Ann Butler’s new memoir is the kind of book that asks you to look twice at an ordinary-seeming life. To neighbors and friends, Butler was the spouse of a Foreign Service officer, raising five children while shuttling between postings in Paris, Athens, and Cairo. To her children, she was simply Mom. But behind the cover story approved by the U.S. government, Butler was living a parallel life: she was a CIA case officer, recruiting agents, slipping into disguises, and gathering intelligence that reached the highest levels of government.

In her book, released this week with CIA approval, Butler recounts the decades she spent in clandestine service. Her husband knew the truth, though he also knew not to ask questions. Her children did not. For years, they grew up believing she worked for the State Department. “Would you ever have imagined your mom was a spy?” one of them was asked later. The answer was instinctive: “Not in a million years.”

Butler’s assignments were the stuff of thrillers. She built relationships with sources who had access to foreign governments and terrorist groups, all the while knowing that discovery could mean prison or worse for those who worked with her.

In her memoir, Butler writes that she missed birthdays and milestones, including her son’s first. She describes moments of guilt and loneliness, questioning the sacrifices she was making in the name of national security.

Her family only learned the truth at her retirement ceremony inside CIA headquarters. By then, her children were adults. “She was really a lot more powerful than she let on,” one of her daughters later reflected.

Butler herself resists being mythologized. She insists her strengths are not unique to espionage but shared by many working mothers: adaptability, determination, and a capacity to juggle competing demands. The difference is that her job required her to vanish into aliases and sit across from informants who risked their lives with every meeting.

Her memoir arrives at a moment when Americans are once again debating the reach of intelligence agencies and the human costs of secrecy. Butler doesn’t romanticize her service, but she does make clear that the work mattered — and that it was built not on gadgets or bravado, but on the quiet persistence of a woman who lived two lives at once.