THE LEGAL ATTACHÉ PART 1: KENTUCKY WINDAGE

True Spies Episode 131, Part 1: The Legal Attaché

++CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains graphic descriptions of violence.

Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you’ll hear the true stories behind the world’s greatest espionage operations. You’ll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I’m Vanessa Kirby, and this is True Spies: The Legal Attaché.

KATHY STEARMAN: The day before, a bus stop had been blown up and a bus had been blown up. And we're on the way back to the airport. And I realized that the car that was taking me to the airport. It was an embassy car. He was trailing along behind a bus full of people by three feet. And I'm like, "Okay if this bus blows up, I'm dead." 

NARRATOR: Part 1, Kentucky Windage. Colombo, Sri Lanka. 2007. The Sri Lankan civil war is now well into its third decade. Over 50,000 people have already been killed, mostly civilians, and the death toll is rising - fast. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, have stepped up their suicide bombing campaign. Better known as the Tamil Tigers, the paramilitary group is now targeting everyone from government officials to rival Tamil politicians and even innocent bystanders.

KATHY STEARMAN: Most of the fighting during the civil war had been done in the north and in the central part of the country. But the LTTE had become really bold, and when I was there they had started bombing bus stops and buses full of people.

NARRATOR: By 2006, the UK, the US, the EU, and India had all proscribed the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist group. That’s how the FBI got involved.

KATHY STEARMAN: Most people don't realize that even if a terrorist organization is raising money to commit a violent act or an act of terrorism in another country, if they're in the United States to raise the money, then the FBI investigates it. Doesn’t matter where that act of terrorism is going to occur? If they're raising money in the United States, we investigate it.

NARRATOR: Among the team providing this support is Kathy Stearman, the FBI’s top official in the American Embassy in New Delhi, then one of the largest US diplomatic missions anywhere in the world. From there, Kathy has responsibility for the Indian desk and Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Bhutan, and Nepal. All of them are grappling with the growing global terror threat.

KATHY STEARMAN: In the Maldives, while I was there, the Maldives actually did have a bombing. And so they asked me to assist them with their investigation so that we could help them with their forensics and the crime scene. And interestingly enough, the person that bombed this building in the Maldives was wearing a T-shirt that said ‘CIA’.

NARRATOR: But this is a story not simply about the fight against terror that Kathy is caught up in. It’s also about another fight, one she’s been having her whole life.

KATHY STEARMAN: There were a couple of guys who I realized didn't want to deal with a woman. And I'm tall and I always wore a suit, which looked like a man's suit. And I think there for a while, at least early on, they actually wondered if I was a woman because I walked around in a man suit. And I'm very matter-of-fact and assertive. 

NARRATOR: It’s not until the cook at her Bureau-provided home confronted her that Kathy appreciated the local flavor of this universal problem, however.

KATHY STEARMAN: She said to me one day, “Madame, I'm very worried about you.” And I said, “Well, why are you worried about me?” She said, “We don't know if you're a hijra or not.” And I said, “Well, what's a hijra?” And she said, “Well, it's a man who wants to dress in women's clothes or women who want to dress in men's clothes.” And I said, “I'm not a Hijra. I am a woman underneath the suit. And this is the way businesswomen dress in the United States.” And she just sort of shook her head like she didn't believe me. But after that, of course, I sort of felt like, “Does everybody view me that way?” And I wondered if maybe a couple of the guys at CBI who seem to have an issue with me, I wondered if that's what they were thinking all along. ‘We can't figure out what she is. So we're having a real issue dealing with her.’

NARRATOR: Kathy was wearing a suit long before her time as a Special Agent in India though. It was part of the armor she built up around herself. Professional, business-like, and sometimes severe, Kathy had learned that a suit could be as much of a weapon as the FBI standard-issue Smith & Wesson revolver it concealed. But as comfortable as she was wearing what many deemed men’s clothing, Kathy was just as comfortable holding a gun.

