What the deputy director of public affairs at the Central Intelligence Agency learned about storytelling amid secrets.
Meredith Cavan is founder of Brightchord Strategies.
I once sat in a room filled with security officers, lawyers and counterintelligence professionals debating a story that was about to break.
The reporting was accurate. The story would be embarrassing. And it was going to publish whether we liked it or not.
Around the table, every argument was made for staying silent: classification concerns, operational sensitivities, reputational damage and security risks. Each concern was legitimate. But none changed the central fact that the story was coming.
As a colleague from public affairs argued that we should respond directly and prevent rumor from outrunning reality, I sketched her in my notebook. It was a stick figure pushing a boulder labeled “transparency” uphill, while other boulders labeled “security,” “classification,” “embarrassment” and “risk” rolled down toward her.
This seemingly impossible struggle — to be transparent within one of the world’s most secret organizations — was, in fact, my job as deputy director of public affairs at the Central Intelligence Agency, after more than two decades of working in the shadows. What began as a role I imagined would be a string of “no comments” and “I cannot confirm or deny” revealed a profound truth. To protect our nation’s most sensitive secrets and build public confidence, we had to be more, not less, proactive in engaging. This paradoxical task yielded universal lessons in communication, vital for any organization looking to elevate its public engagement:
Build trust before you need it
Early in a CIA career, you’re taught the mantra “there are no friendly liaison services” — that even your closest foreign partners are members of an intelligence service whose ultimate goal is to collect information and uncover secrets. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build close relationships, cooperate toward shared missions and become force multipliers. It just means you must be careful not to get too comfortable or let your guard down. Crucially, you must invest in these relationships and build trust before you need them for that critical operation or shared mission.
The same principle applies to journalists. Growing up at the CIA, we’re told to avoid the media like the plague; we work with secrets, and by its very nature, we don’t want our information public. But in public affairs, avoidance was not an option — it was our mission to engage. We approached this similarly to how one would approach a liaison partner. You need to build the relationship early.
Journalists were far more likely to give us the benefit of the doubt or tell our side of the story if we had a relationship where we were seen as straight shooters — forthcoming and helpful on non-sensitive issues. If you can never offer context or comments on anything, even topics that don’t pose a national security threat, they won’t be as likely to hold stories that truly do have major national security implications if released.
Tell your story before others tell it for you
The CIA has a brand. For better or worse, those three letters are recognized around the world and carry a level of gravitas and lore. We truly leaned into this. While we couldn’t talk about current operations or often the identities of our officers, there were countless stories to tell from our history — tales of bravery, ingenuity and sacrifice.
We actively engaged with Hollywood to help shape scripts that authentically told our story. We launched a podcast and even showed up at South by Southwest to help demystify our work. Having that broad recognition allowed us to leverage existing public interest and connect directly with a wide audience.
Even when the story isn’t about your historic heroes but rather an embarrassing situation or a critical operational failure, like it was in the boulder-up-a-hill situation, it was critical to get our narrative out before the outside world shaped and defined it for us.
Expertise builds credibility
The CIA is unusual in the sense that most of the people who worked in our public affairs office were longtime CIA careerists — analysts, operators and technical experts. The vast majority of us had far more expertise working the actual CIA mission itself than we did in public affairs.
While there are downsides to this, one of the major upsides is that we spoke about the agency with the utmost credibility. In many of our public engagements, we were often the first or only CIA officer that the person we were interacting with had ever met.
Having people on your communications team who truly understand the issues and can speak about them with authority and credibility is critical in building trust.
Don’t ignore internal communications
In a world where you’re trying to tell your story and put out fires externally, it’s easy to overlook an important responsibility: communicating internally to your workforce. At the CIA, our officers work in an environment where many don’t have access to the outside world during the day — our cellphones are left in our cars, our computers are on an internal network. This works fine until one of our covert action programs winds up on the front page of The New York Times or The Washington Post publishes an article detailing new personnel procedures.
If those messages haven’t been communicated internally first, we run the risk of the workforce’s understanding of an issue and the narrative behind it being driven by what they hear from the outside, rather than being shaped by our own internal leadership.
Our workforce was composed of spies and analysts. The absence of information didn’t lead people to stop asking questions; it would just lead to conjecture, gossip and everyone immediately going to the “dark corner” of speculation. Because of this, we had to be extra mindful to ensure key agency decisions and messages were communicated clearly, internally, via workforce notes, town hall meetings and our internal news source.
The boulder is worth pushing
My time at the CIA fundamentally reshaped my understanding of public affairs. What began as a seemingly impossible task — to make a secret organization transparent — revealed universal truths about communication. There were times when the risks were too high — when classification and safety simply had to trump the public’s right to know. Transparency has limits, and part of leadership is knowing where they are.
That said, regardless of your industry or mission, these principles of building trust, proactively sharing your story, ensuring credibility and prioritizing internal communication are not merely best practices; they are the bedrock of effective engagement in an increasingly interconnected world.
In truth, the work often felt like pushing a boulder labeled transparency uphill — against gravity, against resistance and under the constant threat of being crushed by concerns both real and urgent. But that boulder matters. Because at the top of that hill is not just a better public image — but a stronger institution, a more informed public and a foundation of trust resilient enough to weather any storm.
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