The Gathering | FBI
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This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

I'm Rhianna Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. I think everybody thinks, well, these little vegans are just, you know, they're running around gluing locks, saving the world. But the truth was they were burning things down. And I don't mean just a few vandalisms. I mean building the incinerator devices and doing $50 million worth of damage. The Gathering, San Francisco, 2003.

Just after midnight, a car pulls up at the campus of the Chiron Corporation, a biotechnology multinational involved in vaccine and pharmaceutical research. CCTV footage captures the scene. Seeing the area is empty, the car's driver jumps out. He walks toward the building, kneels down for a few seconds, walks back to the car and drives off.

Around an hour later, the CCTV footage scrambles. An explosion rings out around the company campus. Another hour later, a second explosion rocks the building. The next morning, a group called the Revolutionary Cells Animal Liberation Brigade claims responsibility for the attack. A loosely organized outfit, the group has links to various other movements, namely the Animal Liberation Front, or ALF.

They like you to know that they did this, so... And they were proud of it. A month later, a nail bomb explodes outside the San Francisco offices of a nutrition company. The Animal Liberation Brigade claim responsibility again. No one is injured in the bombings. However, tens of millions of dollars of damage is done. All because both companies are clients of an animal testing firm, Huntington Life Sciences.

After investigating the attacks, the FBI concludes that the double explosion at Chiron was designed not just to destroy buildings, but to kill first responders too. The Bureau's reaction is swift.

And the man who planted both bombs?

The bureau eventually get an ID. Daniel Andreas San Diego. His actions mark a watershed in American law enforcement. He was the first domestic terrorist to ever be on the top 10 FBI list. Sitting alongside the likes of Osama bin Laden. But unlike with Al Qaeda, the FBI have a mole in the ALF, an agent who's just gone undercover to penetrate the group.

Which was no small feat. When I was told I was going out to California, they said, well, who do you have under? Who do you have? Do you have any informants? Do you have anything? Who can I talk to? They had nothing. Zero. They said, well, we don't know. It's up to you.

In this episode of True Spies, you'll hear how the Bureau sought to bring down the ALF, one of recent history's most impenetrable domestic terrorist groups. There's no membership. They operate in cells. So nobody knows who's actually an ALF member. And if you make an arrest, even if they're looking at 10, 15 years, they won't roll on each other.

You'll hear about the undercover agent tasked with cosying up to the group, Dana Ridenour. I think one of the things that made me a better undercover than most people is I'm kind of low key. So I could go sit in a coffee shop and I see a group time after time after time and I wasn't going to go up and just start talking to them. And eventually they started talking to me.

And you'll hear about the psychological toll that going undercover takes. You lived on edge all the time. You never had a day off. It was 24-7 of always being on because you never knew when the phone was going to ring. Do you feel safe? You know, will they come after you? As a kid growing up in Kentucky, Dana Ridenour could not have been further from the world of animal rights.

I didn't even know what a vegan was. I honestly didn't. That was just something that was unheard of, like, in my high school and college days. But what she did know about was the FBI. As a child, Dana was fascinated with solving crimes, and visiting the Bureau's D.C. headquarters aged 15 piqued her interest.

Hearing an agent muse on the FBI's motto of fidelity, bravery, integrity, while firing various different weapons sealed it. She wanted in. It turns out the Bureau wanted her too, making Dana a special agent in 1995.

But after a few years working everything from drugs to organized crime, her boss offered her a different type of assignment. One that came down from the Drug Enforcement Agency. DEA actually called over to the FBI office because they didn't have any women at the time and they needed a female undercover agent. Which meant Dana. Because I was one of the only women in the FBI office. And the assignment itself was slightly unusual.

It was a situation where a doctor was trading prescriptions for sex, so obviously they needed a female for that one. Dana agreed, jumping right into the case without any formal undercover training. That was just a short case. It only lasted a couple of months. Dana made several appointments with the doctor and asked for various prescriptions, and soon the proposition came. Unknown to the doctor, though, it was recorded. Dana was wearing a wire.

