A Creative Act

Redefining National Security is about WHAT it is...it's also about WHO it is.

This weekend I attended a screening of The Power We Hold: Stories from Women Spies, produced and directed by Cadie Hopkins and Megan Jaffer of Iron Butterfly Media. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

Earlier that evening I attended Stephen Luu’s thesis art exhibit at GMU. His work explored identity, belonging, & healing after coming to the U.S. as a refugee from Vietnam & later serving as a combat medic for 20 years in the USAF. It made me think about the role of art in processing experiences that we carry but don’t always examine.

Those two events ended up bookending an evening that stirred a lot of reflection. As we were leaving the exhibit, Victoria E. Nguyen casually remarked that it had been ten years in January since I left the Intelligence Community.

A whole decade? Rude.

But the comment lit a spark that would grow later that night during the documentary screening. The film follows ten women who served in the IC. Some I’ve known and admired for years (Sue Gordon and Ellen McCarthy among them). Others I had never met before but wanted to know more about.

One story in particular stayed with me. Stephanie La Rue, who served as ODNI’s DEI officer, spoke about being fired this year by the administration for doing the job she had been hired to do. She described the anger and grief that came with losing a community that had shaped her identity and purpose. Watching her story unfold made me realize that ten years later, I never really processed leaving the IC myself. I left and immediately moved into a new job, in a new domain, in a new city. Became a mom. I left behind the people, the mission, and the identity that had defined me for so long, but I never gave myself the space to grieve that transition. But feelings are information. We process them when we’re ready.

Watching this documentary also reinforced that there are so many stories of civilian women from the IC who served during the GWOT and deployed downrange that have never really been told. Not the operational details; those aren’t the point. The real stories are the human ones: the struggles, the moments of doubt, the growth, the identity shifts. The realizations that come only after years of service in difficult places.

If we don’t record those stories, I worry they will quietly disappear, especially when many seek to erase the contributions of women in these spaces. So we want to do something about it. Our hope is to collect stories from our friends & networks and compile them into a book or another creative medium, to preserve the experiences of civilian women who served in the IC during this era, in a way that honors both the work & the human journeys behind it.

During Women’s History Month, if anyone in this community has connections to publishers who might be interested in supporting a project like this—while also understanding the sensitivities involved & ensuring the women whose stories are told can benefit from them—we would be grateful for an introduction.