KATHY STEARMAN: I grew up in Kentucky so I'm familiar with guns. And, at least on the farm where I grew up, everybody had a critter gun, a shotgun, or a rifle, or whatever. So I knew about guns, and I had held guns, and I had shotguns myself. 

NARRATOR: Nestled within the rolling hills of south-central Kentucky, Kathy grew up milking the 200 cows that dotted the 300-acre farm her father had bought some years after fighting at Okinawa in World War Two. There, the outside world seemed a distant place.

KATHY STEARMAN: I had no idea what the FBI was when I was growing up. I didn't watch TV, so I didn't get to watch the show called FBI. I was this kid who lived my life outdoors or in books. The more books that I read about foreign countries and exotic places, the more I realized that the farm in Kentucky was beautiful. But I wanted more. I wanted to go over that horizon and see what was there. 

NARRATOR: Kathy spent four years in college studying medicine but by then she knew it wasn’t the right match.

KATHY STEARMAN: All I wanted to see were the different countries, meet different people, learn different languages, and study different cultures. And I knew that if I became a surgeon, I would never be able to do that. I would never have had that opportunity. And so a family friend said to me, “Why don't you consider something that other women don't get to do? The CIA, and the FBI, and the State Department, and the Secret Service.” And I hadn't really thought about any of those organizations or agencies.

NARRATOR: Working for the FBI was certainly not something that most women got to do. They were only allowed to enroll from 1972, just two months after the death of J. Edgar Hoover. But Kathy had a family friend, a Kentucky State trooper, who knew someone in the Secret Service who helped her with the intros. To this day, Kathy has no idea how the FBI picked up on her application to a different agency, but one day the FBI rang her up asking if she’d be interested in applying to their program.

KATHY STEARMAN: This was in 1987 when the FBI invited me to join the bureau and attend the new agents training class, which is in Virginia at Quantico.

NARRATOR: Quantico, known as the ‘Crossroads of the Marine Corps’, is the largest Marine Corps base in America, a place where anything less than exceptional is unacceptable. By no coincidence, it’s also where the FBI Academy is stationed.

KATHY STEARMAN: The FBI Academy was very strict. When I was a new agent trainee we weren't allowed to even leave the Academy for about six weeks so we were pretty much on lockdown. And when you were in the middle of nowhere, on lockdown, crazy things happened.

NARRATOR: She’s only been there two days when Kathy has her first strange experience at the Academy. 

KATHY STEARMAN: A good portion of training at Quantico involves firearms training. And we would spend at least half a day, three or four times a week, out on the range. We would be taught how to shoot a variety of guns and so, when I got on the range the first day, I actually was shooting fairly well. And then I went out the next day and I pointed the gun at the target, right dead in the middle, and nothing hit the target. Absolutely nothing. The target just stayed a white blank.

NARRATOR: Bemused, Kathy calls over the firearms instructor, Tommy, and explains her situation. Calmly, she suggests to Tommy that something might be wrong with the gun.

KATHY STEARMAN: And he said, “Let's face it, Stearman, you just can't shoot. Why don't you just leave now? Just walk out now.” And I thought, "Okay, I'm not sure where that's coming from." The next day I go out and the same thing, and the same thing the day after that. And I kept telling him, “Look, I know there's something wrong with my gun. I'm from Kentucky. I grew up with guns.” And then he got into the habit of standing behind me during every firearm shoot, and he would scream at me. And even though I had on earmuffs like the earphones I have on now, I could hear him clearly because he made sure I heard him clearly and he would scream at me: “You can't shoot. Why don't you leave now? You don't belong here.” 

NARRATOR: After several more days of scoring blanks on the shooting range it dawns on Kathy that, unless she does something about it, her dream of becoming an FBI agent will stay exactly that. A dream.

