Ten years ago on Mother’s Day, I was serving as a CIA station chief in a South Asian war zone. Many of us were married with kids, some of them quite young. We often commiserated over being apart from the families we loved and found some solace in being deployed together behind enemy lines on a sacred mission to protect our country from terrorist threats. What little downtime we had was usually filled with stories of our children back home, which our spouses dutifully relayed to us. But that never made up for missing our children’s milestones, celebrating holidays together, or watching them compete on the sports field.
A number of the female officers serving in our station had children too young to understand their moms’ careers or what exactly they were doing overseas. All they knew was that Mom was far away from home and would return occasionally for short visits over the course of her tour of duty. Even one year apart seemed like an eternity since it was such a large percentage of the years they had lived on this earth.
Mother’s Day is supposed to be the day when dads and children honor moms and motherhood with a celebratory family meal, flowers and homemade greeting cards.
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When Mom is deployed overseas with the CIA, the best the family could hope for might be an occasional FaceTime conversation if the internet happened to be up and running. The CIA’s work is secret, so rarely do children know where Mom really works. They might have been told she is doing business for an international company or working for some other government agency. Certainly, Mom would never tell them anything about her spy job, such as how she had spent her day holding a high-threat meeting fully kitted out with a Glock, M4 and body armor to meet a source with access to a terrorist group.
Or how she debriefed a source with access to intelligence on an Al Qaeda network seeking to do us harm.
Or how she spent the morning reviewing trauma first aid procedures and practicing marksmanship before driving across the country to meet with host-government counterterrorism officials.
Or how she had to brief the CIA director and the White House in a secure video teleconference call late into the night.
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Until they were teenagers, our sons never really had any understanding of what it meant that their mom, my late wife, Kim, was a CIA disguise technician who cloaked up CIA officers so they could recruit spies and steal secrets without being spotted by the opposition. All they knew was that Mom made the best homemade pancakes and waffles; snuggled them before they went to bed; comforted them when they were sad; healed them when they were sick; gave them copious amounts of Easter candy and Christmas presents; and planned the coolest birthday parties. Perhaps the only clue to Kim’s clandestine work was in the exquisite Halloween costumes she created for our sons, who collected heaps of candy from our duly impressed neighbors.
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But celebrating Mother’s Day while Mom is deployed overseas can also be especially transformative for children, who perhaps not in the moment but over time come to appreciate their mother’s patriotism, sacrifice, bravery and contribution to our national security.
The late Charles Krauthammer poignantly highlighted the necessity of a robust, forward-deployed U.S. presence to detect and preempt overseas threats before they are visited upon our shores. Sept. 11 demonstrated how terrorists plotting from ungoverned space, especially in the South Asian region where I had the honor of serving my last overseas assignment, could reach our homeland despite the geographic separation that once gave us a unique measure of security.
Mom is an undercover CIA officer on the front lines in defense of our grateful nation. Now that’s what being a role-model parent juggling work and family is all about.
So on this Mother’s Day, let’s all spend a few moments in appreciation for the moms who are separated from their families while serving a righteous U.S. government mission overseas, even if we do not have the requisite security clearance to know exactly what that mission might involve or how dangerous it is. And let’s all pray for every mom’s safe return home, where her family awaits her with open arms and tears of joy.
