Reviewed by: My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File by Katherine Verdery Meghanne Barker Katherine Verdery, My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. 344 pp. Katherine Verdery introduces My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File as a "polyphonic" work. Indeed, it masterfully interweaves Verdery's voice at the moment of writing, that of herself during her fieldwork in the 1970s and 1980s, and the voice of the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, who were surveilling her throughout her research. My Life as a Spy works through Verdery's many identities—those produced by the secret police and those that emerge as she changes over time. She shows how the intimate friendships made in her fieldwork profoundly transform who she is and have important implications for others, ultimately revealing that the preoccupation of the Securitate with whether or not she was a spy was a less preposterous notion than she originally expected. By reading her Securitate file and working through it with many who appear within it, Verdery finds that, in fact, ethnography and spying have much in common. A rigorous scholar through and through, even in her autoethnography, Verdery could not be accused of navel gazing. She frequently relates her own encounter with her file to others' accounts of the topic, such as Sheila Fitzpatrick's A Spy in the Archives (2015) or Timothy Garton Ash's The File: A Personal History (1998). Nonetheless, My Life as a Spy has the ability to continually humble the nascent ethnographer with the realization or reminder that only an extraordinary field worker would have achieved such a file as Verdery's. The archive is no less than 2,781 pages, beginning with her first visit as a graduate student in 1973, when a 25-year-old Verdery on a motorbike accidentally goes down a road she doesn't know is forbidden [End Page 1641] to her, a mistake that has lasting repercussions. The file follows her into the 1980s, when she gets herself into new trouble by beginning her monograph with jokes reflecting on ethnic relations that were not hers to retell, and by having a suspiciously Hungarian-seeming name. These accounts of Verdery's fieldwork offer instruction to the young anthropologist, but Verdery recounts these more in order to help the reader understand the repercussions they had for the Romanian secret police's beliefs about her. Stylistically, the book is consistently engaging, mixing humor, pathos, and acute political commentary. Verdery expertly blends the intrigue of the secret police file with painfully honest reflections on the complexity of intimate relations in the field. She makes herself vulnerable, while always pushing toward a rigorous analysis of her own conduct and its consequences. The book is divided into two parts: "Research under Surveillance" and "Inside the Mechanisms of Surveillance." Structurally, the organization of the first chapters into decades (with Chapter 1 focusing on the 1970s and Chapter 2 on the 1980s) seems less elegant than the rest of the book. However, the split between decades aligns with a number of differences: Cold War tensions increased; Romania's World Bank loan led to severe austerity measures on the local population; Verdery shifted field sites; and, moreover, her position within the community changed with the publication of her controversial first book. These issues were all interconnected to the Securitate's impressions of her and the actions taken against her and her associates. In later chapters of Part II, "Reflections" and "Revelations," Verdery works to understand how reading her file revealed who was informing on her, ultimately allowing her to realize that her actions not only motivated reactions from the Securitate surveilling her, but that the Securitate's interest in her had far more profound consequences for those around her than she ever imagined. By the end of the book, having worked through her file and having sat down with friends who informed on her and even a few Securitate officers involved in her surveillance, Verdery observes that these latter—the Romanian secret police—were not the invisible, aloof specters she had imagined but were in fact enmeshed in a complex...