what I’m reading: life undercover: coming of age in the cia by amaryllis fox.

Amaryllis Fox was in her graduate studies at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service when she was recruited to work for the CIA. This memoir tells the story of her ten years working as a spy under non-official cover with the CIA.

This book was interesting. The book begins as Amaryllis Fox narrates a mission in Pakistan that ends with a cliffhanger. She then describes her life, starting at age 7, and continues through her university years at Oxford and Georgetown, and finally working for the CIA. We don’t return to that first mission in Pakistan until the book is nearly over.

The description of this book made me think we would hear all about spy stuff and espionage but Fox doesn’t really go into much detail about anything. We get a basic overview of her training and the undercover part of the book mainly focuses on just one mission that Fox worked on that lasted for years. I would suspect that she worked on many more missions but everything is kind of just glossed over. There will be a sentence here or there about how she had to travel to another country to meet with someone but that’s about it.

Additionally, the whole last third of the book Fox and her then-husband are stationed in China but I couldn’t really tell you what they did there because Fox doesn’t go into details. I understand that she must have worked on a lot of assignments that are classified, so she was unable to tell us many specifics. However, I also was surprised at how in detail parts of the book were surrounding the few missions that she does tell us about.

Honestly, I thought the part in the book that covered her gap year adventures in Asia when she smuggled out an interview with a political figure was much more interesting than any of her CIA escapades. Again, I think it was because there was much more detail in that story than in any of her missions with the CIA.

This book is fairly short, less than 250 pages. In my opinion, it was entertaining but suffered from a lack of depth which left me a bit disappointed.

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