A Real-Life Spy Couple

They met on a work trip — to Sarajevo. He was a seasoned CIA agent, known for running operations in Iraq. She was a rising star in the CIA, an expert shooter. Their mission in Sarajevo: Spy on Hezbollah operatives. When a fellow agent was shot, that mission came to an abrupt halt. But for Robert Baer and Dayna Williamson, a new pursuit took shape: love and marriage. Could their union survive the grueling, globetrotting nature of the CIA — or a more “normal” life outside the agency, minus the thrills? We talked to the authors of the new memoir The Company We Keep about their wild ride.

Robert Baer: I was at loose ends. I’d just graduated from Georgetown and was studying Chinese at Berkeley. It was 1976, a tough job market. I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do, and I applied on a whim. It was a joke, really. When I actually got in, it’s like getting into a fancy nightclub: You’ve gotten past the velvet ropes, you might as well see what it’s like inside.

Dayna Baer: I applied in graduate school at UCLA — I was studying social welfare, and the CIA came to the campus to recruit. I’d never been anywhere, except to London; I’d never shot a gun. I just thought, Why not? It sounded like a great adventure. I got the job in 1991.

MC: What’s the wildest thing that happened on the job?

Robert: I once had an abscessed tooth while on assignment in Tajikistan. I learned that there wasn’t a dental X-ray machine in the entire city of Dushanbe. So a dentist improvised, with a wire cord and an electrical box on the wall. He said this “Soviet miracle” would fix my tooth. When the shock raced around my head, it did numb my face, but my tooth still hurt.

Dayna: Once in an elevator in Cypress, I ran into a guy I knew in college. He shouted “Dayna!” I panicked. I thought, Here’s someone who knows me from a different life, a different name. I told him I was there working on a film.

MC: Describe when you two first met, in Sarajevo.

Dayna: I thought Bob was nutty, out there. He drove a lime-green car with a tangerine “Orangina” painted on the side. It was like a billboard on wheels — when we were supposed to go unnoticed. I thought, Did he want to give people a target? In the CIA, you try to blend in. Whenever we would arrive in a new place, we’d find out: What’s the most common car? What’s everyone wearing? Anyway, there was no romance on that mission — we had to concentrate on the job. But we spent a lot of time together, sitting and waiting, doing surveillance. It’s not like I was some Femme Nikita. Usually I was trying to stay out of trouble