A Photo and Its Story
Fascinating pictures and the story behind them
At the age of 21 she developed an algorithm to identify terrorists’ likely safe havens, and a year later she was offered a job at the CIA. As one of the agency’s youngest female officers, she dedicated the next decade to one of the most dangerous undertakings on the planet. She is…
The only real way to disarm your enemy is to listen to them.
It is late in the afternoon when Amaryllis Fox is admitted into a small nondescript apartment in the largest city in Pakistan, the metropolis of Karachi. The man sitting on the sofa who’d been waiting for her cordially offers her a cup of tea. She is certain: This is the man she’d been tracking for months now. He is a member of a terrorist cell suspected of planning to release a “dirty” radioactive bomb that would cause tremendous disruption, if not sheer mass destruction…
Amaryllis Fox was born in New York City in 1980, the daughter of a British actress and an American economist. The family moved often for her father’s work, living variously in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the former Soviet Union. After high school she decided to study international law at Oxford, but one year before her graduation the attacks of September 11, 2001, awakened a deep interest in the phenomenon of terrorism. During her graduate work at Georgetown she developed an algorithm to predict terror attacks, and the CIA asked her to share it with the agency. Soon she was working for the agency as a political and terror analyst, even as she was finishing her Georgetown master’s degree. She’d also completed an agency operations training program, and at 22 she became one of the youngest female CIA officers. Assuming the identity of an art dealer, she set out to recruit arms dealers as assets. Background: After the fall of the Soviet Union, materials that vanished from the former empire’s military bases could potentially be used to produce nuclear weapons. So one of the young agent’s missions was to locate “dirty” bombs and ensure they’d never be used. Her key strategy: “The only real way to disarm your enemy is to listen to them.” That potent conviction could ultimately save thousands of lives on this afternoon in the apartment in Karachi…
Amaryllis knows the man offering her tea is not working alone. If she were to threaten him or resort to force, the rest of the terrorist cell would carry out the planned attack anyway. Her best hope: use empathy and the power of words. Amaryllis had spent years studying the profile of terrorists, and the moment has come to put these studies to good use. When she first saw the man on the sofa, she was surprised to see him holding an infant who seemed to be asthmatic. In response, she had handed the man a bottle of clove oil that she kept on hand for her own daughter. When she’d later learned that the attack hadn’t occurred, she wondered whether that moment of bonding had softened the man’s heart. “I thought of the wheezing baby and of her dad making choices to protect her, whether from pollution or drone strikes.
We all think we’re the good guy, and in a way we all actually are.” She never did determine the identities of the man’s accomplices. The important thing is that the bomb never went off. Her career has taken her to East Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. At some point she’d started to question if the emotional and physical strain of being a spy was really worth it. So she decided to quit her job. Amaryllis now works as a media analyst focusing on global affairs and appears on news outlets like CNN and the BBC. However what happened to that dirty bomb and those who were planning to detonate it remains a tightly held secret of the CIA.