In an excerpt from her review for Book Post, Sarah Chayes shares what troubled her about Amaryllis Fox’s new memoir.
Enthralled though I was, Life Undercover left me ill at ease.
The first problem is truth. As other former operatives have noted, the climactic scene, featuring Fox alone with al-Qaeda intermediaries, persuading them not to detonate a dirty bomb, is not even plausible. In Pakistan at the time, the CIA worked in concert with the effective and devious Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI). About the only operation conducted without ISI knowledge was the one that led to the killing of Usama Bin Laden. The ISI might tip him off, it was feared. If the imagined scene had taken place, everyone there but Fox would likely have been on the ISI payroll.
Fox wondered to the New York Times why such a fuss about facts, “when it says on Page 1 that operational details have been changed.” I had expected some such disclaimer — surely the names couldn’t be right. After long minutes of searching, I finally found it: in fine italics on the copyright page, buried amidst the Library of Congress card catalogue numbers.
Fox told NBC two characters are “composite,” that her “aim was really to capture the kind of ‘Capital T’ Truth, the emotional truth…” Such are the hallmarks of fiction. Truth, of course, is not absolute. But with so many acting on their “emotional truth” these days, the difference between substantive accuracy and fake news matters. This book proves that Fox has not stopped deceiving people, including herself.
Of more concern is her focus on personal motivations to the exclusion of the circumstances that may have shaped them. In the wake of 9/11, her idealism undergoes a radical transformation. From risking her life for an underground cohort of Burmese resisting an all-powerful junta, she pivots to seeing Americans — denizens of the mightiest country on earth — as the defenseless victims upon whom to lavish her devotion. In a shell-shocked twenty-something, I can understand the confusion. In the mature memoirist, it is harder. Fox can’t not know how often Washington (CIA in the lead) buttresses regimes little if at all better than Burma’s — driving some of their victims to violent extremes. The fusional relationship with the Pakistani military dictatorship’s ISI is just one example. The US’s persistent alliance with Saudi Arabia another. Not to mention the CIA “black sites” during the war on terror and the use of torture. Fox brushes that topic off with an oblique mention of “the injustice of some renditions.”
A friend who has traveled in circles similar to Fox’s wrote me describing the utter lack of perspective of operators consumed by the details of a dangerous and all-encompassing job: “A non-acknowledged agent lives in a sensory deprivation chamber where even the echo of one’s own voice is negated. [Fox’s] effort seems to be a quest for a self-confirming echo that she did what she did, and that what she did mattered.”
Don’t get me wrong. There is much to recommend this book — from the sheer bravura to Fox’s dedication to finding nonviolent ways through the most fraught conflicts. But like Jill Ciment, she should perhaps write a second memoir a few decades hence, when she’s gained some perspective on what she was really doing and what she was doing it for.
Sarah Chayes worked in Kandahar, Afghanistan, for most of the decade after 9/11. She served as special assistant to two commanders of the international troops and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She is the author of the forthcoming Cross of Gold: Corruption in America.
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