More Than Just a Coffee Shop: Ex-CIA Agent Says Spies Use Starbucks to Meet Handlers

In her book, the former recounts her eight years at the Central Investigation Agency (CIA) and reveals some interesting details.

Spies use Starbucks coffee shops to meet their handlers, ex-CIA agent Amaryllis Fox writes in her book "Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA."

Fox explains how such rendezvous were set up:

“He [instructor] gives one [gift card] to each of his assets and tells them, ‘If you need to see me, just buy a coffee.’ Then he checks the card numbers on a cybercafé computer each day, and if the balance on one is depleted, he knows he’s got a meeting...[It] saves him having to drive past a whole slew of different physical signal sites each day… and the card numbers aren’t tied to identities, so the whole thing is pretty secure," the former CIA agent writes.

Fox started working at the CIA in 2002 at the age of 21 and left eight years later. In her book, among other things, she reveals how she negotiated with arms dealers to buy biological and chemical weapons on the global black market.