Asking Cathy Dowd about her time in the Central Intelligence Agency is just as perfectly unsatisfying as one might hope it would be. She can’t talk about it, all these years later, because, well, it’s classified. But she offers a few tidbits that are enough to pique the imagination. She joined the CIA after graduating from Harvard, and was stationed in Paris, serving six years as an operations officer (Read: she was a field agent, not an analyst), in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“I don’t talk about it a lot because I don’t want to stray into what I can’t talk about, even though it was a long time ago,” she said. “But it was a great experience. I loved it … it was during the end of the Cold War. In fact, the Berlin Wall came down” when she was stationed there, she said.
During her time as a U.S. History and AP Government teacher at Needham High School, her students would be granted one day a year to ask her questions about her clandestine service. They wouldn’t get all the details either, mind you, but they’d at least get to sate the tiniest bit of their curiosity.
“I would give them a brief outline and let them ask a few questions,” Dowd said.
Dowd’s current life is far removed from her time in the CIA, but the way she looks at it, it’s all a form of serving the people.
“It’s a form of public service, right? That’s something that I seem to be drawn back to no matter what, to be doing something that mattered,” she said.
Right now, that is town government. Dowd, who lives on Great Plain Avenue with her husband, Sean, is finishing her first three-year term as a member of the Needham Select Board, and is running for a second term in the April 14 election, opposed by Rich Adduci and Bill Dermody for the two available seats. Dowd is the board’s current vice-chair, and as a resident of Needham since 1997 who raised her two daughters in town, she looks at the past few years of intense debate in the town as an opportunity for Needham to use the light and heat to get people engaged with the nitty-gritty of town government.
“I think obviously the town went through a difficult time with the MBTA communities issue,” she said. “I think the silver lining is more participation and more interest in town government, and then myself, AP government teacher at heart, I want people to take the next step and get educated about the process, which is … arcane.”
On the board, her priorities have been establishing a Quiet Zone to reduce train noise, increasing and diversifying the town’s housing stock, and especially pushing for a rebuilt Pollard Middle School. If the town is going to have a debt override to fund the construction, the Select Board has to lead the way, and help residents understand why such a large project is necessary.
“For the Pollard school rebuild to move forward, ideally, we have unity in our town leadership to move it forward, because it’s going to be expensive, and people are going to have legitimate questions,” she said.
The Pollard process is far from complete, and many hurdles remain ﹘ and that’s a good thing, she argues. From her time as a management consultant at Bain & Company, to a few years spent lobbying at the State House as a vice president of the League of Women Voters, she has come to embrace the gradual nature of the legislative process, and the need to get different stakeholders involved.
“That is in the nature of things, and that is OK, you know? That is actually why we have a political system,” she said. “That is why we have democracy, is to work those things out, you know? So everybody gets to say, well, this is important to me. Well, this is important to me, OK, so now we know all that. Now we’ll look at the facts. What’s the best that we can come to kind of serve the most needs for the most people, given the actual situation that we have?”
Dowd left her role teaching at Needham High School in 2023, but that wasn’t retirement for the 61-year-old. Instead, she went back to campus ﹘ entering law school at Northeastern University, so that she can continue, she says, helping on issues that matter to her. She has spent part of this year as a legal intern at the ACLU of Massachusetts.
It’s a long way from Paris when the Berlin Wall was coming down. At the same time, it’s not very far from that at all.
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