For years, the CIA figure critics would come to call the “Queen of Torture” worked at the center of America’s post-9/11 counterterrorism campaign, tracking perceived national security threats while Al Qaeda detainees were subjected to waterboarding inside secret overseas prisons.
Today, the hard-charging red-haired intelligence analyst widely reported to have helped inspire Jessica Chastain’s character in the Oscar-winning film Zero Dark Thirty appears to be pursuing a far different identity: a life coach based in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.
Long after helping run the CIA team created to dismantle Al Qaeda, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky — as she was previously known — is said to be living a far quieter existence in a grand brick Georgian home overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains, where she now offers guidance aimed at women seeking personal direction.
Now 61, she uses the name Freda Scheuer and, perhaps unsurprisingly, appears unwilling to revisit the covert career she left behind roughly five years ago when she retired from intelligence work.
Contacted at her home ahead of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks — the era-defining event that shaped much of her professional life — Scheuer declined to be interviewed by Our News Outlet.
“I am afraid I must respectfully decline,” she said, pointing to years of harsh media coverage and public criticism surrounding her CIA record.
Scheuer’s detractors, who branded her the “Torture Queen,” have accused her of serious failures before 9/11, flawed readings of intelligence, support for harsh interrogation methods used on suspects who were at times later found to be innocent, and misleading Congress about whether those tactics produced useful results.
Residents near the two-acre property she shares with her husband, former CIA officer Michael Scheuer, say she now lives privately and tends to avoid drawing attention.
Freda Scheuer, once known as Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, used to travel the world hunting down threats and watching on as screaming Al Qaeda suspects were waterboarded. Now she has quietly rebranded herself as a life coach deep in Virginia
‘I wouldn’t recognize either of them if they knocked on my door and showed up for dinner,’ one neighbor told us.
Another said they want nothing to do with the ‘spook’ down the street: ‘That lady has too many skeletons in her closet to be any kind of self-help guru.’
Scheuer, who grew up in small-town Pennsylvania and was the first in her family to go to college, joined the CIA as a security analyst in the 1990s. She later signed on in 1999 with the unit tasked with hunting Osama bin Laden – an office founded by Michael Scheuer, the man she’d marry 15 years later.
‘I wanted to be at a place where I could earn my seat at the table and make a difference, have it count,’ she said recently on the Ok Sweetie podcast.
She quickly rose through the ranks, becoming deputy chief of the unit and then its chief by 2003.
Hollywood painted her as brilliant and relentless in her quest to fight terror – but her real record is arguably uglier.
According to government reports, she failed to warn anyone that one of her underlings knew two Al-Qaeda operatives who would go on to become the 9/11 hijackers – Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi – had entered the US.
The CIA never told the FBI or the State Department. Both men were aboard Flight 77 when it hit the Pentagon on 9/11. Critics say the intel might not have stopped the attack but that it could have blunted it.
Scheuer’s history with the CIA inspired Jessica Chastain’s role in the 2012 Hollywood movie, Zero Dark Thirty. Scheuer, for her part, has insisted in the past the film isn’t based on her
Hollywood also turned the fierce red-headed CIA analyst into ‘Diane Marsh’ in Hulu’s miniseries, The Looming Tower
Scheuer has long denied allegations that she withheld the information because of tensions with the FBI.
She insisted she personally hand-delivered the visa information to the bureau, although no evidence ever backed her up. The 9/11 Commission, which was set up in the wake of the attacks, effectively called her account false.
Asked more recently if she felt guilty about 9/11, she shrugged it off, saying in the recent podcast interview: ‘To be honest, I don’t think I even had time for guilt. Wasting time, crying over, you know, it happened… I did my best.’
Even as colleagues questioned her judgment, she kept climbing as one of the few analysts who knew al-Qaeda inside and out. She was determined not to let another terrorist slip through her fingers. Critics have said that determination curdled into an obsession.
Scheuer was part of the unit tasked with hunting Osama bin Laden — an office founded by the CIA’s Michael Scheuer, the man she’d marry 15 years later. He is pictured above in 2006
In 2002, an officer believed to be Scheuer made a point of personally watching the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a man wrongly branded a 9/11 planner, according to a Senate report.
As the first detainee subjected to the CIA’s newly designed ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ he was waterboarded more than 80 times in a single month, confined in a coffin-sized ‘dog box,’ subjected to sleep deprivation and prolonged isolation, and lost an eye while being interrogated, the report added.
