It all started last Wednesday night, after the first day of the Aspen Security Forum, perhaps the most high-level annual gathering of national security types: spooks, former spooks, people who rely on spooks to set U.S. foreign policy, people who write about spooks, people who study spooks, and any politicians who want to participate in the forum. That night, after FBI director Christopher Wray had delivered a milquetoast performance on a panel, and after a group of some three dozen national security journalists had sated themselves at Jimmy's, a local steakhouse, I stood waiting for an Uber with my friend Shane Harris, who reports on the intelligence community for The Washington Post.

Finally, a car pulled up and our designated Uber driver, a woman I'll call Gloria, welcomed us in. She was an older woman, somewhere in her sixties, and had a sweet and heavy Hispanic accent. It was all very standard Uber chit-chat fare: Have you been to Aspen before? What brings you here? Then we dropped Shane off at his hotel, and on we went to mine.

“So what's going on with North Korea?” Gloria asked. “What are people saying?”

I murmured something as I dug around Instagram.

“You know, I've been to North Korea,” Gloria said.

I looked up.

“What?” I asked, startled. “How? When?”

“As part of a delegation.”

“What kind of delegation?” I asked. Gloria was silent, driving through the dark streets. It's notoriously difficult to get into—let alone out of—the Hermit Kingdom. How did Gloria the Uber driver manage it?

“What kind of work do you do?” I asked her. “I mean, other than the Uber driving.”

“I'm a person of faith,” Gloria said mysteriously.

“When were you in North Korea?” I asked. Gloria said nothing. “What were you doing there?” Silence still.

“Here you are,” she finally said, and I got out in the dark meadow in front of my hotel, wondering just who this Uber driver was.

The next morning, a group of journalists stood around waiting for FBI director Wray to arrive at this off-the-record briefing, and as we waited, huffing coffee, talk turned to Gloria. She had driven Shane here this morning and asked him about what he expected to hear at the conference. She had pumped another reporter, a national security correspondent with one of the major networks, for information. “I'll tell you something if you tell me something,” the correspondent recalled her saying. She laughed, we all laughed, but it was now leavened with a good bit of alarm. Was Gloria something more than a mere Uber driver?

“We have to tell Wray about her,” said Deb Riechmann of the Associated Press. We all laughed because we knew she was joking, but only kind of. “Being in this environment makes you hyper-sensitive to it,” Deb told me later when we compared notes on our drives with Gloria. Neither of us was sure if Gloria was a spy or if we were crazy, or both. Deb made a good point: “It is strange that the first thing she asks about when you get in the car is 'What have you heard about North Korea?’ ”

Gloria had also driven Shane a few more times, and he was also growing concerned that Gloria was more than just an Uber driver in a mountain resort town. “She was way more interested in what was going on than any other Uber drivers I've had,” Shane told me. “She was like, 'Come on, what's happening, give me the skinny.' She seemed very aware of what was happening here and that this was a very big security conference.”