Within a few appointments, the Bureau had enough evidence. The doctor was convicted. That's what we call quick hits there, when you're not undercover constantly, when you're in and out of an undercover role. But while her first taste of undercover work was only a short assignment, there was no going back for Dana. I kind of was addicted at that point, I guess. And soon after, the Bureau's undercover school came knocking. I jumped at the opportunity.

mandatory for all undercover candidates,

The two-week course is not for the faint-hearted. There were no gaps and no separation, so we didn't get the weekends off. And we started really early in the morning. We went into the wee hours of the morning. So we were averaging about an hour and a half, two hours of sleep a night. And they did that on purpose. They wanted to get the undercover candidates as tired and as exhausted as possible to see how you could think under pressure, how you would react under pressure.

Each night, the candidates are put through scenarios, situations ranging from trying to stay inconspicuous in a crowd to remembering every single detail of a contrived backstory. Most of them were no-win situations, so it was just think on your feet as fast as you can and hope you survive the scenario to move on to the next one. Dana remembers one scenario in particular.

There was one that I always kind of thought was really funny because FBI agents were trained never, ever, ever to do drugs. And we all have clean backgrounds or we wouldn't be FBI agents to begin with. So they used a scenario in a pool hall setting where the undercover was presented with cocaine, snorting coke. At first, the atmosphere was relaxed. It was kind of an easygoing party at first, so you could come up with excuses why you didn't want to snort the cocaine.

But as the night wore on... The guns came out. The course trainers become agitated, threatening the candidates, before eventually... There's a gun to your head and you're going to snort the cocaine. Even then, many of the candidates went by the book and refused.

which was an instant fail. - But they put that scenario in there for a reason. One, to get you thinking, "Okay, I'm not an FBI agent. I'm a bad guy. I'm an undercover, and I can snort the cocaine if I have to." - While the gun was a fake, the situation simulated, and the trainers known to the candidates, the exercise hit home for Dana.

It was so ingrained not to do drugs that that scenario would trip up a lot of people. And also to kind of get you thinking, well, if this really happens in real life, how am I going to handle it? Many of the candidates realized that, in fact, they can't handle it. About 50% do. They wash out of the school every time. And I think it's because everybody thinks they can be a great undercover agent. But when it comes down to reality, it's a lot harder than what you think it is.

After all the scenarios came the psychometric tests, designed to see whether candidates were suited to life undercover. Dana met with a variety of counselors and got some bad news. I tested the opposite of what an undercover agent should be. I tested extremely high on empathy, which is not what you want in an undercover agent. They kind of thought I might go to the dark side, so to speak. In other words, she might be liable to switch allegiances.

But there was another issue with Dana's test results. I tested very high on introvertedness, which is also not what you want.

As a woman in a field dominated by men, though, Dana knew she had the advantage. I honestly think women make better undercover agents because people tend to ignore you, disregard you, don't pay attention to really what you're doing. Whereas a man walks in, you know, especially if there's going to be a suspicion. But I think naturally women make really good undercover agents because they can just blend into almost any situation and nobody pays too much attention to them.

Dana was determined to do deep cover work. And after passing through training, she got her wish. My supervisor came to me one day and said, I think we have the perfect case for you. Have you thought about doing long-term deep cover work? He asked. And I said, well, what is it? Well, her supervisor told her, you look younger than you are. And you look just about hippie enough to pull this off.

Then he asked, "How would you feel about going to California and living amongst the eco-extremists?" Eco-extremists? What on earth are they? Dana thought. Now she was curious. He said, "You need to become a vegan." Despite not even knowing what veganism was, Dana took the assignment. I had no idea what I was really getting myself into.

Dana's first objective was to familiarize herself with this whole new world. This was the early noughties after all. Veganism was still a pretty niche movement, which proved to be full of surprises. I found out it wasn't just about the food, that it was a lifestyle. It was about anti-corporation and not wearing name brands and definitely not wearing leather.

But some were taking this lifestyle further than others, not least the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front . Started in the 1970s and 1990s respectively, both groups sought to fight exploitation and destruction of the planet and animal life.

1996 is when the extremists kind of started building momentum, and they were part of that group that did the Vail Ski Lodge bombing. Accusing a ski resort in Vail, Colorado, of encroaching into wildlife areas, members of the ELF lobbed firebombs at several of its buildings, raising them to the ground.

