Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire
Episode: Amaryllis Fox: “What Does This New Version of Mutually Assured Destruction Look Like?”| Episode 24
Here’s a list of all the books mentioned in this episode, complete with an Amazon buy link and quotes from the episode.
Life Undercover
Buy on Amazon"Amaryllis Fox spent nearly a decade working as a CIA operative, recounting her experiences in the bestselling book, Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA."
Life Undercover
Buy on Amazon"It's so clear from how you talk and the way you describe yourself that you are very attuned to the pain of others, whether it's the suffering of the Burmese people or the deep shock and pain you felt over 9/11, which you describe in your book."
Life Undercover
Buy on Amazon"It's called Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA, and that doesn't really strike me as a typical recipe for success as a CIA operative, being extremely empathetic, or am I wrong about that?"
Life Undercover
Buy on Amazon"A second thing that I found really surprising about your book was the suggestion that a lot of terror groups have close to—or within reach of—some kind of nuclear capabilities."
Life Undercover
Buy on Amazon"I think I read in the book about leaving on the last day and what my mentor had told me, which was like, 'When you leave, however much you think you did good work here and you have relationships and you did something important and you got these exceptional performance awards and la-di-da, when you leave, it’s like getting out of a swimming pool—the water will close in behind you, and no one will ever be able to see that you were here.'"
Life Undercover
Buy on Amazon"I think you don't explicitly talk about it in the book, but there's such a brutality somehow associated with the career path you were on this year: you give up everything from your past, you spend all day masquerading as something you're not, and when you leave, as you described, you're gone and it disappears."
Life Undercover
Buy on Amazon"A lot of young women read this book and reach out to me, and I think that on a personal level, if I were just their friend or their mom, there’s not a lot of personal happiness to be had on the simple deep personal level doing this work."