The Secret Lives of a Military Spy Turned Corporate Spook
Haters wrote her off as a wannabe Lara Croft who wouldn’t get far in the sexist, hyper-masculine world of international espionage. Shawnee Delaney continues proving them wrong.
Night falls over Kabul, Afghanistan, on a hot and dry evening in 2011. Shawnee Delaney gets into the passenger seat of a silver Toyota Land Cruiser, fastens her seat belt and gives her colleague, Luis, who is driving, a wide toothy grin. Shawnee is button-nosed with piercing blue eyes, and her bright red hair is pulled back into a tight, shiny ponytail that curls in on itself, underneath a black hijab that allows her to blend in. Luis drives off the unremarkable compound where they are stationed as spy recruiters for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the civilian intelligence liaison to the U.S. military. Their interpreter, a baby-faced Afghan-American young man with an easy laugh, hops in the back as they head to meet an asset, a high-level Afghan government official who provides them with intelligence about everything from planned terrorist activities to the morale in various government organizations.
As Luis navigates the busy main road, rickshaw flatbed trucks, taxis and four people on a single motorcycle whiz by. Gwen Stefani’s “The Sweet Escape” plays over the radio as Shawnee and her team try to keep the mood light. They talk about Team America: World Police, the latest episode of Game of Thrones and, of course, Homeland, which they’ve watched on pirated DVDs sold in small local shops. As they approach a security checkpoint they believe to be friendly, where the guards had waved them through dozens of times before, an Afghan security officer flags down their car, pointing at their license plate. He motions for Luis to roll down the window, but Luis refuses. This is known as “breaking the seal” and it’s against protocol. The officer becomes visibly furious, and starts screaming. Luis radios for assistance.
Then the officer bends down to inspect the front plate. As he touches it, it wobbles and he realizes it’s velcroed on, a telltale sign that Shawnee’s entourage is up to something suspicious. To make matters worse, the phony plate is from a region with many suspected suicide bombers who are known for packing improvised explosive devices in their trunks; with this oversight, Shawnee and her team have screwed up, big-time, and they know it.
“He rips the plate off the car and starts to scream at all of us, mostly at the two men in the vehicle, calling them ‘wet dogs,’” an insulting slur reserved for locals who support coalition forces, Shawnee tells me recently over Zoom. “Then he starts beating the shit out of the windows of the car with the butt of his rifle. He breaks all the mirrors and tries to break the windows, except he can’t because they’ve been up-armored [made bulletproof]. He walks around the car, slamming the rifle against the different sides. Luis and I hold our breath. We both know that the back window hasn’t been up-armored.”
Shawnee’s heart races and she sits quietly, breathing into her belly to slow her heart rate. Running through her mind as she prays that the officer won’t hit the rear window is the fact that just a few years prior, Al-Qaeda had issued a $1 million bounty for anyone who captured a known Western intelligence officer. Hands shaking, Shawnee pulls out her burner phone and calls a human intelligence contact. He promises to send someone to the car ASAP, but Shawnee knows she needs to buy time, and fast.
“I’m going to kill you!” the security officer screams.
Just then, a truck rolls up and parks itself in front of Shawnee’s car, blocking them in. The security officer walks to the truck and takes something out of the back.
“It looks like he’s grabbing an RPG,” Luis says to the group, referring to a rocket-propelled grenade. “Wait, oh god, there are two RPGs!”
Growing up in the mountains of Santa Cruz, California, in the 1980s, Shawnee was a quintessential small-town girl. She played with sheep and milked cows at a neighbor’s daycare center on a ranch nestled in acres of redwood forest while her parents worked long hours, her mom as a sheriff’s deputy, and her father as a master plumber. She also spent much of her childhood with her grandmother, Marjorie Christiansen Beck, who had been one of more than a thousand U.S. Women Airforce Service Pilots, known as WASPs, trained to fly airplanes during World War II.
“My grandmother was drawn to flying, I think, because she wanted to serve, but also because there was a freedom to flying that she just loved,” Shawnee tells me. “She would glow with this immense sense of pride speaking of her role in the war effort. I grew up thinking that my grandmother had single-handedly won World War II,” Shawnee says. But when World War II ended, the government was done with the WASPs. They were expected to forget about the pilot life, to go back home and be wives. Shawnee’s grandma was a terrible cook, and not particularly drawn to homemaking. “I think my grandmother really struggled with staying home for the rest of her life,” Shawnee says.
Many WASPs, including Shawnee’s grandmother, never got recognition for their service during their lifetimes, but Shawnee had the honor of accepting a Congressional Gold Medal on her behalf in the Emancipation Hall of the United States Capitol in 2010. Then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi led the ceremony. Some of the WASPs, then in their 80s and 90s, attended, wearing their blue pilot uniforms, white hair coiffed and grinning proudly. Shawnee still keeps her grandma’s medal on full display at the corner of her work desk.
But she doesn’t credit her grandma with her current life, at least not directly. Shawnee was 4 years old in October 1983 when a news report came on the television about 307 people, including 220 Marines, who had been killed in a suicide bombing in Beirut. Shawnee still remembers the picture of the bombed-out barracks. News anchor Dan Rather’s tone was solemn, even more serious than usual.
