Listen to Tracy Walder’s True Spies podcast: The Rookie and bin Laden

In the space of a year, Tracy Walder went from being a carefree California sorority girl to hunting Osama bin Laden for the CIA.

She met an Agency recruiter at a University of Southern California jobs fair and would spend the next five years as an operative for the CIA Counterterrorism Center, hiding in the trunks of cars on her way to debrief terrorists at black sites.

It was quite a journey for a woman who dreamed about becoming a history teacher. 
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Tracy Walder: The Accidental Spy‍

In many ways, Tracy Walder was an accidental spy. She grew up in a family of educators in California and sang and danced her way through high school musicals. She decided to become a history teacher when she was about 10 years old and intended to apply for a teaching job at her university campus jobs fair. The CIA table was empty, however, so Tracy chatted with the recruiter and decided she’d rather make history than teach it.

“Before the CIA came into my life, I didn't have a lot of confidence,” Tracy told the True Spies podcast. “I was somewhat shy. I was vice president of my sorority. I loved going to football games and I was a history major at USC. I really hung out a lot with my sorority sisters.”

She was also curious about world affairs. In 1997, Tracy was watching CNN as Peter Bergen and Peter Arnett interviewed Osama bin Laden in a cave. He issued a fatwa and Tracy wanted to know more about it. A seed was sown. Weeks after the jobs fair, Tracy Walder, then 20, found herself sitting an hours-long polygraph test for the CIA - twice. The second time Tracy was so drained she fell asleep during a break. But she passed the test, even with her eyes closed.

Tracy started her life at the CIA like any graduate in their first job. She went where she was told. “I got lucky. I was really excited that I was put into counterterrorism,” she said. “I was looking at terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, providing targeting packages to the Department of Defense… monitoring those camps.”

On September 10, 2001, Tracy started working in The Vault, the top-secret counterterrorism nerve center. “I believe when I asked them if I was going to have to kill anybody, they said: ‘Not unless there's some large terrorist attack.’”

The next day, all US federal buildings were evacuated as news of the 9/11 terrorist attacks spread. Tracy and the counterterrorism unit stayed put, watching the catastrophe on TV: “I was not scared. No panic. I'm not a big panicker. If you let your emotions completely overcome you, you can make a very, very bad mistake that could have worldwide consequences. So any fear, any panic, sadness, guilt, it's okay to have those feelings, but you have to put them away when you're at work.”

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The Rookie and bin Laden

“I think that a lot of us felt a lot of guilt, particularly if you look at the 9/11 report that blamed us [the CIA] for it, that we should have stopped this. We should have seen this coming. We should have put all the pieces of the puzzle together. So, I think that that happened right away. But you have to pack that away because you have to focus on the work.”

Tracy was focused on the US invasion of Afghanistan and hunting down the world’s most wanted person, often working in The Vault with the US president or vice president often looking over her shoulder.

Osama bin Laden was the chief suspect - after all, he’d tried to attack the World Trade Center in 1993 and was one of the few people capable of orchestrating a large-scale attack. Tracy and the counterterrorism experts worked 12 or 13-hour shifts and soon had intelligence on the whereabouts of bin Laden. He was in Tora Bora in Afghanistan's White Mountains near the Khyber Pass. Unfortunately, the intel was leaked to the media, so bin Laden knew the net was closing. He’d need to move quickly in order to escape.

“There were two schools of thought, of how we should get bin Laden in Tora Bora. Do we send in ground troops? Precision Air Force bombing? Or do we not send in ground troops at all and just carpet-bomb the whole place?” The latter option prevailed.

“But if you don't have enough ground forces on the ground to keep him from escaping... he's just going to leak through it like water, which is exactly what happened.”

It was a defeating - but not defining - moment. Tracy decided that in her next posting she was going to try something different - she applied for the CIA Weapons of Mass Destruction group, working in the field. Throughout her career, Tracy - who’d never left California until she worked for the CIA - visited Afghanistan, Jordan, Uzbekistan, Algeria, Morocco, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and England. So what does a CIA spy do for an encore?

“I became a special agent at the FBI,” Tracy said. “I worked Chinese counterintelligence there.”

To hear more about Tracy Walder’s adventures, listen to the True Spies podcast: The Rookie and bin Laden.


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Tracy Walder is a SPYEX consultant with expertise in intelligence, clandestine operations, security, counterterrorism, political issues, international business diversity, and avoiding bias. She can be contacted via SPYEX for consulting or speaking engagements.