John le Carré novel come to life, the writing makes vehemently clear that a real person is moving in and out of the shadows. When the CIA recruits Fox as a Georgetown graduate student after she writes an algorithm to help predict terrorist attacks, her double life begins. After Fox goes through the weeding-out process, she’s forced to tell a good friend, also in contention for a CIA role, that she wasn’t selected. “Yeah right, I bet they just told you to say that,” the friend sagely remarks, and Fox bursts into tears, gutted by losing the last friend who knows the truth. Six months of advanced operations training at “the Farm” launches her into covert operations in the Middle East, where she’s tasked with finding would-be terrorists or terrorist suppliers and turning them into CIA sources. But marriage to another agent, a baby, and living in China while under constant supervision also take their toll. Even as Fox wins praise from Langley for her astonishing work in the field, her interior life is crumbling. Fox demonstrates not only the bravery and guts of young CIA agents—for they are almost all young—but the courage it takes to challenge whether a life of lies is a life worth living. Sparely written and gripping, Amaryllis Fox’s memoir dives into the beating heart of undercover work, illuminating its corrosive effects on the spirit even as she celebrates the humanity behind the hard-won triumphs. —Adrian Liang, Amazon Book Review

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