What the CIA can teach us about caring for one another

OPINION:

A few years back, when I was serving as station chief in a South Asian war zone, my CIA colleague Sean visited our town house late one evening to drop off a present for my older son, who was celebrating his fifth birthday.

Sean surprised my wife, Kim, who was caring for our two young children while I was overseas serving an unaccompanied assignment. Sean gave my son a toy helicopter and told him how much his dad wished he could have been with him on his birthday were it not for the important work he was doing for our country with his colleagues overseas.

Kim was deeply touched. Sean had already put in a busy day at work and took a detour before going home to his own family so that he could do something special for mine.

A senior intelligence officer who has since retired, Sean did not tell me beforehand of his plan. His selfless and munificent gesture warmed my heart thousands of miles away. What mattered most to me and the colleagues with whom I had the honor of serving was that life was going on back home as it should.

And when you think about it, that’s the essence of the CIA‘s mission.

Agency officers serve overseas, often in harm’s way, to detect and preempt threats to the homeland. That’s what Charles Krauthammer meant by “forward defense:” Better to deal with our enemies “over there” rather than inside our borders.

Just about everything about a CIA officer’s work life is secret, starting with the mission to recruit spies and steal secrets. Often officers cannot reveal their true location — even to their families. Sometimes they operate in an “alias persona,” which means there can be no contact with their loved ones back home for the duration of their mission.

And of course, they protect their invaluable sources and the sophisticated methods by which intelligence is collected as if their lives depend on it. Many times, it does.

One of my CIA mentors, who was known for pithy axioms, liked to say that “the secret of our success is the secret of our success.” If you do not have a need to know, then you do not need to know.

That need-to-know principle is not only how the CIA protects its secrets, it is also an opportunity for CIA officers to focus on their specific part of the agency’s global mission.

During that overseas assignment in South Asia, my intelligence community colleagues, often in partnership with our allies in the region, delivered some extraordinary counterterrorism successes that helped keep our nation safe. I never expected our fellow citizens to have any interest in tracking our round-the-clock efforts to take the fight to the terrorists. They just trusted us to do it.

There was congressional oversight and the rare newspaper article about a deceased al Qaeda operative. But I found on visits home during the 19 months I spent in that assignment that my family and friends were blissfully ignorant of the counterterrorism mission I had undertaken.

Yes, the work was secret, but it was also true that no one was clamoring to know the details either. People were focused on their jobs, caring for their kids, or just going to a ballgame.

And that’s the way it should be. The best measure of success is when ordinary Americans are able to go about their business without worrying about whether the CIA is doing its job.

So let’s honor the brave men and women patriotically serving the CIA mission overseas this holiday season by celebrating at home with the ones we love.

Let’s enjoy the freedom, liberty and democracy they help underwrite every day.

And let’s never forget that our ruthless adversaries have every one of the fundamental freedoms enshrined in our Constitution directly in their crosshairs.

That’s what my sons and I will be thinking about this holiday season as we remember and express our deepest gratitude to my former CIA colleagues, heroes who are standing the watch on our behalf so that we can enjoy this blessed family time together.

• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. Follow him on X @DanielHoffmanDC.