“And my dad … he never watched the news, only listened. I remember my eyes jumping back and forth between the TV and my dad’s face as he slowly lowered his newspaper,” Shawnee says.
Then she heard the word “terrorist.” Her father explained what it meant, but rather than fear, she felt insatiable curiosity. Why would people kill themselves in a suicide bombing? While Shawnee was far too young to consider what kind of career would quench this curiosity, the thirst to find out guided the trajectory of the rest of her life.
When she was in junior high, her family got their first internet connection. Shawnee didn’t use chat rooms like other teenagers, but instead researched terrorism activities. (“Look, I know it’s weird,” she admits.) Her parents, always working, didn’t really notice, as was often typical of a Gen X upbringing. “I lived in a self-imposed bubble. I didn’t have many friends,” Shawnee tells me. Instead, she used learning as a way to escape, stockpiling issues of The Economist and watching the nightly news religiously.
With aloof parents and not many friends, no one noticed what came next either. It began when she was 15, when Shawnee got her first job, at a car dealership, working with a 45-year-old family friend she saw as a “cool father figure.”
“He would give me these Club and Penthouse Forum magazines in the back office. He’d flick through them, as he chewed Doublemint gum — even today, when I smell that gum, it still gives me flashbacks,” she tells me. “He’d open the magazine to pages he’d dog-eared. ‘I want to do page 45 to you,’” he’d say. He raped her during work shifts for a full year. Shawnee believed him when he told her that no one would believe her if she told anyone what was happening. He was well liked in the community and often brought local cops by the dealership. The message was clear: Law enforcement is behind me, not you. Shawnee didn’t feel like anyone else could understand what she was going through. “I’d look around at the other kids at school and just feel so angry. They finished school and had normal lives at home. I finished school and got raped. I was always so alone.”
In addition to the sexual abuse, she started suffering from multiple health conditions around this time. This included Lyme disease, which wouldn’t be diagnosed until her early 30s but which caused brain fog, muscle spasms, and joint and back problems for most of her young adult life. In high school, an ovarian cyst ruptured, and Shawnee was diagnosed with endometriosis, fibroids and ovarian cysts, which she refers to as “the trifecta.” She was adamant about not letting other people see her pain or feeling like a burden, and her suffering instilled in her an around-the-clock work ethic.
When I ask Shawnee why she felt she couldn’t share her pain, she pauses. “You know, everyone at DIA has some kind of hero complex. I’m no exception,” she shrugs. It’s shocking, admirable and even a little maddening the lengths Shawnee feels she must go to be strong for everyone around her. But her conviction leaves no room for doubt. Sure, as I talked to her, there were moments when I wondered if I was just being manipulated like her sources, and whether her charisma was a function of training rather than authenticity. But after hours of conversation, I came to believe in her ability, a superpower really, to protect everyone around her.
Back on the dusty roadside in Kabul, Shawnee and her colleagues are staring at a pair of rocket-propelled grenades aimed squarely at their heads, when Luis, Shawnee’s colleague, begins gaming out the logistical end of a scenario that would make most people shit their pants: “They’re a little close,” he says of the weapons pointed directly at them. “If he shoots that at us, it’ll bounce right off the car.”
Terrified, Shawnee makes eye contact with the security officer, trying to deescalate the situation by showing her humanity through the locked doors. The officer’s eyes narrow. He looks Shawnee straight in the eye, and then slashes his finger across his throat. Shawnee holds his eye contact, then focuses again on steadying her heart rate. More belly breaths. She picks the skin on her fingers and prays that the DIA contact will arrive soon. Her brain moves swiftly through training scenarios she’s practiced dozens of times: how to ram a car when you’ve been blocked in, shoot out an enemy’s car windows from inside your own, establish an escape route, mentally prepare for the worst.
Finally, a man Shawnee doesn’t recognize but whom she assumes must be the envoy sent by her source moseys up along the garbage-strewn edge of the road. He taps on the security officer’s shoulder. They talk. The envoy shares “some b.s. cover story,” explaining how the trouble he is causing them will surely result in a bad outcome for the security officer if he doesn’t let them go. The guy relents, his face twisted with anger as he waves them through the checkpoint. “I don’t think it went well for him after that night,” Shawnee says, enigmatically.
Luis drives the rest of the route to an Afghan government facility where they meet with their intelligence asset and discuss terrorist activity in the region, as well as political and strategic issues with the Afghan government and police. Afterward, Luis takes a surveillance detection route, an indirect path in order to make sure they’re not being followed, back to base. There, still in action mode, Shawnee briefs the base commander and writes up her required report on the meeting: her assessment of potential security threats, the military changes discussed and more. She turns it into the DIA and then calls her mom.
“I did a lot to protect my parents from the details and truth of my work in those days,” Shawnee tells me. This is something that I relate to completely, from the days when I left the Mormon church of my youth, falling into a lifestyle I knew my parents would not approve of. And I begin to realize it’s one of the main reasons Shawnee and I have connected so strongly.
