The noted anthropologist Katherine Verdery's latest book, My Life as a Spy, is a memoir written with the help of the Romanian security services. The Securitate carefully saved and cataloged her letters, kept scrupulous logs of her movements and that of her friends, video-taped and photographed her, dressed and undressed, in the course of her days. They followed her to Baltimore to watch her. Eavesdropping agents aided Verdery in reconstructing events and relationships from her long engagement with Romanian society. We should all be so lucky to have such help.

Or maybe not. The book's cover is a photograph of Verdery in underwear taken through a window as she makes her bed. The Romanian Securitate knew no boundaries. They were interested in her professional activities and her personal life. They offered her friends and seducers for lonely nights, ideas and sources for her scholarship. Often Verdery was complicit in this surveillance/counter-intel project. Reading her file, Verdery writes that she appeared to be able to keep little to herself, a personality feature which, she realized, endangered her friends and compromised her career.

This captivating memoir is like none I have read before. Verdery describes it as a polyphonic narrative. In it, her voice mingles with that of Securitate officers, informers, her field notes from the past, and contemporary interviews with her friends, including those who informed on her and former agents who were tasked with observing and controlling her activity in Romania and abroad.

As she observes herself from all sides round, Verdery records how her self-image fractionated into multiple personalities. There was the young, ambitious scholar, riding with hair down on a moped across Transylvania; an autonomous western subject sure of her independence and convictions, there to teach the west and Romanians about their misguided beliefs. As an ethnographer, she played the role of a child and surrogate daughter. Verdery describes how she became a different person in Romania, freed from the enclosing expectations of American society: “I was in some sense the produce to the people of the people I became tied to and of the person being in Romania had made of me” (174).

Reading her 2,781-page file, she sees other forms of herself reflected in the surveillance material. Romanian agents fixed on “Katia,” and “Folklorista” sent, they believed, to pry into military installations, and, a decade later, they drew up a portrait of “Vera,” a member of the Hungarian diaspora with a mission to stir up trouble abroad. They described her as intelligent, alarmingly charismatic, and an opportunist who made friends in order to gain access to knowledge about her target—Romanian society.

Verdery circles her multiple personas and is game to acknowledge all possibilities. She admits that she appears to have behaved much like a spy. Like Securitate agents, Verdery made up code names, tried to disguise her actions, took notes on her friends and acquaintances, and characterized them on a macro level. She made triplicates of her notes and sent them by special courier to the U.S. embassy. Then she took that material home, and wrote it up in the third-person much like Securitate informants, who, Verdery surmises, used the third-person to distance themselves from their betrayals. With this work, Verdery won a good job, awards, and accolades, much like her Securitate officers, often of working-class origins, who profited materially and professionally from observing and commenting on her. In the final chapters when she confronts several former officers, Verdery points out to them how much they had in common. She confesses to a little crush on one of them.

My Life as a Spy has a great deal to offer readers. It provides a running commentary on surveillance practices. For researchers working in intelligence files, this book offers a guide to help interpret the in/accuracy of security officers’ judgements. For scholars of the Cold War, Verdery revisits the totalitarian thesis, arguing that the image of the omniscient, invisible security state was a myth that security officers used as a tool for subjugation. In reality, she finds that most people knew security agents, got along pretty well with their handlers, and called on the Securitate to help them solve local problems. Rather than an oppressive force, the Securitate was a network of relations in which society traded, negotiated, and used in reciprocal fashion.

Most powerfully, Verdery, looking back on her long and successful career, describes how, as she worked and made mistakes, she learned to be led by her subjects. In writing about their country as an outsider, she increasingly let Romanians be her guides. She learned to use her emotions and her multiple biographies, narrated in this text with astonishing courage, as a research instrument. Reflecting on feelings and desires, Verdery argues, scholars can reach deeper insights. The wisdom of that observation is the gift of this book. A masterpiece.