Opinion

The CIA moms defending America deserve our gratitude this Mother's Day

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

By Daniel Hoffman Fox News

Published May 10, 2026 10:00am EDT | Updated May 10, 2026 11:28am EDT

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First lady Melania Trump delivers remarks honoring military mothers at White House

First Lady Melania Trump delivered remarks honoring military mothers at the White House

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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........

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