But for Shawnee, this day in Afghanistan was different: She broke down and started crying when she heard her mom’s voice. “I felt sick to my stomach, realizing it could’ve gone so poorly. But at the same time, my shoulders felt light,” she tells me. “I realized I’d lived through that moment where I could’ve died and hadn’t. I felt so grateful.”
She describes herself as feeling invincible, too. Shawnee didn’t question her career choices in that moment because she’d spent her whole life working to become an intelligence officer and spy recruiter, and she loved it. For her, a life-threatening experience was all in a day’s work, a necessary cost of her constant yearning to help other people — perhaps, it dawns on me, so that she feels strong enough to help herself.
During her nearly 10 years of service, which began in 2005 during the Iraq War, Shawnee completed seven tours, including two in Iraq and two in Afghanistan, recruiting spies at the height of the United States government’s Global War on Terrorism and the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
The sources Shawnee cultivated were those the intelligence agencies believed had critical inside knowledge of the strategies and plotting of terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda and the group that would later be known as ISIS, as well as various authoritarian government regimes across the Middle East. Many of Shawnee’s recruits were themselves former terrorists, and her job was to do whatever it took to understand their motivations and convince them to share intel that could help the United States. “This is the fun part about intel,” Shawnee tells me, instantly redefining for me, a small business owner, lawyer and writer, the meaning of the word “fun.” “Figuring out what motivates people so that I can exploit those motivations.”
Some of her assets turned to working with the United States after hitting an ethical crossroads, suddenly doubting the morality of their choices after major geopolitical events such as 9/11. Others were willing to provide intel in exchange for citizenship in new countries, travel visas or monetary compensation that they’d often use for their children’s education or on medical treatment for family members. Shawnee called this mutual exchange of value a “double win.” These recruits were risking their lives by talking though. If they were caught, it could mean violent death for all involved, Shawnee included.
At just 19 years old, midway through college, Shawnee applied for an entry-level role with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and made it through the first round of interviews before the recruiter realized her age. “He kind of laughed in shock that I’d gotten so far and just said, ‘Call us back in a couple years,’” Shawnee recounts, proud of her younger self’s chutzpah.
In the meantime, Shawnee took an admin job in the facilities department at Stanford University, where she worked until September 11, 2001. After hearing the news of the terror attacks on her way to work, Shawnee walked into her boss’s office, where his television flashed one of the towers crashing down, and she apologized before quitting on the spot. “If I know what I’m meant to do, why am I still doing this?” Shawnee recalled thinking.
She applied that day for a master’s degree in international policy studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, then called the Monterey Institute, where she began learning to speak Arabic, determined to become an irresistible intelligence candidate. In fact, she didn’t stop there. Shawnee moved to Cairo the next summer between semesters, traveling through Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan to continue polishing her Arabic.
Once she got home from Cairo, Shawnee applied to the CIA again, and this time they offered her an entry-level role in their Clandestine Services Trainee Program — though they suddenly eliminated the role two weeks before she was scheduled to start that winter after she graduated. But the setback didn’t deter Shawnee. “I couldn’t quit,” she says. “I could not fail.” She became obsessed with proving herself. “I needed to show that I was good enough for the CIA, even if I would have to go a different route.” Shawnee doubled down, applying for roles with other major intelligence agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Defense Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency.
Just a short time after, as she was finishing up her last semester, Shawnee finally had her shot, when a senior DIA official and recruiter came to campus.
Her argument to them? “Look, the DIA needs me,” Shawnee explains, admitting that, in desperation, “I verbally vomited on them.” She wanted to show how persuasive she could be, knowing her ability to convince skeptics would translate in the field. The senior official, Sharon Houy, remembers the meeting even now, almost 20 years later, and tells me she immediately wanted to hire Shawnee.
“In that interview, Shawnee was serious, intense and intent. I could see the wheels turning, making sure she was thoughtful in her answers, making direct eye contact, leaning in, but I also noticed her leg jiggling up and down under the table,” Houy recalls. Shawnee was nervous but also seemed like a natural for what Houy and colleagues call “going beyond the fence,” meaning working in the field rather than behind a desk. A common interview question was, “If there’s only one bottle of water left and you’ve got a long day ahead of you, what would you do with the water?” The right answer is not to ration it, but instead to give your bottle of water to a guard, curry favor, build a relationship and be resourceful enough to get yourself out of a hard situation. Shawnee nailed it.
She got the DIA job, turning down offers from the FBI and NSA, and began working in supportive roles, first aiding the Iraqi task force and then the Afghan task force a couple of years later. In 2006, she deployed to Iraq, where she took her first field meetings. “I was terrified,” she says. But in that debut encounter with an informant, despite her nerves, Shawnee was able to glean just the kind of sensitive information she’d hoped for: details about a secret meeting location of a local terrorist group.
In order to become a spy recruiter conducting full-cycle clandestine operations, though, she needed to graduate from a program colloquially called “the Farm,” a notoriously difficult six-month proving ground for spies in training.
After Shawnee returned home from her first deployment in Iraq, she was invited to a meeting at the head office of the DIA to discuss her candidacy to attend the Farm. “We want to trust you,” the DIA higher-ups told her. “We want to trust that we’re not going to spend a million dollars on your training just for you to quit and go get married and have babies.”