At that point, in 1998, it was the worst act of eco-terrorism in American history. There was also the big fire out in San Diego that was $50 million damage. And then came the two San Francisco bombings, the Bureau linked with Daniel Andreas San Diego, who swiftly became one of the FBI's most wanted, just as Dana was starting her undercover assignment in 2003.

All the attacks were either directly by or linked to the ALF and ELF. Dana was tasked with infiltrating both. Posing as a graduate student, she was to find out as much as possible about how the groups operated, who the big players were, and what direct action they had planned. I was told there would be no criminal cases, that they wanted to keep me in for intelligence reasons and they didn't want to get me burned.

but she would have few resources to work with. I said, "Well, who do you have under? Who do you have? Do you have any informants? Do you have anything? Who can I talk to?" They had nothing. Zero. They said, "Well, I don't know. I guess you just go out there and work amongst them, try to cold bump somebody. We don't know. It's up to you."

And that wasn't the only unknown. I didn't know that I would be able to infiltrate, and I had no idea how long it would take. I thought, well, you know, it might take a week, might take a month, might take six months. In the end, it took a lot longer. Years longer.

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They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, or a book that they've been reading for years.

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Landing in Sacramento, California, on her first major undercover case, FBI agent Dana Ridenour heads straight to meet her new contact agent, the man who would be her only link to the outside world. Good contact agent is essential. That's your tether to reality is your contact agent. Having arranged her accommodation, Dana's contact agent drives her there.

Then he reminds her of the seriousness of the case. It was the height of domestic terrorism. The 1990s saw a spike in the rate of homegrown terrorist attacks. Firebombs were now a common occurrence, and Dana knew that if the ALF and ELF were willing to burn down buildings, they would likely treat a spy particularly badly if she were caught in their midst.

But the Bureau was desperate. The Bureau needed intelligence, and so that was my goal, was to gather intelligence. Names, plans, tactics. Anything and everything. And the thoughts were, if you get in with some of these people and you kind of rise up in the ranks, then maybe you'll start hearing where these people are laying their heads. You know, we didn't even know if they were still in country. With no intel to work with, Dana improvised.

I started hanging out in vegan restaurants and going to above-ground rallies. But she deliberately avoided speaking to anybody. I'm kind of low-key. I'm not going to go push myself on anybody. So I could go sit in a coffee shop and I'd see a group time after time after time. After several sluggish weeks, one day her plan started to work.

And eventually they started talking to me. Asked where she was from and what she was doing in California, Dana faced the first test of her undercover backstory. I was just a college student out there and I was enrolled in like music class and I was playing guitar. In the bureau, these backstories are known as legends.

I always try to keep my legend as close to my real life as possible. Like in real life, I have one sister. So my legend, I had one sister, that sort of thing. But you know, you have to know your undercover father's name, your mother's name. What'd your father do for a living? Where'd you live when you went to grade school? Where'd you go to high school? That's all part of your legend.

Any slip-ups could blow a case. And so you had to be living in your legend. You couldn't be out eating a cheeseburger and somebody see you

Luckily, the Bureau went the extra mile with Dana's legend. So I had a passport and everything with my alias. On top of a full credit history and driver's license. Groups like the ALF were known to be some of the most paranoid, closed-off organizations in the country. They would even trawl through online databases for Intel on new associates.

But there was one sticking point in Dana's legend. The FBI made me 10 years younger than what I was in real life. Which is...

in the highly suspicious world of the ALF, posed a problem. Well, if you think about that, you relate to the music that was on the radio when you were in high school, the movies when you were in high school. So suddenly I was 10 years older having to think, oh my goodness, I don't even know what was, you know, what band was popular 10 years later.

While researching both extremist animal rights groups and early 90s grunge rock bands, Dana soon found that her disposition was well suited to the case.

even if she disagreed with the ALF's tactics. You know, the FBI, you think of them investigating the mafia and drug lords and people that are not nice people. Well, the extremists are all, for the most part, very nice people. They're educated. And I fit in with the community a lot better than if I would have been one of those loud, obnoxious people that have to take over a room. Hi there.

