A former government employee has gone viral after posting a TikTok about the strict dating rules she followed while working in a sensitive job in Washington, and now she’s sharing more details about it.
Brittany Butler, a mother of young children who lives in the South, is now active on social media, sharing insights and knowledge from her time working as a “targeting officer” for the CIA.
Butler recently touched on a hot topic on TikTok: dating.
Why penguin-inspired ‘pebbling’ is social media’s new love language
In a video that has now been viewed more than 560,000 times, the full-time writer spoke about what she was and wasn’t able to share with her boyfriend while working for the government.
In the video, she says she had two serious relationships during her eight years with the CIA.
The former CIA officer worked for the agency for eight years before retiring to focus on his family. (Brittany Butler)
Her first boyfriend, she explains, was a Mexican-American man who was a Harvard Law student at the time.
New York woman prints 500 business cards to help friend find a date, sparks TikTok buzz
“Me and him had been dating for nine months, and I had to tell the CIA that I was in a serious relationship with him,” she said in the TikTok video.
She added: “The rule is that if you have regular contact with foreigners, you must report it to the CIA.”
Butler said in the video that he had to provide information about people he was meeting while working for the CIA. (iStock)
Butler said she had to give her then-employer her boyfriend’s name, date of birth and a brief biography.
When asked what she could tell her boyfriend about her job, Butler told Fox News Digital that she told the men she was a “consultant for the Department of Defense,” making her job seem mundane to avoid further questions.
Toronto woman adopts innovative dating tactic: clapping at a bar: ‘You’re cute, contact me’
“Because so many people in Washington, D.C., work in defense and government jobs, I knew that saying I was a ‘government consultant’ was usually enough and people wouldn’t pry any further,” she told Fox News Digital.
Brittany Butler, pictured, and her husband met while Butler was working for the CIA. (Brittany Butler)
Butler also began dating her husband while working for the CIA.
She told Fox News Digital that the pair had been dating for about four months before she revealed her workplace.
NYC woman turns to ‘boy sober’ after dating disappointment: ‘I felt so miserable’
“We could talk about the nature of the job and if it was a good or bad day, but that was it,” she said.
Butler said he visited Baghdad in 2008 when he was assigned to the Iraq division of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. (Brittany Butler)
She added: “Due to the confidential nature of my job, I cannot discuss the details of operational activities.”
“The rule is that if you have regular contact with foreigners, you must report it to the CIA.”
Butler shared in a TikTok video that her husband gave her Social Security number and visited CIA headquarters to see some of the most common sights.
Click here to sign up for our lifestyle newsletter
Butler later went on to work full time for the CIA, but told Fox News Digital that he began working as an intern for the State Department at the US Embassy in Paris during his junior year at Florida State University.
Now, Butler is both a mother with a young child and a writer on a mission to change the false narrative about women in intelligence, she said. (Brittany Butler)
“With the encouragement of my mentors there, I applied to the CIA and was hired as a CIA case officer within the Directorate of Operations,” she said.
Fox News Digital has reached out to the CIA for comment.
Click here to get the FOX News app
Butler said he went through a series of interviews, standardized tests, psychological evaluations and polygraph examinations before becoming a targeting officer for the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, first in the Iraq division and then the Afghanistan-Pakistan division.
“The work was fast-paced and stressful,” she says. “As a mother of two young boys, it was hard to maintain a healthy work-life balance.”
A former CIA agent talks about what dating was like while he worked for the government agency. (iStock/Brittany Butler)
After becoming a mother for the second time, Butler decided to quit the CIA in 2014 to focus on her family, as she “didn’t want her sons to suffer because their mother was always away.” She now has three children.
For more lifestyle stories, visit www.foxnews/lifestyle
Butler is the author of “Syndicate Spy: A Juliet Alloway Novel.” Mystery was published last year. She told Fox News Digital that the magazine’s aim was to “change the false narrative about women in intelligence.”
She is also working on another book.