Whereas her grandmother had been forced out of her short-lived career as a pilot in WWII by the government she served and encouraged to go home and have kids, Shawnee got down on her knees and begged, through tears, promising that kids weren’t for her. In retrospect, she is aware of how abhorrently sexist this was, but she was willing to go along with it because she’d wanted this career for so long. And it was just the beginning.
James Bond might come to mind when first hearing about this covert training facility. The Farm is where, three years after joining the DIA, Shawnee was finally molded into a spy, subjecting herself to intensive and often grueling training on asset handling, tradecraft, report writing, terrorist threat response and rapport-building strategies. Prior to deployments, Shawnee also attended additional off-site training where she role-played high-risk scenarios, like racing cars on rough terrain and trying to escape when your wrists have been bound together. “I didn’t have the arm strength a lot of men did to remove the duct tape they restrained us with, so instead I spit down my arms, and was able to make the duct tape slippery enough to wriggle my hands out,” Shawnee says with a laugh.
The Farm also taught her how to cultivate the most powerful weapon in human intelligence: empathy. Trainees learned the fundamentals of interpersonal communication, active listening and how to interpret people’s motivations — in other words, relationship- and trust-building were paramount, and falling short could mean the ultimate consequence.
Many had doubts about Shawnee’s and other women’s ability to recruit spies. “Several instructors told me that between my red hair and me being a woman, men in the Middle East wouldn’t meet with me or take me seriously.” Here, “red hair” seems to be a euphemism for the fact that Shawnee is objectively beautiful.
“People on tour called me Lara Croft,” she says, referencing the often-hypersexualized Tomb Raider video game character and movie heroine, “and combat zone Barbie,” perhaps an indication that her instructors’ doubts about women’s abilities to recruit spies was a bias embedded at the organizational level.
To this day, Shawnee’s graduation outfit, a sailor-style navy blue linen suit from Banana Republic, hangs in the back of her closet, a reminder of her achievement.
During one of her overseas assignments, Shawnee received a targeting package, a classified intelligence dossier containing intel about an asset from a “hard target” country — “think Axis of Evil,” Shawnee says enigmatically. From his file, she knew that this man, whom she calls “The Politician,” might have information about high-level government plans that could help the U.S. bring down a terrorist organization. He had been working with Shawnee’s colleague who was finishing his tour and was supposed to “turn over” the asset to Shawnee. In a warm turnover, standard protocol dictates that the outgoing case officer should introduce Shawnee and the asset to each other, then talk Shawnee up as a capable and competent handler — so that The Politician would trust her enough to continue putting his life on the line.
“My goal was to make the transition smooth,” Shawnee says. “Assets don’t like turnovers because they feel like they’re a waste of time. You have to repeat yourself and [learn to] trust someone new.”
Shawnee, her colleague and the recruit met at a rundown hotel room in a European location she calls “Beach City,” which could be almost anywhere along the European coast, a location she can’t disclose for security reasons. Everything in the room, from the carpet to the walls, was a shade of orange.
“This is Paige,” her colleague said, using Shawnee’s alias, which we’ve changed for her safety, his voice deadpan. “He didn’t say anything nice or try to create a bridge. He just stood up and walked away,” she says.
For a moment, Shawnee looked at The Politician in shock, the orange room suddenly feeling stifling and dull. The Politician shrugged his hands, then let them fall heavy onto his lap. Since all communications had to be in person, the fact that he’d be working with a new officer was brand-new information to him.
“I’m trying to help,” he said, “but I’m so tired of feeling like I have to start over with new officers.” He told Shawnee that she was his third case officer in a year. She apologized and told him she was frustrated with the lack of consistency too. While her instructors at the Farm had doubted her ability to get intelligence out of devout religious men in the Middle East, she hadn’t expected one of her own colleagues to make the work more difficult.
Shawnee recognized that The Politician’s admission about feeling frustrated was a vulnerability. Her training told her that this was an in, so she apologized for her colleague’s rudeness and then changed tacks, asking about his family and wife. He told her that his wife had died, information that wasn’t in his file. Shawnee asked about her — what she liked to cook, how they met, how she wore her hair, focusing on the human elements of his relationship with his wife rather than jumping into the potential information he might have.
“Within 15 minutes, we were both sobbing,” Shawnee says, “him from the memory and me with pure empathy and sorrow for his loss.” Shawnee held The Politician’s hands in hers, as he told her he believed the government hadn’t done enough to provide health care that could’ve saved his wife. He felt betrayed, like her death was an unnecessary loss, largely the result of governmental indifference. What her male colleagues had learned was only that his motivation was ideological, but now Shawnee was learning that his primary motivation was revenge, key information they hadn’t yet been able to uncover.
“I decided then to believe that my gender could be a strength and not a weakness,” she says. Instead of letting her instructors’ ominous, doubting voices control her mentality, she would instead think of her gender as a bridge that helped her gain an asset’s trust. Her ability to use emotional intimacy to create vulnerability gave her an edge that many of her colleagues didn’t have. It was far from the last time she’d utilize these skills to gather intelligence.