At a rally protesting the annual dolphin slaughter in Japan, Dana spots an opportunity. Hearing a woman nearby who also has a southern US accent, she approaches. "Where are you from?" Dana asks. "South Carolina," the woman replies. "And you?" "Kentucky." Chatting on and off throughout the rally, Dana learns more about her fellow southerner. Called Savannah, she's a college student new to the ALF cause, just like Dana.

The two hit it off. She and I got along really well. Also new in town, Savannah soon becomes a close friend. You know, as good of friends as you can when you're lying to everybody. Within a few more weeks of hanging out at vegan cafes and rallies, Dana had established a new social circle. Her cell phone started ringing. You want to go to the movies with us? You want to hang out? Let's go eat dinner.

Dana saw she was becoming part of the community. And it made it a much natural transition into friendships when I wasn't running around chasing them, following them, saying, pick me, pick me, I want to be in your group. She relayed her progress back to her contact agent.

This being my first long-term case, I didn't, you know, I kind of relied on them. I was like, is this good? And they're like, oh, no, it's great. It's really great. You're doing a great job. Just keep going, keep going, keep going. But Dana was starting to struggle. It is not like television. It is not like Hollywood. It's the opposite of that, in fact. It's very lonely. But it also takes a huge psychological toll on you. I remember one time, it was my actual birthday, and

And my phone didn't ring. And I was sitting on the couch feeling sorry for myself because nobody called me. Nobody had my phone number. And when my undercover birthday rolled around, of course, all the targets showed up and they're like, hey, let's go party. Let's go. So you start to think to yourself, well, maybe these are really my friends. You know, it is really hard to differentiate sometimes reality from from work. And yet Dana was starting to gain traction in the movement.

Savannah introduces her to more and more targets.

And for the most part, they're driven. They're very goal-oriented. They were musicians or writers. They were very creative because I think that kind of comes with the territory. But also tattoos and piercings, that's kind of a way of life too in the movement. One of the new introductions is Savannah's boyfriend, Nick. Dana's contact agent runs a background search and what comes back makes Dana's heart drop.

He's got an extensive criminal record, particularly for assault. Dana feels the pressure of her situation reach fever pitch. I feel like I'm losing my mind. But still, she was making progress. They taught me how to encrypt, so I knew how to encrypt and I knew how good their encryption was.

Eventually, other officers in the FBI were consulting her for intel. And say, hey, we're thinking of doing a search warrant. What am I going to find? Often they wanted to confiscate activists' computers, which Dana advised against. And I said, look, you'll never get

As she goes deeper into the case, though, Dana finds that much of the intel the Bureau really wants isn't forthcoming.

Getting involved in direct action like firebombing was even more difficult than Dana had imagined. That's the other thing is the security culture, they don't talk about anything that they're going to do. And if you're part of the group, say there's three or four of you that's going to go do something, the only people that know about that direct action are those three or four people that are going to be doing it. They don't share it with anybody. And you also know that if you do a direct action together, then you will never ever talk about it again.

because they know that the police use that. The Bureau did start getting some arrests, though, all thanks to scraps of intel Dana gleaned. There were a couple of guys that I knew they were traveling. So, yeah, I passed on that information. Hey, this is the car they're driving. This is the tag number they have. We know they're coming into your area. We're not exactly sure what the target is.

Stopping the car, two FBI agents find bomb-making equipment, burglary tools, and one ready-made incendiary device. Luckily, they were picked up along the way. And the FBI's number one domestic terrorist target? The man who blew up the Chiron Corporation and the Nutrition Company buildings in San Francisco, Daniel Andreas Sandiego.

That was one of the things I was really after, was trying to find his whereabouts. But nothing concrete. The group's security culture was too tight. That's one of the reasons why they're so hard to arrest. I mean, they're good. They work in cells. They don't tell anybody. It is strictly a need-to-know basis. So I didn't have a lot of information on the targets. Dana went on gathering as much intel as possible for four years.

The fact that it took four years was a good thing because that showed that I had gotten in with the group and I had built some relationships. Which required a heroic level of patience from the FBI. Luckily, the Bureau did not rush me. I thought that they were going to because they're notorious about saying, oh, take your time, but then what do you have for me today?

But they did let me do it my way. But then, in 2007, the Bureau's patients ran out overnight. With the FBI, it's the flavor of the month. It's where the money is going to go. And when I was put under, it was the height of domestic terrorism. And it was DT, DT, let's put all of our money into domestic terrorism. Well, then it changed. International terrorism became the flavor of the month.

