Besides fake identities, it was Williams’ job to maintain the existence of front companies used by G Squadron operatives as “commercial cover” when they deployed on “alias operations,” she said. Her duties Delta Force Boosting included paying rent and utility bills on behalf of spurious business entities used as cutouts, work that often entailed expenditures of her time and taxpayer money that she saw as wasteful. She recalled taking a chartered flight to a small town in Maine simply to check the mail at an empty office. The MST would send people on monthly rotations to a city in Florida merely to be seen walking in and out of a vacant building. They once sent Williams to California with $10,000 in cash to buy a bunch of cell phones straight from the factory no receipt needed.

Another time, a pipe burst in the untenanted suite of a front company in Washington, causing the landlord to become suspicious because the place flooded and no one was around to open the door. Williams and a co-worker jumped into one of the unit’s brand-new sport-utility trucks and drove at top speed all the way to D.C. to deal with the situation. “Sorry,” they told the incredulous landlord. “Everybody’s away.”

Williams’ time in the unit was a roller-coaster eight years of her life. She was expected to wear a pager at all times and be at the Building within an hour of it going off. She juggled multiple cell phones, and when one would ring, she’d have to remind herself which front company it pertained to, and what role she played in relation to that fictitious entity. “In two seconds,” she said, “you have to swap mentally.” Staffers were routinely dragooned into supporting training exercises, and in airline hijacking scenarios Williams was invariably cast in the part of a damsel in distress. “I got shot a bunch of times in the face with a paintball gun,” she wryly recalled. The operators were forever playing pranks on the Cover Girls, packing their desks with plastic explosives, for example, or coming down from the team bays with savage war dogs straining against their leashes to frighten the women who were afraid of dogs. “It was not a professional environment,” said Williams, and Licea agreed. “Having worked in corporate America prior to going to the unit,” Licea said, “this stuff would never fly. You’d be fired.”

Fat people on the support staff were relentlessly mocked. A soldier of Asian buy Delta Force Boost descent was called a “chink” to his face. The boozing in the team bays inevitably degenerated into obstreperous roughhousing. “That’s it, we’re not fucking drinking anymore,” a sergeant major would bellow in frustration. “You guys are out of control.” But the dry spells never lasted long. “It was like they were trying to herd cattle,” said Williams, “or take care of a bunch of children.”