KATHY STEARMAN: And so I had a colleague in my class. He was actually a former West Virginia state trooper. I had him stand behind me one day and I said, “When I am dead center, where are my bullets going?” And so he did that. And we had to do it discreetly because I think we both knew that if the firearms instructor saw him helping me, he would just be really upset about the whole situation. And so he stood behind me and he said, “You're aiming dead center, but the bullets are going lower, right?” 

NARRATOR: By this point, Kathy knew that something wasn’t quite right. But Where Kathy was from in the south Midwest there’s an old saying. It concerns the adjustment any shooter must make when firing on a target to account for wind and other circumstances. It’s called ‘Kentucky Windage’. More colloquially though, Kentuckians know it can mean adjusting for whatever life throws at you to get the job done. Kathy was doing both. Not only was her gun clearly faulty, but she also suspected the firearms instructor was behind it. But at that moment there was little she could do other than improvising.

KATHY STEARMAN: So I knew that if my bullets were going lower right, in order to hit that center, I needed to aim upper left. And so that's what I started doing. And then I started hitting the target. And that is how I passed firearms training, not by aiming dead center at a target, which is what you're absolutely trained and supposed to do.

NARRATOR: The day after the final test, the FBI’s latest recruits are set free to enjoy a day’s shooting minus the pressure of the tests. Kathy goes to the weapons cache and asks for her gun.

KATHY STEARMAN: And the guy who handled the gun vault said, “I can't find your gun.” And so the firearms instructor walked up behind me and he said, “It's on the repair rack.” 

NARRATOR: The man behind the desk looks quizzically at the firearms instructor. Then he looks at Kathy, who is starting to think her suspicions may be right.

KATHY STEARMAN: And he handed it to me and I went out into the range and I aimed upper left. Couldn't hear a thing. The target was just a white blank.

NARRATOR: At this point, Kathy knew. The firearms instructor had tampered with her gun. 

KATHY STEARMAN: I aimed dead center. Lo and behold, there were my bullets landing dead center. And he actually had the audacity to say to me, “Well, Stearman, I tried to get you kicked out, but you made it through anyway.” And I hated him so much at that moment. 

NARRATOR: A few months after graduating Kathy finds herself back at Quantico for a conference. At one point she spots Tommy, the firearms instructor, walking nonchalantly down the hall.

KATHY STEARMAN: And I said to him sarcastically, I said, “Well, what are you up to these days?” And he said, "Well, Stearman, I'm just doing my job, getting more and more women kicked out of the FBI." And then he just walked on.

NARRATOR: Now one of only 600 female agents out of a total of 10,000, Kathy embarked on her career in the FBI, her opinion of the organization already changed immeasurably before she was even given her first assignment.

KATHY STEARMAN: I was very naive, which is surprising because I grew up with a father who was very strict and he believed - I think he really and truly believed - that women had no worth. But even though I grew up with that in my household, it never occurred to me that I couldn't push forward, that there would be someone who would try to stop me. It never occurred to me that a man would be that blatant about his misogyny and about his dislike for women. So, yes, I was naive and I had no idea that I would have to deal with someone like Tommy and other men in the Bureau. But it didn't deter me. It just made me stronger but it also made me harder.

NARRATOR: Soon after graduating, Kathy went undercover working on money laundering and white-collar crime cases but she still yearned for a world beyond America.

KATHY STEARMAN: My easy class in college was Russian if you can believe that. And I've always loved languages. And so I took Russian so I could speak some Russian when I joined the Bureau because I wanted to work in counterintelligence. So when the opportunity came about three years - three or four years - into my career, I applied for language school, to the Defense Language Institute, to learn foreign languages.

NARRATOR: The Defense Language Institute. Where the US military sends young soldiers bound for extended stints overseas. Kathy spent two and a half years there studying Mandarin. She then transferred to the FBI’s San Francisco field office working counterterrorism around the time of 9/11, readying herself for an overseas assignment. But before she can go Kathy encounters another problem. One that threatened not only her career but her life.