A year later, according to Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side, a similarly described officer flew to a black site at taxpayer expense just to watch Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the attacks, get waterboarded.
Her only reason, a colleague said, was that ‘she thought it would be cool to be in the room.’
Mayer later wrote, without naming her, that the officer was behind ‘years’ worth of terrible judgment.’
Separately, per the Senate Torture Report put out in 2014, an analyst who meets Scheuer’s description had interrogators slam Mohammed’s head into a wall until he ‘confessed’ to recruiting black Muslim operatives in Montana.
It was a lie, extracted by torture, according to the report. US agents wasted weeks chasing ghosts across Big Sky Country – apparently on the unnamed analyst’s orders.
Her critics, including Congressional investigators, say her biggest blunder, though, was that involving German car salesman Khaled El-Masri who wound up being drugged, sodomized and tortured for four months at a black site – all because an analyst known only as ‘Frances’ pushed for his abduction and kept him locked up even after signs showed the CIA had the wrong man.
Scheuer is believed to have watched on as suspected Al Qaeda figure Abu Zubaydah (left) and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, (right) were being tortured
Government investigators later insisted it should have been clear he was the wrong man.
While US courts ultimately tossed a lawsuit filed by El-Masri because of national security, the European Court of Human Rights believed his account and slammed the CIA’s rendition program for mock executions, stress positions, forced starvation and worse.
Still, top agency brass brushed off calls to fire her, writing that ‘mistakes should be expected in a business filled with uncertainty.’
She was promoted instead – eventually running the agency’s Global Jihad unit.
Scheuer retired in 2021 with three of the CIA’s top honors.
‘She was rewarded for her work and I have been punished as a victim,’ El-Masri revealed in a March interview with The New Statesman.
Scheuer, for her part, bristled at her ‘Queen of Torture’ nickname and reputation, telling Reuters in a rare 2022 interview that it was sexist.
‘I got that title because I was in the arena. In fact, I raised my hand loud and proud and you know, I don’t regret it at all,’ she said.
‘I never saw anything that constituted torture, period,’ she has previously said, adding that her methods ‘100% saved lives.’
These days, the 61-year-old goes by Freda Scheuer – and is unsurprisingly reluctant to talk about her past life some five years after retiring from clandestine service
Scheuer’s career has spilled out onto the big screen.
Hollywood turned her into ‘Maya,’ played by Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty, and ‘Diane Marsh’ in Hulu’s miniseries, The Looming Tower.
She has been adamant in the past, though, that Zero Dark Thirty isn’t based on her life – and that it took her years to even watch the film.
Scheuer, who was known inside the CIA for touching up her makeup and applying skin care products mid-meeting, opted for the unusual career shift in 2021 after leaving the CIA.
She launched a beauty site – YBeUBeauty.com – in 2021, which has since gone dark.
It has been replaced by a new business, YBeU Life Coaching, which sells ‘certified life and leadership coaching’ to women – touting her years ‘leading teams of mostly women in a high-stakes profession traditionally dominated by men.’
‘Some people think it’s pretty unusual to go from being an intelligence officer hunting terrorists, to becoming a life coach,’ the site description continues.
It features a photo of her leaning over her kitchen counter, coffee mug in hand, staring into the camera as if she can read your darkest secret.
Much like the interrogations she once defended, her coaching, which costs $397 for three sessions, appears to push clients past their comfort zones.
Her Instagram is full of lines like ‘Always do what you are afraid to do’ and ‘Do something every day that scares you.’
She gushes online, too, about her husband, whom she refers to as ‘Mr. YBeU.’
Since leaving the CIA, Michael Scheuer – who has become a blogger, podcaster and Fox News regular – has taken to espousing conspiracy theories and called on President Donald Trump to impose martial law after he lost the 2020 election, according to Reuters.
Scheuer, for her part, declined to say if she agreed with her husband’s ideas when she gave her Reuters interview – but insisted at the time that she debates him on some issues.
Now, in light of her rebrand and quiet life in Virginia, human rights advocates insist Freda Scheuer got away with torture.
‘It’s disappointing that there has been no accountability,’ said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch, who has tracked her for 25 years and worked with detainees tortured during interrogations.
His warning to Scheuer’s would-be life-coach clients: ‘You might ask yourself why you’d seek advice from someone who took part in a scandalous program that undermined the credibility of the CIA, the US and the entire counterterrorism framework that was set up after September 11.
‘That legacy will follow her.’