Frustrated at the lack of progress in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the U.S. intelligence community redirected more and more resources to that end, which meant Dana got some bad news. They just decided that they didn't need to put the money on our case and it was just closed overnight. It was like, okay, pack up, go home.

What's more, the FBI's number one target in the movement, Daniel Andreas San Diego, had vanished. There was talk that he was in Germany. There was talk that he was in Costa Rica. The Bureau had tracked him to downtown San Francisco a month after the second bombing, but San Diego spotted them. Parking his car on a side street, he descended into the metro network and was gone, the FBI suspecting he wielded a disguise to escape the area.

Having invested four years of her life on the case, Dana was shocked. But still, she had work to do, not least make incredible excuses to friends like Savannah. I had told them that I had a boyfriend and that he lived in Florida and that I missed him. And that when I got out there, I told them we'd broken up. So I told them we'd gotten back together. And so I was moving back to Florida to move back in with my boyfriend.

Dana realized her contacts, her targets, were the only people she had had any day-to-day interaction with for four years. So you start to think to yourself, well, maybe these are really my friends, you know? It's crazy to say that, I know, but when you're in the middle of it, it is really hard to differentiate sometimes reality from work.

Soon after leaving four years of a double life behind, though, Dana gets a lifeline. Yeah, they closed our case up in Northern California, but then Southern California was still having a lot of problems with the extremists. It was less than a year later when they had called and said, we need you out there. Dana signed up immediately.

But on one condition. In the intervening months, she had struck up a relationship with a fellow undercover agent while on another case in the Virgin Islands. He should be part of the operation too. So we went to the FBI and we said, hey, look, we know this is a little different, but how would you feel about a romantically involved couple playing a couple undercover? And there were people who thought it was a great idea. And there was also people in the bureau that said that's a terrible idea. It's

Seeing that it could work, though, Dana's supervisor agreed. It worked out perfect because I had this boyfriend that I had gone to live with at the end of the first case, so it made sense that I would be moving back and I would be bringing the boyfriend with me. Shortly after that, Dana was back in California, this time in Los Angeles, where she and her partner Bill hit the ground running, picking up the threads from her Northern California work.

Using the same tactics as before, frequenting vegan hangouts, attending rallies, Dana and Bill began connecting with the LA cell, who cautiously welcomed them into the group after doing some due diligence.

It wasn't long before Dana and Bill received a stunning offer. But that's not all. They added.

Anytime you're in terrorism, whether it's domestic or international, and you hear the word camp, the ears perk up so you know, okay, this is something serious. Dana and Bill relay the news to their case supervisor. And they're like, we really can't pass this up.

The supervisor lays out the risks involved. It was going to be kind of a situation that could be dangerous because we weren't going to have people covering us like we would normally have in the States. So if anything went bad, we were on our own and we knew we were on our own. Then he asks them directly. You really ready to put your life on the line to do this when, you know, we're going to be hanging out there with no backup? Absolutely, Dana and Bill declare. We knew everything.

We were in deep. We knew that they trusted us. We could get so much good intelligence out of this, as well as, you know, what they're going to be bringing back to the United States to possibly do once they get back here. The camp's name? The Gathering.

You had to be pretty serious into the movement to be able to go to the gathering. Because you're not going to ask somebody to travel to another country with you to go to a training camp to learn how to do the stuff that they teach at the gathering, you know, which is how to

get by security devices, how to do recon, how to build an incinerator device, where to place incinerator devices. All that kind of stuff is kind of what you learn at these camps. In addition to how to protect your computer, how to do encryption, how to recruit. And so Dana, Bill and several others from the LA cell fly to Amsterdam. The gathering awaits.

And basically it's a huge animal rights get-together where they stay in an anarchist camp in tents out in the middle of nowhere. There they pick up a trove of intelligence on tactics, direct action plots and most importantly, people.

The exposure to all these other animal rights people from all over the world. I mean, there are people from every country. There were, you know, Germany and France and Sweden. Every country almost was represented at the gathering. Learning everything from bomb building to cell compartmentalization, Dana and Bill get most of it on tape, wearing a wire for much of the trip. Back in the U.S., they hand over a pile of evidence to the FBI.

