Convention Lectureship

When Tracy Walder enrolled at the University of Southern California, she never thought that one day she would offer her pink beanbag chair in the Delta Gamma house to a CIA recruiter, or that she’d fly to the Middle East under an alias identity. Graduating with a history degree, she would spend the next four years as a covert operative for CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, assuming aliases, thwarting terrorist attacks, and debriefing terrorists at black sites.

After the CIA, she went on to become one of the few women to work on the operations side of both the CIA and FBI, serving as a Special Agent at the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office and specializing in Chinese counterintelligence operations, specifically the Tai and Chi Mak case, profiled on CNN and in The New Yorker. In a single year, Walder worked on cases involving cybercrime, fraud, and even helped take down one of the most notorious foreign spies ever caught on American soil.

Her book, The Unexpected Spy: My Secret Life Chasing Down Some of the World’s Most Notorious Terrorists, candidly details her fascinating real-life story as a young woman in special operations, from hunting terrorists in the CIA to training for the FBI. Following her time at the CIA and FBI, Tracy became a teacher and created a course on national security and foreign policy for young women. Currently, she works as a teacher and adjunct professor of criminal justice and terrorism.

Walder sits on the board of directors of Girl Security, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization increasing the representation of women in national security through education. She also sits on the board of Chapman University’s Atallah College of Education and the Highland Park Education Foundation. Walder earned her degree in history from the University of Southern California and her Master’s in education from Chapman University.

Read Tracy’s complete biography on her webpage here.