KATHY STEARMAN: I had breast cancer. And so I was actually going through chemo during 9/11 and after that happened. And I so desperately wanted to be with my colleagues fighting against terrorism and doing everything that they were doing but I couldn't because I was still undergoing treatment. 

NARRATOR: The doctors set out Kathy’s chances. She had a 86% chance of beating the disease if she survived the first five years. After surgery, six months of chemo, and two months of radiation, Kathy knew that if she did beat cancer, serving the FBI overseas was still her dream. Luckily, after four years of treatment, tests, and a few tears, Kathy was finally strong enough to pursue that dream again.

KATHY STEARMAN: I said to my husband, “Listen, I really, really, really want to pursue going overseas again. I really want to work in the Legal Attaché Office.” 

NARRATOR: The Legal Attaché Office. The FBI’s office in embassies around the world liaises with that country’s law enforcement agencies. The Legal Attaché, or Legat, is the FBI’s most senior official in any given region. After transferring to FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. in 2006, Kathy got her wish. She’s to be the Legat in New Delhi, after nearly 20 years of negotiating all the Kentucky Windage both the FBI and life could muster. She was one of the first women to ever hold the role.

KATHY STEARMAN: And for a couple of years I was the only female legal attaché that the FBI had out of about 70 legal attachés.

NARRATOR: While India and much of the rest of the sub-continent were no less concerned by the global terror threat, harmony with US officials was not perfect. Upon arriving in New Delhi, Kathy was already having to rebuild bridges with the gamut of Indian intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

KATHY STEARMAN: My predecessor had left the embassy a couple of months before I arrived. And he was a bit of a prima donna. So apparently he just treated everybody at the embassy really poorly because he felt like the country was filthy. He didn't like working with the people. He didn't like the office. And he really just created chaos with all of the other people that the Legat office normally interfaces with. And I didn't know all this had been going on until I arrived. And so the first thing I did was I made an appointment with every single head of agency in the entire embassy because I wanted to meet them and I wanted to ask them: “What is it that the FBI can do to help you do your job here?” And every single person said to me, “Well, I hope you're going to be better than that guy that was here before because he was an a******.”

NARRATOR: In patching up relations with her Indian counterparts, Kathy found herself spending a lot of time at the headquarters of the Central Bureau of Investigation, or CBI, India’s equivalent of the FBI. The building was quite unlike any American agency outpost, however. Built during the British Raj, this once opulent colonial office was now crumbling under the weight of its own stone walls, sodden from decades in a monsoonal climate.

KATHY STEARMAN: It was quite an experience. Sometimes the gates would be open and sometimes they would still be locked. And I would have - when the gates were locked - I would have to climb through this turnstile that had to have been there since the 1850s, and you could barely turn this turnstile. And it was all rusted and I would squeeze through. And then, by that time, my suit would have all these tiger stripes on it from the rust. And then I would traipse across the parking lot and go into the building to the area where I always met my colleagues, it was sort of a courtyard, and it was where a lot of the officers washed their clothes. They would sit in their underwear and have chai and just watch me walk by like, “Who is that, and what is that?” 

NARRATOR: Kathy’s primary contact at the CBI was Mr. Kumar, a small, slight man with a Cheshire cat grin. Invariably though, whenever meeting Mr. Kumar at his office deep within the bowels of CBI headquarters, a monkey would be present too, perched by the open window overlooking a courtyard of inert soldiers. Monkeys were ubiquitous in New Delhi and often rather territorial. The FBI had even gone to the effort of circulating a ‘Monkey Memo’ among agents, highlighting the dangers of these animals if encountered grouped together among the city’s back alleys. One day, Kathy confronts Mr. Kumar in his office about an intelligence request she still hasn’t heard back on.

