"Was it hard to be a CIA officer with all of the challenges and change that
entailed? Yes. Scary? Of course. But if I was going to fulfill my life
mission, I had to conquer my instinctual tendency to freeze in place. Fear
would get me nowhere. Faith, however, would take me to places I could never
have imagined."

—Michele Rigby Assad, Breaking Cover: My secret life in the CIA and what it
taught me about what's worth fighting for

Grab a cup of coffee or tea and settle in, because this weeks guest is a
fascinating one, a one-of-a-kind woman I'm lucky to call a friend. Michele
Assad was a self-described "sweet, faith-based southern girl" in high
school, the last you'd expect to become an international undercover agent
for the CIA, interrogating terrorists while stationed at war zones across
the Middle East. But that's exactly what she did for ten years with her
husband in a real-life Mr. and Mrs. Smith situation.

In this conversation we dive into what it was like to work as a woman in
interrogation rooms even when everyone told her she'd only succeed behind
the scenes doing paperwork; the role of faith in Michele's career, how she
honed her skills around intuition and reading body language, and what it's
like for her to "come out" and try to build a public-facing platform after
so many years of being required to keep her entire life secret.