The Spy Who Collected People

Karen Schaffer has spent a career doing the thing most people only think they understand from movies. Postings around the globe. A CIA career that put her in rooms where the stakes were real and the margin for error was thin. And then the job that a lot of officers would tell you is one of the hardest in the business – serving as the top Intelligence Community representative to the FBI, standing in the space between two organizations that haven’t always seen the world the same way.

So I figured we’d spend this conversation talking about tradecraft.

We didn’t. Or rather, we did, but not the kind you’re expecting. Because every time I asked Karen about a hard assignment, a tough call, a moment where things could’ve gone sideways, the answer came back to the same place. Somebody trusted her. She trusted somebody. A relationship she’d built years earlier in a completely different context turned out to be the thing that mattered when it counted.

That’s the through line of her whole career, and she says it plainly: this business runs on people. The classification markings and the compartments and the org charts are real, but they aren’t what gets the work done. What gets the work done is whether the person on the other end of the phone picks up when they see your name.

Karen and I serve together on the advisory board of the International Spy Museum, so I’ve watched her operate up close. What I keep noticing is where she spends her time now. She shows up for young people trying to break into this field – especially young women, who still walk into rooms where nobody looks like them. She’s supported and participated in programming for IN Network: The National Security Academy and Spy Scholars, and she doesn’t do it for the photo. She does it because somebody once did it for her.

We get into her career, the FBI years, what she wishes she’d known at twenty-five, and why the most underrated skill in national security is remembering people’s names and actually meaning it when you ask how they’re doing.

Grab a coffee. This one’s a good time.