On the cover of anthropologist Katherine Verdery’s My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File, there is a grainy, black-and-white surveillance photograph of the author, taken during a 1986 research trip to Romania. Standing alone in her underwear, she bends down to make the bed in her hotel room, apparently oblivious to the presence of the camera placed there by the Securitate—the Romanian secret police—who had, by that point, been tracking her for over a decade.

MY LIFE AS A SPY: INVESTIGATIONS IN A SECRET POLICE FILE by Katherine Verdery Duke University Press Books, 344 pp., $27.95

Over the course of the 1970s and 80s, Verdery—now a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center specializing in Southeastern Europe—traveled regularly to Romania to conduct fieldwork, first as a graduate student and later as a tenured professor. As an American researcher in Ceausescu’s Romania, Verdery knew it was reasonable to assume that she was being watched. But when she formally requested access to her Securitate file in 2008, what she found was far more extensive than the routine monitoring of a foreign academic. Encompassing over 2700 pages of informer reports, surveillance, phone taps, intercepted correspondence, and officer notes, the file constructed an alternate version of her life in Romania, one in which her scholarly work was merely a cover for her real identity as a spy.

“There’s nothing like reading your secret police file to make you wonder who you really are,” Verdery writes in the book’s preface. Encountering the “doppelgänger” in her file—a woman who shared her name, biography, and image but was otherwise unrecognizable to her—provoked a kind of existential crisis, shattering the stability of her own self-image. She was devastated to learn that people she considered dear friends had informed on her—some offering up relatively benign reports, others quite damaging ones—and felt violated by the extent of the surveillance, which had penetrated far further than she ever suspected.

The file’s unwieldy form only compounded her sense of disorientation: Never intended to be read by anyone outside the Securitate, the pages jump abruptly between different times and places, following the agency’s inscrutable bureaucratic logic. With each visit to Romania, the aliases assigned to her proliferate—“Folclorista,” “Vanessa,” “Vera”—each of whom is presumed to be the true “Katherine Verdery.”

Verdery first arrived in Romania in 1973 as a 25-year-old Stanford PhD student with what she admits was an extremely superficial understanding of her chosen fieldwork site. The decision to go to Romania in the first place had been primarily a matter of convenience: She was interested in the idea of working on the margins of Europe and curious about life in a communist country; Romania was at that point one of the more accessible Eastern Bloc countries for foreign researchers and the language would be far easier to learn than a Slavic one.