Over the next few months, many arrests are made for everything from arson and burglary to bomb plots. One guy ended up doing five years for an arson. They found his DNA on a cigarette butt that he lit the device with.

The Bureau even managed to track down the activists responsible for the Vail Ski Lodge firebombing a few years previous. Each was given at least five years' prison time. The cases had a huge impact on the movement. They didn't get a slap on the wrist. You started to see the numbers dropping because of the impact that we had picking off people here and there. Not long after, back in the States, Dana and Bill attended another rally.

In Washington, D.C., it was part of the largest annual animal rights conferences in America, and the pair expected it to be another potential treasure trove of intel. We just felt like this was the perfect opportunity that if we were going to gather criminal information and criminal evidence, this was going to be it. This is when they were going to start asking us to do some direct action.

But that's not how it panned out. We walked in and we got the cold, cold, cold shoulder. I mean, we knew something was not right. Dana and Bill tried to salvage the situation. I mean, and we tried to get people to talk to us and tried to get people to talk to us. But after a few minutes, a crowd surrounded them. When they said they knew that we were either working for the police or we were the police.

The nightmare for any undercover agent was happening before Dana's eyes. The ALF had discovered that Dana was at best not who she said she was, at worst actively spying against them. And given the FBI ranked the ALF as the number one domestic terrorist threat in the country, she was not prepared to wait and see how they would react.

It was a very ugly situation and we had to get out of there pretty quick. Dana and Bill made a dash for the emergency exit, ran back to their car and floored it. Called our case agent and said something bad, very, very bad has happened. We don't know what it is, but you need to find out what has happened. Which didn't take long.

He made some calls and picked us up and he said, "There's been a Freedom of Information Act and it's gone out to 200 people and your target from Sacramento was one of them." Savannah. Dana could hardly believe it. Her contact agent went on. There was an attorney that filed about 200 Freedom of Information Acts on behalf of about 200 activists at the time.

The movement wanted to know what the FBI had on them, he says. And when that comes to the headquarters, they look to see if the case is still open. But the bureau clerk looked at the wrong case, Dana's Northern California case. Seeing that it was now closed, he simply released the information. A lot of it was single source information. In other words, only one person had provided the intel, much of which only Dana could have known.

And Savannah, she was the person that put two and two together, and all of a sudden she realized, well, I know this person, I know exactly who this is, and I know she's living in L.A. So Savannah contacted the L.A. cell. And said, I don't know if she's a cop, I don't know if she's FBI, I don't know if she's a snitch, but she's definitely not who she says she is. Just like that, after years undercover, Dana was burned alive.

Despite this, Dana's time undercover had seen the U.S. eco-terrorist movement largely dismantled.

You took down the 11 people that did $25 million worth of damage over the course of 17 different arsons. I think that makes a huge difference. And I think the other people in the movement start to look at that and say, wow, those people got real time. They're going to jail for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. I don't really want to do that. People started saying, you know, maybe I can fight this battle. Maybe I can save animals a different way.

And what about Daniel Andrea San Diego, the man whose 2003 bombings put him on the FBI's most wanted list as the first domestic terrorist? Well, he's still on the list. I passed on all the information that I had to the Bureau, but yeah, he's still out there somewhere.

A few years later, Dana Ridenour retired from undercover work. I had gone back to undercover school as a role player, and I always told the candidates, look, people, if the hair on the back of your neck stands up, it's doing it for a reason. Back up. Don't do what you're about to do. And I started to feel like the hair on the back of my neck started standing up. So at that point, I thought...

Am I the person who's going to take my own advice or am I the person that's going to be stupid? I got in the car, I drove back to my office and I told my supervisor, you know, I'm six months away from retirement. I'm done with undercover work. I'm done. I just feel like I did my duty. I've done more undercover work than most of the agents we have. And it was time for me to hang up my undercover shoes, so to speak.

Now a fiction writer, Dana's put many of her experiences into her novels, the Lexi Montgomery series. I wrote the books to begin with as I wanted to show the psychological toll that working undercover actually takes. I'm Rhiannon Needs. Next week, hear the story of the spy with 29 names, Agent Garbo.