AMARYLLIS Fox furrows her brow in concentration as she fires an M4 rifle, scours the ground for 'bombs' and flips a car, while evading actors posing as terrorists.

But the 24-year-old isn't on the set of a Hollywood action film – she's a real-life CIA spy holed up at the 'Farm', a simulated 'town' where elite young agents are trained up in secret for six months.

Hidden away on a 10,000-acre site in Virginia, US, the covert facility plays host to a huge, adrenaline-fuelled game of "make-believe" that's dubbed the most "demanding espionage training on Earth".

Defensive driving and torture tips

Here, amid the fake town square, woodland and buildings designed to look like embassies, ruthlessly selected spies are taught everything – from recruiting informants, or "assets", to withstanding torture.

They even reportedly learn ways to kill themselves in case they're captured during their real-life cloak-and-dagger work abroad. And at every step, trainees who don't meet the CIA's standards are eliminated.

The Farm's fascinating secrets are revealed by Amaryllis – now a former agent and a 39-year-old mum of two who is married to a member of the Kennedy family – in her new memoir, Life Undercover.

"We learn defensive driving, our instructors teaching us to flip cars by tapping a spot above their rear wheel with our own front grill and how to respond in seconds when swarmed by armed militia fighters or trapped at an ambush," she recalls.

"They leave fake roadside bombs around campus for us to identify; we indicate that we've found one by pulling over and popping our truck."

While other former agents have spoken out about the Farm, the CIA doesn't acknowledge its existence. It is widely rumoured to be based at the US military reservation Camp Peary, near Williamsburg.

Amaryllis, the daughter of an American economist and a British actress, was just 22 when she was recruited by the CIA, after creating an algorithm predicting likely terrorist safe havens.

Childhood bombing trauma

She had first encountered terrorism aged eight, when her best pal was killed along with 269 others while flying home on the Pan Am flight bombed over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

Then years later, while she was an undergrad at Oxford University, Amaryllis's writing mentor, journalist Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped and brutally beheaded by terrorists in Pakistan.

Horrified by his murder, she recalls in her book: "The more deeply I realise that hiding won't help me. I'm going to be afraid of what's happening until I understand why it is."

For her first two years at the CIA, Amaryllis analysed classified cables from foreign governments, wrote daily briefs for the US President and watched beheading videos to try to identify the filming location.

All the while, her family thought she was consulting for a multinational company.

Then, aged 24, Amaryllis was made a prestigious clandestine (undercover) service trainee and told she was headed to the ultra-secret Farm for six months with no contact with loved ones.

'You're going to disappear'

Before she set off there in a blacked-out bus, her boss told her: "My advice is to get drunk, then get some sleep, then spend some quality time with the people you love.

"Because in three weeks, you're going to disappear."

Who is former CIA spy Amaryllis Fox?

AMARYLLIS Fox spent her childhood between the US and London, where she lived a few streets away from Big Ben.

Her father was an economist from upstate New York who frequently travelled for work, while her mum, an Englishwoman, was an actress.

Growing up with her big brother Ben, Amaryllis recalls how her mum would tell them: "Never forget, you can travel anywhere, just by closing your eyes."

As a teen, Amaryllis signed up to study international law at Oxford University, where in her second year she was headhunted by people she believes were working for a UK intelligence agency such as MI5, MI6 or GCHQ.

At the time, she told them: "I don't believe in your cloak-and-dagger stuff."

But after her writing mentor was beheaded in 2002, Amaryllis moved to the US to undertake a master’s programme in conflict and terrorism and was recruited into the CIA.

Following her Farm training, the young woman was deployed as a spy under non-official cover – the most difficult and coveted job in the field, with most operatives deploying under diplomatic cover instead.

She moved to Shangai under the cover of being an art dealer specialising in tribal and indigenous art. There, she was joined by her new husband Dean Fox – a CIA case officer whom she'd met on her last day at the Farm.

After giving birth to her eldest daughter Zoë in September 2008, Amaryllis continued to go on missions, before eventually moving back to America and deciding to leave the agency.

She has since remarried, tying the knot with Bobby Kennedy III – Senator Robert F. Kennedy's grandson – last year. In January 2019, the pair welcomed a baby girl, also called Bobby.

In October, Amaryllis released her book Life Undercover. However, it had already sparked a storm online after she reportedly submitted it to her publishers without getting official CIA approval, with some former agents claiming some details didn't ring true.

She insisted that she met the obligations of what she agreed with the agency, telling The Times there is "a lot that isn’t in the book".

Today, Amaryllis lives in LA and regularly contributes as an analyst for CNN, BBC, and other news outlets.

Playing 'make-believe'

At the farm, Amaryllis found herself living in a "fictionalised country called the Republic of Victoria (ROV)" where she and other trainees were "first-tour case officers" assigned to the US embassy.

"We each have training names – aliases to protect our identities from one another," she writes.

"But other than that, everything feels real. There is an actual embassy building, with an American flag fluttering out front, on an actual town square with a wooden gazebo."

During their stint at the Farm, trainees, most in the 20s and 30s, attend fictional embassy parties alongside 'diplomats', where they identify targets of interest and "recruit" them as assets.

They also drive cars kitted out with concealment compartments for their notes and embark on long surveillance detection routes in a "cat-and-mouse labyrinth chase" with operatives.

"If we see the same granny with a yoga mat twice on the same street, she could just be walking in the same direction we are," writes Amaryllis. "But see her twice on two different streets, miles and hours apart, and we might have just nailed our surveillance."

Starbucks cards to 'signal' meetings

They also learn sophisticated ways to "signal" a meeting with an asset – such as buying a coffee using a Starbucks gift card because the value can be checked online using the card number.

"If the balance on one is depleted, [the instructor] knows he's got a meeting," Amaryllis adds.

As the months pass, the spies are sent on days-long treks across woodland with a rainproof notepad and are trained to shoot targets with Glocks and M4s in urban-combat scenarios.

"Hit a civilian and we're out," writes the former spy. "Even the actual targets have to be given first aid as soon as we complete our objective or the compound is secured."

She gives an eye-opening account of the first aid training: "[We learn] to cover sucking chest wounds with supermarket bags, duct-taped to a patient's skin as their pierced lung heaves beneath."

But it's not all hard work for the youngsters.

Sex-fuelled weekends

Every so often, Amaryllis writes, the spies get a free weekend, during which they meet up at local hotels, watch movies and "sometimes, most times, we have sex".

For those who make it through the training without getting their asset 'killed' – which results in their expulsion from the Farm – the end arrives unexpectedly in the form of a siren blaring across the 'town'.

"It means the simulation is over. The explosions stop. The interrogations shut down. The instructors playing terrorists and cabinet members get up in mid-meeting and walk away," says Amaryllis.

For some, it can feel like they've survived an apocalypse.

But for all the graduates, it's only the beginning, a practice for their dangerous real lives undercover, where they will infiltrate terror networks, recruit foreign officials and try to make the world safer.

In Amaryllis's case, she'd even carry her newborn baby daughter Zoë, now 11, in a sling on missions to prevent terror attacks, because it wasn't safe to leave her in the hostile nation they were living in.

"I'll be alone, without a safety net, in the most dangerous places the planet has to offer," writes Amaryllis, reflecting on the moment she was handed her first assignment after leaving the Farm.

"But I'll have the best shot at doing what I signed up to do: preventing the most catastrophic attacks."

• Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA by Amaryllis Fox is published by Ebury Press (£20, hardback) and available to buy now

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