In 2011, on her first tour in Afghanistan and six years into Shawnee’s career as a DIA case officer, she received a targeting package for a mullah, an Islamic scholar, who was connected to the leadership of Al-Qaeda’s inner circle. At the time, everyone in the global intelligence community was looking for Osama bin Laden, the most wanted terrorist in the United States. The mullah and bin Laden had been friends, and the intelligence report showed that he had known of the plans for the attacks on 9/11.
Shawnee’s first meeting with the mullah was awkward. They met in a hot and stuffy shipping container in a shabby neighborhood with dusty, pothole-riddled streets. A mini-fridge hummed in the background, and the floor rug was dirty. Shawnee had set out a tray of fruits and nuts to make the place feel more comfortable than the austere box otherwise suggested. Luckily, the sparseness of the setting didn’t seem to phase the mullah. “This guy was a talker!” she tells me.
Shawnee offered him money, but he refused to take it. This was a problem since protocol required the exchange for two reasons: first, to establish a paper trail and trace the value of intelligence when requesting government funds, and second, because payments are known to foster a psychological sense of obligation that leads to better intel from recruits.
Shawnee needed to establish common ground first, but how? He was a fundamentalist Muslim with ties to terrorist activity. She was one of a relative handful of career women working in global intelligence. They were from completely different worlds.
Shawnee did know that the mullah cared deeply about education — as a religious scholar, he had memorized the entire Quran. She also knew that the mullah was a family man with lots of kids. At the time, Shawnee was starting to entertain the idea of maybe having kids of her own someday — unbeknownst to her bosses — but she was still a single woman with no children.
So she made a choice: She told the mullah a story about a local palm reader she’d visited with another source who had predicted that she would someday have 12 kids. He laughed, and they hit it off.
The mullah told Shawnee he was considering defecting from Al-Qaeda because he wanted to honor his recently deceased father, who had moved to a Western country. (Shawnee asked me not to disclose which country out of fear for the mullah’s safety all these years later.) The mullah’s father had been disappointed and angry at his son for his suspected involvement with Al-Qaeda, and while he still wanted an Islamic state, he had also believed 9/11 was wrong. The mullah was still deeply hurt by his father’s disappointment in him, and now he couldn’t even visit his father’s grave, due to the risk that he’d be flagged and detained for suspected terrorist activity.
At their next meeting, Shawnee’s interpreter bowed slightly as he handed the mullah a beautiful Quran with a dark blue cover wrapped in a handkerchief. Shawnee explained that it was a gift from her but that she recognized she wasn’t allowed to touch it and wanted to be respectful. The mullah was so moved by the thoughtfulness of the gesture that he teared up.
“I think that gift made him feel understood and respected as a person and more willing to become a source,” Shawnee says. Despite his strong resistance, Shawnee also needed him to accept the money in order to bring him on as a spy. In doing so, she changed her story about what the transaction meant. “I told him, ‘This money, it’s not for you. It’s for your kids’ education. You can only use it for that purpose.’” This made the offer palatable and the mullah accepted the envelope of cash. Shawnee, too, promised that she would go to his father’s grave on his behalf and share that his son was helping the U.S. government prevent future terrorist attacks, a promise she kept.
“We’d have these nine-hour marathon meetings through the night,” Shawnee says. “One evening, he put a picture of a road on the table between us. He pointed at a tree. He said, ‘Take a right at this tree. That’s where Osama bin Laden is.’” But Shawnee’s interpreter and the mullah were from different regions, and the mullah’s accent made it hard to understand him.
“He kept mumbling ‘Obadabad.’” Shawnee pops her lips on the Os like a bubblegum snap as she says it. O-BAH-DAH-BAHD. She knew that what he was saying was important, and wrote it up in her reports, but her team couldn’t make it out. Unhelpfully, the mullah mumbled and was unable to point things out on a map. Shawnee ran it past her geospatial team, but they also couldn’t locate it. Then, four weeks later, in the early morning hours of May 2, 2011, Seal Team Six killed Osama bin Laden in his compound in Pakistan. He had been in a city called Abbottabad.
“We flubbed it. I still don’t know how we didn’t get that. In hindsight, it seems so obvious to our team,” Shawnee says with regret, as if failing to provide the actionable intelligence that would have led to the death of the century’s most untraceable terrorist sooner was a personal failure. While things are usually clearer with the benefit of hindsight, the sense that she should’ve figured out the location sooner is echoed by armchair YouTube commenters.
While Shawnee wished that she had interpreted the specific intel about Osama bin Laden’s location sooner, she’s adamant that she doesn’t have regrets about the work she did in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite the great controversies that shadow the U.S.’s involvement there decades later. (The majority of Americans and those who deployed believe it was a mistake for the United States to have gotten involved in the Iraq War, one of the many reasons being that it was predicated on the false belief that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.)
