At 21 years old, Amaryllis Fox was recruited into the CIA.

By 22, she was one of the youngest female officers assigned to “non-official cover,” which means she conducted operations abroad but had no diplomatic protections as part of the most top-secret unit at the Agency.

Fox was assigned to operations around counter-terrorism, which means she was sent to infiltrate terrorist networks in remote areas of the Middle East and Asia. When she was invited to join the CIA’s “Clandestine Service” unit, she says it’s “the scariest invitation I’ve ever been given and the one invitation I’ve most wanted to receive.”

In her memoir, Life Undercover, Fox writes, “I got into this business to understand the people who attacked us, so I could make them stop. With this single letter, I might finally have the chance to meet them face-to-face.”

The work was emotionally grueling. When she is assigned to cover Iraq, her first task is to watch the same beheading video a hundred times in a row, focusing on a different grid square of the image each time to note any over-looked clue it might give to the location of the crime.

Although Fox was trained how to use a Glock, how to get out of flexi-cuffs while locked in the trunk of a car, and how to withstand torture, the bulk of her work was focused on the most simple skill of all: Listening with intent.

Her work required her to meet with dangerous arms dealers and people who wanted to see Americans dead, but she had to put all of that aside for a period of time. She learned that in order to extract information from her counterpart, she first had to humanize him — not as an arms dealer, but as a fellow parent, for example.

“The only real way to disarm your enemy is to listen to them,” she says. “If you hear them out, if you’re brave enough to really listen to their story, you can see that more often than not you might’ve made some of the same choices if you’d lived their life instead of yours.”

I was surprised to find out that there’s a lot we can learn from the work of a CIA agent. After reading this dossier, you’ll walk away with practical tools around empathy, conflict resolution, and authenticity.

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