It has been five months since Spann was killed during a prison uprising in northern Afghanistan. Shannon, 32, has endured the hero’s burial at Arlington, the appearance at the State of the Union, the round of television interviews. But in the flurry of the incident’s aftermath, one thing has been forgotten: Shannon is a CIA operative, too. Before taking maternity leave, she worked as a counterterrorism officer in the agency’s Directorate of Operations (DO), its shadowy espionage branch. The Spanns, who both joined in 1999, were part of the DO’s buildup after years of post-Iran-contra atrophy. Now, “my cover has been blown,” says Shannon. And she was the lucky one.
Uninspired by her job as a law-school professor, Shannon applied to the agency on a whim after seeing an advertisement. She got to know Mike at the CIA’s secret training facility in the Virginia Tidewater–known as the Farm–where recruits learn to parachute, evade surveillance and enlist spies. Mike sat behind her in class. “He made me laugh more than anyone ever had,” she says. After graduation, Shannon took a post at headquarters in Langley, Va., hoping, at some point, to go overseas as a case officer. Mike, who had experience as a Marine Corps artillery officer, signed on for the “special activities division,” the paramilitary wing.
Agency life was an adjustment. Both took large pay cuts. They worked long hours. Mike traveled frequently, returning from one two-month mission only two days before September 11. “Oh! We were so glad he was home,” Shannon recalls. “And then that happened.” Mike called home about once a week from Afghanistan. He always sounded exhausted. The week he was killed, for some reason, he was able to call three or four times. “I never really thought that he wouldn’t come back,” she says. “I never thought that once.”
Shannon plans to return to Langley this fall; “The thing that’s going to be so hard is that I was used to sharing this life with Mike,” she says. In the meantime she’s devouring “open source” materials–books and magazine articles on foreign affairs. She also has her hands full with Jake and Mike’s two children, 9 and 4, from a previous marriage. (Their mother also died last fall.) “Being a single mom with three kids is harder than anything I’ve ever done with the CIA,” says Shannon. And they make the perils of agency life worthwhile.