Shawnee is, however, critical of what she describes as a lack of support provided to civilian personnel like herself who deployed to war zones during that time. “We weren’t even given quality gear or vehicles, and the water we used to shower burned my arm hairs off, it was so full of chlorine,” she says. Even the body armor chest plates were old and cracked, likely unable to stop a bullet. Once, a front axle fell out of a truck Shawnee’s team was driving through northern Iraq. “The most basic of needs weren’t provided for,” she adds. On top of that, sexism was rampant, and getting good assignments often had more to do with an officer’s gender and their ability to play politics inside the organization. As for mental health services, the only therapy provided was basic screenings before and after deployment.
But even then, those who deployed were incentivized to lie if they wanted to keep their war-zone posts — the very reason people like Shawnee signed up in the first place. “The psychologists would screen for PTSD. If you answered ‘yes’ to questions about whether you were having nightmares, for example, they’d send you home,” she says. (Even though she “never told the shrinks,” Shawnee had a recurring nightmare in which DIA screwed up her cover and inadvertently outed her, prompting terrorists to kill her.) The culture created a sense that suffering was an indication of weakness, a belief that Shawnee had already internalized as a teenager while enduring a year of being raped by her family’s friend at the car dealership.
Once, pre-deployment, when Shawnee opened up to a DIA psychologist about her rapist, he leaned in and told her that he was worried about her past affecting her ability to do her job. “DIA doesn’t want you to crack,” the psychologist told her. Gratuitously, he asked Shawnee where they’d been when her rapist assaulted her all those years ago. When she told him that it had often been in an office next to filing cabinets, they both noticed at that moment that the psychologist himself was sitting next to a set of file cabinets.
“Is that making you uncomfortable?” he asked, straightfaced, nodding to the cabinets. “I told him ‘no,’ because it wasn’t, but it was so frustrating,” she says. “This thing happened to me when I was 15, and now in order to keep my job, I needed to act like it didn’t matter?” But while there is so much that she wishes had been different about the culture within the DIA, Shawnee still loved connecting with sources, feeling like she was part of an important mission and collecting intel. “The good outweighed the bad, and I still loved my work. [To this day] I’m proud of what we accomplished,” she tells me.
Shawnee’s lifestyle was so unconventional that she barely had time to spend with her family, much less to date, though she does casually mention two brief marriages, an admission that startles me at first, since she only brought it up after months of conversation. The first was when she was 21 — “I just thought this is only supposed to happen once, I have to say yes,” she says — and the other was a decade later, to a tactical instructor she’d once taken a class with. “He had a great brain,” she says of her second husband, but soon after they married they both realized that Shawnee was more invested in her work than in him. He was based in D.C., while she was mostly in war zones for the two years they were married. “He’d write me these overly sweet poems about how he missed me, and I was just like, ‘Give me a break, I need to work,’” Shawnee says with a shrug.
As one of the only women on tour, the looks, flirting and propositions she received were endless. “I’d go to the gym where the men on base would be working out, and I’d watch all of their jaws drop because a female walked in,” she says. Shawnee found it deeply unnerving. Her imposter syndrome had convinced her that she wasn’t anything special, but she often felt she was being treated like a piece of meat. “All the coming on was exhausting, and honestly really lonely. I just wanted to do the work,” she says. As a result, Shawnee liked to keep to herself.
Most of the time, that is. Shawnee tells me about one other wartime relationship, though she requested that I not publish the details, in order to protect the interests of generations of other women. “I fought my whole career to be taken seriously, when I was constantly accused of sleeping with leadership to get into training — gross — or fucking any man I ever smiled at,” she laments. “All women in my position deal with this and it just gives the haters and naysayers ammo to say women shouldn’t be in the field.”
Instead, on the subject of romance while deployed, Shawnee leaves it at this: “It was about feeling alive. It’s the intimacy of being around other people who made the same choice to live, there, in that moment, and it’s a hard feeling to replicate outside of a war zone. In war zones, life can literally end at any minute. You act a bit differently.”
Shawnee completed her last DIA tour in Afghanistan in 2013, a few years after then-President Obama announced plans to begin withdrawing from the country. On a cool summer night in D.C., right after returning home from Kabul, the evening before she was set to return to an assignment recruiting spies out of Germany, she stepped off a curb at a weird angle and ripped her Achilles tendon. A friend came to the rescue and fireman-carried Shawnee to her car, but after an unhelpful urgent care visit she never followed up with a doctor, which was typical of her. Shawnee often ignored her health concerns, despite flare-ups from her chronic Lyme disease and endometriosis. Instead, she took some Aleve and hobbled onto the plane.
“I was so mission-driven that I’d neglected everything else,” she says when trying to explain how her friendships, romantic partners, family and even doctor appointments fell to the wayside during the nine years she worked for the government. “My mentality continued to be, Why would I want to bother anyone with my illness? I would put my game face on and then wait until I got home to collapse in disabling pain,” she admits.
From there, things started to fall apart. Just after beginning a new assignment in Germany, Shawnee brought her team a loaf of homemade bread.
“My boss looked at the bread suspiciously and said to my colleagues, ‘Why would she bring this?’ — trying to sow division from the start and insinuating that I had ulterior motives,” remembers Shawnee, who was in constant and visible pain at this time due to her chronic medical conditions.
