She Spent 25 Years in Intelligence. Nobody Prepared Her for This.

Liz Sherman was at her desk at CIA when the second plane hit. Her husband was inside the White House Situation Room. She couldn't get a line through. She spent 25 years in American intelligence — imagery analyst at CIA, program mission manager at ODNI, and a career at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency that included a 2009 deployment to Balad Air Base in Iraq and a final posting as National GEOINT Officer for Africa. This is the conversation about what that career cost her, and what she built when it ended. The morning of 9/11 from inside the building. The lupus she worked through and told almost nobody about. The counterterrorism conference she had to walk out of because her son had tied her daughter to a tree. The cancer diagnosis during COVID, thirteen surgeries, and the rescue cat who sat with her through all of it — and became a 501(c)3 that sends care packages to cancer patients.