KATHY STEARMAN: So I'm sitting there and I said, “Is there a problem with the request I made of you? Do you want me to resubmit it?” And he sat there and he hemmed and hawed and bobbed his head a little. And finally, he looked down like he was ashamed. And he said, “Miss Kathy, the monkey stole your paperwork.” 

NARRATOR: Sat behind Mr. Kumar, assuming its usual position, is the monkey.

KATHY STEARMAN: And his tail is just sort of flicking back and forth. And that monkey at that very moment looked over at me and I swear his little face said, “Yeah, I'm the one that stole your paper. It's true.” 

NARRATOR: With Mr. Kumar now staring into his lap in embarrassment, Kathy is unsure how to respond. Years of FBI training didn’t cater for this.

KATHY STEARMAN: I literally cracked up laughing. And I didn't mean to because I know it embarrassed my colleague from the CBI. And I said, "I'm sorry but you know what? I actually do believe that the monkey did steal my paperwork." And I don't think he realized that there was actually a monkey sitting on the window ledge behind him as we were having this very conversation. So it was one of those surreal moments when you have to say to yourself, “You can't make this stuff up. You really can't.”

NARRATOR: But Kathy can only laugh for a moment. The terror situation in several of the countries she has oversight of out of New Delhi is deteriorating. The Maldives suffers the first bombing in its modern history. And in Sri Lanka, the civil war is reaching a fever pitch.

KATHY STEARMAN: Once, when I was at the embassy in Colombo, the American Embassy, one of the RSO officers came around. He said, "Embassy's on lockdown. Nobody is going to leave." They had found a bicycle with a box on the back and it was full of explosives. 

NARRATOR: The civil war broke out in the early ‘80s as attacks against the minority, largely Hindu, Tamil population were stepped up by the ruling, largely Buddhist, Sinhalese population. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam fomented a full-blown insurgency against government forces which triggered a conflict that had lasted almost a quarter of a century by the time Kathy Stearman visited the country. But the LTTE had been on the FBI’s radar ever since the US government placed the group on its terrorist watchlist in 1997.

KATHY STEARMAN: So a couple of years after they ended up on the terrorist watch list, there was an investigation started out of our Newark, New Jersey division. And it turned out that there were several people in the United States, Sri Lankan nationals. I think three of them ended up being American citizens. They were actually in the United States and they were raising money to buy weapons to send to Sri Lanka, to the LTTE, to fight against the Sinhalese.

NARRATOR: The LTTE was no amateur outfit. They had a Navy, an airborne unit, an intelligence arm, and a fighting force of up to 20,000 troops. The three Tamil Tigers raising money in the US were looking to purchase SAMs, cutting-edge surface-to-air missiles, alongside as many AK-47s as they could afford. But one of their numbers was looking for a way out.

KATHY STEARMAN: The reason they actually came on our radar is that there was an informant. There was someone who came forward within their group to talk about what this group was doing.

NARRATOR: The informant offered some rather bizarre, but no less actionable, intelligence. The founder and leader of the LTTE, Velupillai Prabhakaran, wants to bribe the US State Department into taking the Tigers off its list of foreign terrorists...

KATHY STEARMAN: So we put some undercover agents in place. An FBI agent posed as a State Department employee and the LTTE came to him unbeknownst of the fact that he was an undercover agent and they offered him $1 million to have the LTTE taken off the terrorist list. 

NARRATOR: With people now planted inside the organization, the operation expands. Some 20 field officers work on the case full-time. The investigation spread to 10 other countries. By 2005, some 13 senior LTTE figures had been arrested. When she arrives as Legat a year later, Kathy is charged with gathering and cataloging all the evidence that will be used at their upcoming trial in the US.

KATHY STEARMAN: There were a group of agents that came out to Sri Lanka from the New York office and the Newark office. It was the Newark Joint Terrorism Task Force, and there were people from other agencies as well as the FBI. And they came out with me so that we could go and basically sift through weapons and see what we needed to send back to the United States.