One day, Shawnee’s boss came into the office, reenacting a commercial for a fibromyalgia medication she said she’d seen that reminded her of Shawnee. In it, she told the group, an old woman hobbles around in pain. Shawnee’s boss imitated the old woman, laughing hysterically and saying, “Ohhh, my fibromyalgia! Look, I’m Shawnee!” Everyone in the room, people who were supposed to be on Shawnee’s team, laughed with her. “They were laughing at me,” Shawnee says with bewilderment. “I started to feel like it didn’t matter if I disappeared. The ops would keep going.”
In October 2013, Shawnee arrived home to her triplex apartment in a converted World War II officers’ club one night after working late. There was no elevator, just stairs, and the pain from her ripped Achilles became unbearable. She realized she couldn’t walk, so she sat down on the edge of the bottom step and climbed backward up the stairs on her butt and hands. Halfway up, she stopped and started crying. Shawnee called her friends, some she hadn’t talked to in years, back in the States. “Please let me buy you a plane ticket,” Shawnee begged her friends. “I don’t want to be alone.” But no one came.
Like her grandmother before her, Shawnee’s sense of mission remained her North Star, but between her failing health and a sense that she’d never truly considered what she wanted for her life outside of her career, Shawnee started to think about what was going to come next. For someone who, by 34, had achieved virtually everything she’d aspired to since she was 4 years old, it felt terrifying. Who was she if she wasn’t connected to the job she’d built her entire life around?
“All I could think was, ‘I’m fucking alone in this world. If I die, no one will know for weeks,’” Shawnee says.
The loneliness brought back a feeling she’d had as a teenager: No one could understand her agony; no one would love her if she burdened them with the weight of all the pain she carried.
“Right then I realized that if I didn’t make a change, I’d be sitting alone on these stairs for the rest of my life,” she says. Finally, the veneer she’d carefully crafted was starting to fall apart.
Shawnee and her corporate security team knew something was up when they received an anonymous tip that a man had been discovered washing himself in the sink of a company bathroom before typical work hours. This, clearly, wasn’t normal behavior at a massive American company. After an investigation, they determined the man was, shockingly, a plant for the Chinese Communist Party’s armed forces, the People’s Liberation Army, who had routinely spent the night at the office downloading and stealing the company’s intellectual property (IP) — valuable information that he could sell or hand over to his government. A new front line in the battle against terrorism and bad actors had emerged, and it was unfolding right here on American soil. Shawnee, exhausted from toiling overseas for years on dusty bases and having RPGs aimed at her face, was perfectly positioned to join the fight in cybersecurity.
In her final days at the DIA, in 2014, she’d been learning similar intel from recent recruits: how the work of intelligence was shifting from in-person to digital. Shawnee also knew that authoritarian governments, such as Iran and China, were relying more frequently on hacking and cyberattacks to steal confidential information, money and intellectual property from innovative companies, many in the United States. She realized that her work recruiting spies gave her a unique skill set she could use to help protect these corporations, which were responsible for some of the world’s most valuable intellectual property.
“Cybersecurity is often thought of as an IT or technical issue,” Shawnee says. “But it’s really a human issue. Social engineers use the same tactics spies use: manipulating people to share sensitive information, even unwittingly, eliciting information from people by building and exploiting their trust. I knew I could mitigate those risks.”
Of her decision to leave the DIA, Shawnee says, “It felt like I was abandoning the mission, but I also felt a lot of relief.” Relief from what she views as a “toxic culture” of bullying, retaliation and loneliness that nearly a decade later she still credits with giving her “100 percent PTSD.” It was time to teach corporate America how to be spies.
On her first day as the associate director of Merck’s trade secret and intellectual property protection program, a recruiter mentioned that Merck’s health care insurance covered in vitro fertilization (IVF). Shawnee had continued to think about having kids but she still hadn’t figured out how she’d build her family, since was still single and not actively dating. The news felt like kismet. Within months, Shawnee began IVF treatments. When a former colleague offered to be the sperm donor, she accepted. Her twins were implanted that October.
Two months before their due date, Shawnee was diagnosed with severe preeclampsia and an intrauterine growth restriction that had made one of her daughters, Danni, start to shrink in the womb. The doctors had to perform an emergency C-section. “Between debilitating preeclampsia and the worst migraines of my life, I was lying on the floor begging out loud for someone to knock me out,” Shawnee recalls. When she gave birth to her two daughters, Frankie and Danni — named in honor of two people from her DIA years — they were just four pounds and two pounds respectively, severely premature. Shawnee lived in the ICU with them for just over a month, watching other mothers move in and out of the ward, some with babies who didn’t make it.
“There was a policy not to keep preemies together in the same incubator bed, but I insisted that Frankie and Danni stay together when possible. Even though they suffered from different problems, Frankie with heart issues, and Danni with jaundice, they were ready to come home on exactly the same day. It’s like they wanted to be together,” Shawnee recounts.
Shawnee went back to work just one month later, despite experiencing severe postpartum anxiety and continuing to cope with the near loss of her daughters. “Eight months later, I figured why not throw in Gryphon too,” Shawnee says, laughing a bit, aware of the ridiculousness of having a third child so soon after the trauma of the twins’ delivery and after starting a new high-caliber job. (This, I now know, is classic Shawnee Delaney.) She gave birth to her son, Gryphon Axl, in 2016, all the while watching firsthand the rise of social engineering.
