Strictly Secret

A three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist tells the story of how secrets shaped her life—from her family’s escape from Communist Romania to her years covering terrorism—in this sweeping memoir that doubles as a political thriller.

Almost before I could talk, I learned there was something dangerous about words.

As a girl growing up inside one of the world’s most repressive regimes, Rukmini Callimachi came to understand the power of observation—how, in the wrong hands, it becomes an instrument of control. In the last decade of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s rule, nearly every man in her family had been placed under surveillance by Communist Romania’s feared secret police. Their mail was opened. Their phones were bugged. Plainclothes agents trailed them to work, and their every move was logged in Securitate dossiers stamped Strictly Secret.

This is the story of a girl raised in fear who grew up and made a career of walking toward it.

From the flooded streets of New Orleans to the scene of a massacre in Ivory Coast to the frontlines of the war on terror, Callimachi trained herself to notice what everyone else walked past—the overturned cabinet full of al-Qaeda documents or the ISIS personnel records bearing the muddy boot prints of those who had walked right over them.

Yet beneath her fearless reporting lay a terror she had never reckoned with—the one that had shaped her childhood.

Here, she braids her two lives into a single, breathtaking narrative, turning the tools of her profession inward to excavate her family’s secret police file, uncovering explosive new evidence about a decades-old Cold War mystery. Unspooling like a real-life espionage thriller, Strictly Secret is a deeply authentic memoir about the secrets that bind us.