NARRATOR: Standing on a military base in the midday Sri Lankan heat, Kathy and her New Jersey colleagues are sifting through weapons from a recent raid on LTTE positions. Surface-to-air missiles, rocket launchers, large caliber rifles. It is then that one of her counterparts at the Sri Lankan police, one Mr. Weerasinghe, approaches Kathy.

KATHY STEARMAN: He said, “Miss Kathy while you're here, I'd like to ask your opinion on something.” 

NARRATOR: Mr. Weerasinghe asks Kathy to follow him to a windowless room. Scattered across the table are photographs, photographs of body parts, destroyed furniture, and scattered clothing.

KATHY STEARMAN: And he said, “We recently had a bombing. Here in Colombo, where a Sri Lankan official was blown up in his office.”

NARRATOR: Suicide bombings were nothing new to officials like Mr. Weerasinghe. Back in 1987, an elite commando unit called the Black Tigers was formed within the LTTE. Its purpose? Suicide bombings. The LTTE was in fact the first group globally to hone the use of suicide attacks at scale, the Iranians and others following their lead. By the end of the Sri Lankan civil war in 2009, the LTTE is widely thought to have conducted more suicide bombings than any other group around the globe. Given their experience with such attacks then, why were the Sri Lankans asking for Kathy’s help?

KATHY STEARMAN: He said, “We found this residue on the wall behind the official's desk and we can't figure out what it is. We thought, maybe it's some type of new bomb-making material. And we wanted to ask the FBI and see if they could figure out what it was.” 

NARRATOR: But still Kathy wondered, why is he asking me?

KATHY STEARMAN: So I looked at the photos and I looked at the clothing and I realized that the clothing was a sari. And he confirmed that the bomber was a female suicide bomber. And so I asked him, “Was the bomb placed in her bra when she walked into the official's office?” Because of the way she set off the bomb, she sat in front of the desk where the officials sat, and then she set off the bomb. So basically everything blew against the wall. And he said, “Yes. It was.” 

NARRATOR: Looking again at the residue on the wall, Kathy realizes what it is. She turns back to Mr. Weerasinghe and says…

KATHY STEARMAN: Well, the residue on the wall is breast tissue. 

NARRATOR: Mr. Weerasinghe demurs, confusion and embarrassment strewn across his face. Kathy says to him again...

KATHY STEARMAN: It's breast tissue. It's the inside of a woman's breast. That is what the tissue looks like. And I said, “So if she had the bomb in her bra. Part of her breast was blown against the wall after she exploded it.” And I think he sort of looked at me like, “Well, okay, sure. I guess every woman knows what the inside of her breasts looks like.” And then he sort of rethought that. And I saw the confusion on his face.

NARRATOR: What Kathy doesn’t tell him is her past life studying medicine, working on hospital wards during the summers. Her main job involved sterilizing and passing surgical instruments during operations. She had seen enough mastectomies to know exactly what she was looking at. Mr. Weerasinghe stands there for another moment. Then he gently puts his hand on her arm and leans toward Kathy, as if readying himself to tell her a secret. Then he whispers: “Kathy, did you know that Sri Lanka invented the female suicide bomber?”

KATHY STEARMAN: And I actually didn't know that. And I didn't think that that was a distinction I would want to claim, but it stayed with me. 

NARRATOR: Staring at a picture of the bomber’s perfectly intact foot, Kathy started to feel uneasy. A strange, unpleasant feeling stirred within her. She had seen countless crime scenes before, from dismembered bodies to blown-out buildings. This was different.

KATHY STEARMAN: All I could think about was this woman who had put on a sari - and it was a very nice sari. It was very high quality. It was silk. It was a beautiful color. It was trimmed in gold. And the thought of her dressing up in her finest sari and having her toes painted and having herself had to go off and kill herself made me wonder. It made me really ask myself, “Is there anything that I could possibly feel that strongly about that I would walk out the door and realize that I won't make it back? I won't be back.” So that foot set me on a path to thinking about a lot of things that I really had not considered before in my life. What do people feel the most passionate about that they are willing to die for? 

