Viral TikTok video reveals what former CIA officer could and couldn’t tell boyfriends
A former government employee's TikTok about her strict dating protocols while working in a sensitive position in Washington has gone viral — and now she's sharing even more information about it.
Brittany Butler, a mom of young children living in the South, is active today on social media, sharing insights and knowledge from her time working at the CIA as a "targeting officer."
Butler recently touched on a topic that’s turning heads on TikTok: dating.
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The full-time author discussed in a video that currently has over 560,000 views what she could and couldn’t share with her boyfriends while working for the government.
In the video, she said she had two serious boyfriends in her eight years of working at the CIA.
The first boyfriend, she explained, was Mexican American and a Harvard Law student at the time.
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"He and I dated for nine months, and I did have to tell the CIA that I had a serious relationship with him," she said in the TikTok video.
She added, "The rule is when you have recurring contact with a foreign national, you do have to report it at the CIA."
Butler said she had to provide her then-employer with her boyfriend’s name, date of birth and a brief background.
As for what she could share about her job with her boyfriend, Butler told Fox News Digital that she would tell men that she "was a consultant for the Department of Defense, making the work sound mundane to avoid further questions."
"In Washington, D.C., many people work in defense or government roles, so saying I was a ‘government consultant’ usually sufficed and people knew not to probe further," she told Fox News Digital.
Butler began dating her husband while working at the CIA as well.
She told Fox News Digital that the pair were dating for about four months before she shared her place of work.
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"I could talk to him about work personalities and whether I had a good or bad day, but that was the extent of it," she said.
She added, "I couldn’t discuss specifics about my operational activities due to the clandestine nature of my work."
Butler shared in her TikTok video that her husband was able to visit the CIA headquarters, after giving his Social Security number, where he saw most common areas.
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Although she would go on to work for the CIA full-time, Butler told Fox News Digital that she started as an intern with the State Department at the American Embassy in Paris when she was a junior at Florida State University.
"Encouraged by mentors there, I applied to the CIA and was recruited as a CIA case officer within the Directorate of Operations," she said.
Fox News Digital reached out to the CIA for comment.
After a series of interviews, standardized tests, psychological assessments and polygraph exams, Butler said she became a targeting officer in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center — first in the Iraq division and then in the Afghanistan-Pakistan department.
"The pace of operations was intense and stressful," she said. "As a mother of two young sons, I found it challenging to maintain a healthy work-life balance."
After Butler became a mom for the second time, she decided she didn’t want her "boys to suffer from having a mom who was always away," so she left the CIA in 2014 to focus on her family. Today she has three children.
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Butler is the author of "The Syndicate Spy: A Juliet Arroway Novel," a mystery published last year. She told Fox News Digital aims to "change the false narratives about women in intelligence."
She is also working on another book.