Former FBI agent shares experience of working for CIA during 9/11 terror attack
A former CIA agent has revealed what it was like working at the agency when the 9/11 attack occurred - and told of how she is “living with the guilt”.
Tracy Schandler Walder started working for the CIA in 2000, just a year before al-Qaeda terrorists flew two planes into both buildings of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. She was employed as a Staff Operations officer - a relatively new role at the time.
Using their knowledge of “operations, assets and tradecraft”, Tracy’s role was to “handle assets, look at our different intelligence capabilities, and make sure that the operations we had in mind were feasible”. She spent most of her time in the counter-terrorism centre - where she was working when the attack took place.
READ MORE:
“I went to work as normal”, she says of what turned out to be one of the monumental days in world history, “looking at terrorist training camps in Afghanistan ”. She did not hear about the first plane hitting the building as officials weren’t allowed cellphones and she was situated in a building which - for security reasons - had no internet access.
TOWIE's Chloe Brockett makes cheeky dig at Saffron Lempriere during filming
Almost 3,000 people died in the worst terrorist attack the world has ever seen (AFP via Getty Images)Tracy first heard about the plane when she received a call from the “outside building”, she said in a video shared to her Instagram account, theunexpectedspy. After the second plane hit, Tracy knew it was an al-Qaeda terrorist attack. From that moment onwards she was placed almost immediately onto an anti-terrorism programme - which is still classified
“I often get asked though, how did you feel? We didn’t really have time to feel, what we felt quite frankly didn’t matter, because our job and our goal was to stop the next terrorist attack,” Tracy said. “We were trying to in real time track down the terrorist threat, stop b in Laden, find bin Laden and hopefully neutralise bin Laden.”
Tracy explained the emotional turmoil which 911 brought around and the sense of guilt she felt for the CIA’s failure to prevent the attack. “I worked that programme for quite some time, and in a way I think it felt like a way that I could apologise and rectify the fact that we missed what happened on September 11th,” she said.
Tracy is now a teacher and has written a memoir on her career (theunexpectedspy/Instagram)
Tracy said speaking about the 911 attack is "really hard" (theunexpectedspy/Instagram)She believes there is a “lot of blame” given to the CIA which is “really tough to take”. Heartbreakingly, she added: “I have no other words other than ‘I’m sorry’, and if I could bring those lives back I would.”
“I know it’s not singularly my fault and terrorists don’t just pick up the phone and say what they’re going to do in their attack. There are a lot of things that went into it but all I can do in the future is try to bring awareness to this and make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again.
“I deal with a lot of PTSD as a result of what happened on September 11, I have to live with that guilt I guess. But it’s really hard, and it’s really hard to talk about, and I think that that’s wise because every day I’m living with the guilt,” she explained.
Now a teacher, Tracy hangs up an American “flag of honour” which has the names of everyone who lost their lives on September 11 written on it. “I hang them up in all my classrooms, and I’m going to continue to do so to honour those that were lost.”
Throughout an eventful career Tracy worked as a CIA Officer and an FBI Special Agent. She is now a national security contributor to News Nationand in 2019 released a book called The Unexpected Spy, a memoir with the subtitle: ‘From the CIA to the FBI, My Secret Life Taking Down Some of the World's Most Notorious Terrorists’.
Read more similar news:
Comments:
comments powered by Disqus