NARRATOR: Reflecting on this in her US embassy car back to Colombo International, Kathy notices something that makes her even more uncomfortable.

KATHY STEARMAN: I think it was like the day before a bus stop had been blown up. And we're on the way back to the airport. And I was just sort of jittery about the whole thing. And I realized that the car that was taking me to the airport was an embassy car. He was sort of trailing along behind a bus full of people by like three feet. And I'm like, "Okay if this bus blows up, I'm dead."

NARRATOR: Kathy lunges toward the driver.

KATHY STEARMAN: I was like, speed up and get around this God damn bus. And he sort of looked at me, turned around. He looked at me like, “What is wrong with Miss Kathy? Because Mr. Kathy's always nice to me”. And he didn't say anything, but he knew who I was and he knew what I did. And he knew that I work for the FBI and I think from the look on his face, he thought, “Oh, sh** maybe she knows something that I don't know.”

NARRATOR: The driver pulls out from behind the bus and floors it. Weaving in and out of some of the most congested roads in the world, they arrive at the airport in record time alive. But once inside, Kathy is no less anxious. Her senses are now firing like never before. 

KATHY STEARMAN: I got in line to check in and I started to look at almost every woman differently. Every woman had a sari on. I found myself looking at their boobs or their chests. Like, what? Are they acting nervous? Do they have something in their bra? Do their bras look overly stuffed or something that shouldn't be there? 

NARRATOR: She notices a local woman ahead of her in line swaying restlessly, constantly picking at her sari all while sweating profusely. Sri Lanka’s climate was one of the most humid in the world. Westerners were permanently drenched in their own sweat. But rarely the locals. The more she looked at this woman, the more scared Kathy became, even after watching her sail through the metal detector without a sound. By the time she sat down on board, Kathy felt so mentally drained that she resigned herself to the possibility she might die there and then.

KATHY STEARMAN: That is really the only time in my career that I ever really thought about the fact that it might, today, be the day I get blown up. It was just one of those experiences I had never experienced before. I'd never felt that way before because in all the years I'd been in the FBI, there was maybe one other incident where I felt actually afraid. 

NARRATOR: The flight passes off without incident. Kathy concludes that perhaps the woman was just a nervous flier. But after landing back in New Delhi, Kathy realizes she’s in a spin. Something had changed.

KATHY STEARMAN: I never really thought about the way I felt every morning when I would walk out the door with a gun on. I'd put my suit on. I'd put my gun on. I didn't really think that “Oh, today I'm dressing up or putting on my suit because today I might die.” Maybe I had a belief and I did have the belief that I was part of the FBI and we were there to protect the country. We were there to protect the people of the United States. So it really didn't occur to me that maybe I was doing the same thing without even really thinking about it. 

NARRATOR: Her perception of the FBI had changed before she even graduated from the Academy. Now Kathy’s perception of herself changed. After some soul searching she decides to stay at her post in New Delhi, where things are no less febrile. The FBI is working on a case to take down an Indian terrorist who helped to fund 9/11. As Legat, Kathy takes the lead.

KATHY STEARMAN: I had to testify in an Indian court that those records were accurate. But the court was actually held in the prison where he was being held because before I arrived for the testimony, there apparently were threats against my life because somebody leaked it to the newspaper. And so, when I arrived in Kolkata for the testimony, on the front page of the newspaper was: An FBI man to testify against Ansari. And I thought, well, everybody thinks a man's going to show up, so maybe nobody will be trying to shoot me.

NARRATOR: That’s next week on True Spies. I’m Vanessa Kirby. Join us next week for the second installment of True Spies, The Legal Attaché. Or, if you’re a subscriber to SPYSCAPE Plus in Apple Podcasts, there’s no need to wait. You can listen to part two right now.