Can a Former Spy Make a Good Governor?

Abigail Spanberger's CIA spycraft skills—from working under pressure to sizing up enemies to bending people to her will—equip her well to lead Virginia. But will she?

When we first interviewed Abigail Spanberger for the SpyTalk podcast back in September, she had just announced she was giving up her congressional seat in the distant Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. to run for governor.

A Democrat elected in a district that had gone Republican for decades, Spanberger quickly won a reputation for bipartisanship in a divided Congress whose Republicans were rapidly going MAGA under the first presidency of Donald Trump. From 2019 onward, her CIA service and record of working across the aisle with otherwise hardcore Republicans, on issues they share, has allowed her to fend off scare-mongering far-right attacks, such as one that labelled her “a terrorist” for once working briefly as a substitute English teacher at a Saudi-funded school in Northern Virginia while waiting for her security clearance (which she got with no problem and went on to work as a postal inspector and later the CIA for eight years).

I asked Spanberger whether some of the skills she was trained in and employed as a counterterrorist case officer recruiting foreign officials and shadowy others helped her win friends in Congress from the MAGA ranks. As with her CIA missions, she said, she made it her job in Congress to find common ground with people who were otherwise stidently opposed to Democats.

“It's really dependent on the person,” she said. “So with a person who might have a military background, or a service background, I will frequently go to them on issues I have done work on, such as toxic exposures (on the battlefields)…” Likewise, “I do a lot of work on prescription drug pricing, and with colleagues from rural districts, the problem of rural hospitals closing down…” are issues they share.

“It's really a question of what their constituencies are like, what their district is like, and to some degree with their basic ideology is,” she added, meaning help for small businesses or disaster relief. “In my office, we sometimes say, a broken clock is right twice a day. If we can work together on one thing, maybe we can work on another thing together.” And so on.

The window for early voting ends Saturday. Election Day is next Tuesday, Nov. 4. The other major statewide offices up for grabs are lieutenant governor and attorney general. With a 12 percent lead in the polls over Winsome Earle-Sears, currently the commonwealth’s Republican lieutenant governor, it looks like a shoo-in for Spanberger. Then again, you never know until the vote is counted.

Do listen to the Spanberger interview, right here on Simplecast, or wherever you preferred platform. The SpyTalk podcast appears every Friday afternoon on Simplecast, Apple, Spotify or wherever your preferred listening platform.