OPINION:
On Memorial Day, the CIA holds a ceremony to honor the courageous agency officers who gave their lives in service to their country. To commemorate fallen officers, the CIA puts stars on its hallowed Memorial Wall, which Director William Burns called “a sacred constellation that inspires us to do more.”
The holiday season is particularly bittersweet for those who have lost loved ones in the line of duty. There is no time better spent than with those we love most. But we also mourn our family members and friends taken from us before their time.
While serving overseas in war zones, especially during the holidays, my CIA colleagues and I often commiserated over being away from our families. We not only shared a mission to collect intelligence on the most pressing threats to our national security, we shared a deep regret over being apart from our loved ones.
For our families back home, especially our spouses and children, the separation brought — in a best-case scenario — incessant distress and anxiety until we returned home from serving in harm’s way.
Mike Spann, a Marine Corps officer and CIA paramilitary case officer, was the first American killed in combat in Afghanistan after the U.S. launched Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001 against the Taliban and al-Qaida. His legacy was extraordinarily powerful for generations of CIA officers, who honored his memory by carrying on the noble mission for which Spann gave his life.
Spann, who left behind his wife, Shannon, and three small children, also inspired the creation of the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation, which provides multifaceted support to families of other fallen officers. Working closely with the CIA’s Casualty Affairs Office, the Memorial Foundation provides financial assistance to cover burial costs, college scholarships for the families of fallen officers and grief counseling.
This is the foundation’s sacred promise — “One family, one mission” — to the officers who take on the most dangerous assignments and their families who support them.
My own children know from heartbreaking experience how painful it is to lose a parent. But for children of fallen CIA officers serving on active duty, the challenge can be even more complex and agonizing because they may never learn the details of their parent’s clandestine professional life.
On Dec. 30, 2009, Jennifer Matthews, one of the CIA’s foremost experts on al-Qaida, was serving as chief of Base Khost at Camp Chapman. She and six CIA colleagues were killed while conducting a risky personal meeting with a source who purportedly had sensitive intelligence on Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s longtime second-in-command.
Ms. Matthews’ daughter, Calista Anderson, now works as the events coordinator for the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation. She and her two younger brothers never knew their mother was a CIA operative working on behalf of our nation’s security when she was taken from them.
More than anything, CIA officers serving in harm’s way would want their family members to be able to continue living their lives to the fullest if something were to happen to them. The CIA Officers Memorial Foundation provides that measure of comfort, which enables those officers to focus on their mission.
The support to the families of the fallen is rarely made public and, for privacy reasons, understandably so. But recently retired CIA senior officer John Edwards, who became the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation president last year, has rightly emphasized that the foundation should take every opportunity to be more public about the work it does. Going back to the outpouring of public support that followed Spann’s death, the foundation understands the importance of engaging ordinary citizens who are eager to lend a hand.
President John Quincy Adams is said to have observed, “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”
The Sept. 11 attacks demonstrated how terrorists plotting from the lawless spaces in Afghanistan where Matthews and her team had been serving could target our homeland. Afghanistan is a failed state and breeding ground for terrorism. Transnational terrorists from Africa to the Middle East and South Asia still have us in their crosshairs.
As our brave CIA officers operate behind enemy lines around the globe to keep us safe, let’s be thankful to the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation for helping the families of the fallen to cope with their loss and maximize their human potential, just as their loved ones would have wished.
• 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 Twitter @DanielHoffmanDC.
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