CIA Woman Finds Needed Peace in Gospel

CIA Woman Finds Needed Peace in Gospel
Kedrik Hamblin - LDS Living
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Flying to Germany in 2002, during the height of career success with the CIA, Stephanie Smith read in a news magazine a phrase from President Gordon B. Hinckley that he used to describe The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: “Solid, strong, and true.”
“It just had an impact on me,” Smith said.
She wrote it down on a paper which she put in her wallet. The impression of these words would later lead her to call an LDS colleague for help when her successful world was being turned upside down.
Smith now shares the events that led to her conversion with others. She will be holding a fireside this coming Sunday, Oct. 18, at the Washington D.C. Temple Visitor’s Center.
She tracks her journey starting from 1985, when she moved as a young, single woman to Washington, D.C., where she had been hired as an editor for the CIA. She later married and completed a master’s degree in public administration at Harvard.
Continuing work at the CIA, Smith quickly moved up the ranks; she attributes this to hard work. For a decade she worked fourteen to sixteen hours per day six to seven days per week. Raised as a devout Catholic, she would attend Mass every Sunday and then head off to the office for a full day of work.
“That was an every week routine for me,” Smith said. “Obviously there was no discipline, no time, nor any inclination to any deeper spiritual or scriptural study or introspection.”
The rigorous work schedule and Smith’s drive to succeed had several effects. Along with fatigue Smith said she began to experience herself as an unkind person, began taking small “moral shortcuts,” and neglecting relationships with family and friends.
After becoming Director of Support (the first female in the history of the CIA to achieve that position), she began working even longer days, sometimes up to twenty hours. This continued until her health declined and she was hospitalized.
“I’m going along like that, realizing that my health is failing, starting to feel bad about who I was as a person and starting to wonder will there ever be a time when I can decelerate?” Smith said. “I would say to myself: Yes, just successfully complete this job, the world is your oyster, everything will get simpler.”
However, life didn’t become simpler. The CIA and her career were thrown into a crisis after two of her senior officers were fired. She recognized she was in a line of political dominoes and would probably lose her job.
“It took an enormous toll on me,” Smith said. “I just fell apart. I fell apart physically, emotionally, and spiritually.”
Smith said she believes it was the earlier impression of President Hinckley’s words and her tremendous respect for the LDS colleague that led her to call him one evening from her office. He gave her two messages.
“He said to me: ‘Heavenly Father knows you by name. He knows you as an individual and he, like me, knows the true quality of your heart and he has a very specific individual plan for your success,’” Smith said. “I think he said ‘It may not be success as you’ve come to define it. It’s a very different kind of success.’”
Later he gave her directions to the D.C Temple Visitor’s Center where she went and reluctantly signed a referral card for the missionaries to visit her. Several weeks later, two sister missionaries visited and after they entered the home asked if they could sing a song. Smith felt it was very odd until they began singing “I am a Child of God,” and she began crying. After that she continued meeting with the missionaries.
One evening, before a business dinner, Smith sat in her car reading her “homework.” She came across Alma 34:26, when Amulek was teaching people to pour out their souls to God.
The scripture, which Smith said pierced her through the heart, helped her realize for the first time that she was actually supposed to talk to her Heavenly Father. It was also the beginning of her testimony of the Book of Mormon.
“From that moment on I just read the entire Book and I’ve never been without the Book of Mormon,” Smith said. “I have it with me in my car. I have a bedroom version. I have one at my desk at work. I’ve read it three times since then.”
Smith was baptized in January of 2007. Although she counts many blessings, Smith said the biggest is to know that she has eternal purpose.
“I at last was filled with eternal hope that allowed me to go through three years of intense professional hardships, degradation, and opposition,” Smith said. “I only could get through that because I knew now that I had an eternal purpose and that I had an eternal worth and I was surrounded by a community of people who . . . staked their lives on that very same belief.”
Smith has also learned the joy of serving others.
“The second blessing to me is that I got involved with people in a small way . . . the way Christ would have gotten involved with them,” Smith said.
Smith continues to work with the CIA and is now serving in her ward as the employment counselor. Her Oct. 18 fireside will begin at 7:00 p.m.