Amaryllis Fox

Amaryllis Fox is a former CIA clandestine service officer, writer, television host, and peace activist.

Before attending university, she traveled to the Thai-Burmese border to volunteer in the Mai Laa refugee camp and worked with the Burmese democracy movement. Eventually, she interviewed Aung San Suu Kyi for the BBC, which landed Fox a brief stint in Burmese prison at the age of 18 but also resulted in the first radio broadcast from Suu Kyi in almost a year.

In 2002, after extensive fieldwork in East Timor and Bosnia, Fox graduated from Oxford with an honors degree and started graduate work in international security at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. There she developed an algorithm to predict terrorist activity under thesis advisor Dan Byman, a leading thinker on terrorism and U.S. security policy. Asked by the university’s CIA officer in residence, Dallas Jones, to share the algorithm with the agency, she began work as a political and terrorism analyst for southeast Asia, commuting between Langley and Georgetown to finish her degree with honors. Following graduation, she moved into the CIA’s directorate of operations and deployed as a clandestine service officer focused on counterterrorism and counterproliferation. She served in 16 countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East before leaving government service in 2010.

Fox has used her coding abilities and international experience to build projects in support of international development and has covered current events and offered analysis for CNN, National Geographic, al Jazeera, BBC, and other global news outlets. She speaks at events and universities around the world on the topic of peacemaking, and her videos about dialogue and nonviolence have been viewed over 120 million times online. She is the co-host of the History Channel series American Ripper and lives in San Francisco, CA, with her daughter Zoë.