“Countries like China will send ‘honeypots,’ attractive people hired to work [and extract information from] executives. It’s all with the purpose of collecting damning images and videos that they can blackmail people with,” she says. She rattles off a laundry list of other deceptions — “the exact same tactics I used as a spy” — from fake LinkedIn profiles, phony paid surveys and sham consulting contracts to malicious requests for white-paper authorship, all aimed at soliciting information that the targets have no business divulging. And now, Shawnee warns, artificial intelligence has become a terrifying “force multiplier,” leveraging deepfakes and taking social engineering to a whole new level. “Corporate America is not prepared,” especially organizations “whose leadership and workforces don’t realize just how serious these threats are,” she says. “Hackers aren’t just rogue guys sitting in basements [anymore].”
A few years later, after a brief stint at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Shawnee took a job at Uber, shortly before the company settled with Google’s Waymo in one of the most high-value and high-profile trade secret theft cases to date. The suit alleged that former Uber executive Anthony Levandowski had stolen confidential trade secrets from Google’s autonomous vehicle division, Waymo, before selling his own driverless-car company to Uber for a reported $680 million; Uber settled with Waymo for $245 million and Levandowski was sentenced to 18 months in jail, only to be pardoned by then-President Trump.
“In my old life, my mission was to save lives and make the country safer. Then at Merck, DHS and Uber, I learned how to save companies a lot of money and protect themselves from IP and financial theft.”
But Shawnee believes that the mission in cybersecurity is bigger than the money — it always comes back to the thing she cares about most: “Everything is run by people,” says Shawnee, who, five years ago, launched her own cybersecurity consulting firm, Vaillance Group, where she now employs some of the former CIA officers who wouldn’t have given her the time of day in her early career. “People are your biggest assets but also can be your biggest threats. My mission now is to teach people how to protect their assets from the same types of malicious threats and tactics that I used against them while in the DIA.”
One night as Shawnee and I speak over Zoom, she stirs a pot of taco fixings on her kitchen stove, prepping the family dinner. The light in Shawnee’s voice beams brightest when we talk about her kids. Her twin daughters, Frankie and Danni, are now 9 years old, and her son, Gryphon, is 7. She raises them with the help of live-in au pairs who share Shawnee’s insatiable curiosity about the world around them. Each of her kids has lifetime memberships with Babbel, Duolingo and Rosetta Stone, the language-learning softwares, and between the three of them they’re studying Russian, French, Italian and Spanish. On Gryphon’s most recent birthday, Shawnee sent me a picture of a Rubik’s Cube–shaped cake she’d made for the occasion, casually slipping in that, in addition to everything else she does, she’s also an incredible baker who makes custom cakes for her kids’ birthdays.
“Are you looking for romantic love?” I ask, reflecting on how the last time I’d asked, she’d likened dating to the six steps of agent recruitment: spot, assess, develop, recruit, handle and terminate.
“I love what I do and I love my kids, [but] I am still lonely,” Shawnee admits. Perhaps for the first time, her voice softens.
“My four tours in Afghanistan and Iraq were a high. I miss [the work] every day and it was the greatest honor of my life.” She pauses to stir the taco fixings. “Except for becoming a mother,” she adds. Minutes later, her kids come rushing in through the front door, jumping on her with kisses and hugs. Shawnee brushes Gryphon’s bright blond bangs out of his eyes. She prompts them to say hi to me, and when they do, Shawnee beams, proud and happy.
A couple months later, while I’m on a trip to D.C., Shawnee and I confirm plans to meet for the first time, at a Starbucks in Northern Virginia. On the drive over, she messages me.
“Could we meet at a weird spot?” she texts.
“Sure?” I type back, wondering if this is a spy thing.
“I’m at the ER,” she says, confessing that her endometriosis flared up two days ago and she hasn’t been able to move or eat due to the pain. Canceling the meeting is somehow not an option for her. I would follow Shawnee Delaney anywhere, I now realize, but this time, I gently suggest that we postpone.
“When is it enough?” I ask Shawnee, this woman who drinks life with a ladle, flirting with chaos, painfully aware of her demons, and yet seemingly always able to keep going forward.
“Never,” she says with a chuckle.
Amy Bond is the CEO of Pole & Dance Studios, a professional division competitive pole dancer, pro-bono attorney and author. She is currently finishing her second memoir, Divorce, a Love Story. Her work has been published in Narratively, HuffPost, The Rumpus and The Cut. Amy lives in San Francisco and aspires to own a cat.
Jesse Sposato is Narratively’s executive editor. She also writes about social issues, feminism, health, friendship and culture for a variety of outlets.
Noah Rosenberg is the founder and CEO of Narratively.
Yunuen Bonaparte is a photo editor based in Brooklyn. She’s been part of the Narratively family since 2017.
Shawnee's life and career is fascinating. What a brave, resourceful woman!
Shawnee is an inspiration. Amy magically wove the events of Shawnee’s life into a fascinating story.