How did discrimination against women end in the American CIA?

In 2003, senior White House officials fired me for being an undercover CIA agent. They leaked my identity when my then-husband, US Ambassador Joe Wilson, wrote an article saying the George W. Bush administration had lied about invading Iraq.

I have spent decades analyzing this trauma. It put me in danger, ended my undercover career and destabilized my family. Even later events lead me back to when then-President Donald Trump in 2018 pardoned former Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, who was investigating the leaks. was convicted of perjury and lying to the FBI during

During those years I was called a liar, a traitor and, in the words of one Republican congressman, a ‘glory minister’.

But when I read journalist Lisa Mundy’s new book, The Sisterhood: The Secret History of the Women at the CIA, it brought back painful memories that I never thought about after spying. The book touched me in an extraordinary way.

I realized that after working in a man’s world for so many years I had largely ignored the damage I was doing to myself and my female colleagues.

When I was young, the US government passed the Title 9 bill, which banned sex-based discrimination in any school that received federal funding. When I was a teenager, my suburban Philadelphia high school had a variety of sports teams to choose from, as strong as the boys.

I was lucky that my parents never suggested that my gender should dictate what I could do. In fact, my father tried to tell me, ‘If I put my mind to it, I can do anything I want to do.’ Even my college years were spent in ignorance of the sexism in American society.

Then as a young woman I joined the CIA. Suddenly it became clear that the real world operated by different rules.

At the height of the Cold War, I The CIA When I came, it was very much a man’s world. The agency recently began recruiting women for intelligence operations instead of secretarial positions and other support roles. A deep network of male officers still runs the system.

When I began the rigorous training to become a field operations officer, I saw women already in the CIA. Most were elderly, none of whom held high positions. She was unmarried, childless, sometimes angry and tough as nails. Nevertheless, I admit that my chance of success came from his efforts.

I also knew that I didn’t want to be like them. Can’t I be a successful officer and have a family? The terms ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘gender discrimination’, much less ‘microaggression’ and ‘unconscious bias’ meant nothing to my small group of female operations officers. We just had to accept the extraordinary misogyny from the agency’s alpha males.

At times, it was quite obvious. My friend was told by her boss, the station chief on her first assignment in Africa, that she should go home, get married and have a baby—and what is she doing in operations? At other times it was clear that promotions went to younger men than to women, who were just as successful in managing and recruiting spies.

The service of female spies in the CIA and the obstacles they face are the focus of Mundy’s deeply researched and highly readable book. The Sisterhood begins slowly, involving women who join the U.S. intelligence services during World War II.

After the war began, thousands of women were employed in the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), as the men were swallowed up by the war machine. These OSS operatives were the first women in American history to be formally recruited into intelligence work.

As Mundy explains, these early recruits were told to report to a derelict brownstone in the Foggy Bottom area of ​​Washington. Men were instructed to change from their social class, job, or military rank to an army uniform prior to the interview process.

The women were taken to another room and told to take off their coats and hats. Mandi writes: ‘Since they were women, there was no need for further equality.’

Many women recruited into the OSS in the 1940s were highly educated, sophisticated, and multilingual. A test designed for women recruits assessed how well they could take care of documents. Then, when they reached the agency, some of these women went into field intelligence operations.

They demonstrated bravery and ingenuity at every turn as they established effective espionage groups, obtained intelligence from Nazi and other authorities, and sent critical intelligence to Washington.

After the war, Washington suffered a collective amnesia. The important role of women in the country’s war effort was quickly forgotten, women were once again relegated to support jobs. The 1950s and 1960s looked like Mad Men, where secretaries wore white gloves and pantyhose to the office and assisted their male officers.

President Harry S. Truman founded the CIA in 1947, but for several more decades the agency hired mostly white men with Ivy League degrees, and in the 1970s and ’80s, the agency began hiring men of equal intelligence and intelligence. Recruited women with nerve for undercover work.

I enjoyed this big change. I joined the CIA because I wanted to serve my country, it would give me the opportunity to go overseas and it seemed like it would be more interesting than my peers.

Mundy’s book delves into the era when women were recruited into covert CIA missions. She observes some of them closely, including Lisa Mannfill, a senior at Brown University from a cosmopolitan family, who in 1968 was recruited to join the CIA’s career training program. Recruited at lower pay than men.

She eventually became a successful undercover operator, even though higher-ups tried to keep her in desk jobs for years. Mundy also highlighted agency legend Eloise Page, who started as secretary to the founding OSS and became the CIA’s first female station chief in 1978.

Despite not being allowed to take full operational courses at the CIA’s training center ‘The Farm’ in Virginia in the 1970s, these women proved their mettle. They managed to negotiate with terrorists who hijacked a plane in Malta and deal unexpectedly with intelligence ‘walk-ins’ – when a potential foreign agent unexpectedly visits an officer’s home or arrives at the embassy and promises to provide intelligence in exchange for something of his choice.

The catalyst for change was the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991. During the hearing, the all-white Senate Judiciary Committee heard the sober testimony of Anita Hill, a black woman, that Thomas had sexually harassed her a decade earlier.

The Senate eventually confirmed Thomas and Hill faced public criticism and death threats, but the meetings created a new awareness of gender discrimination in Washington. She influenced the 1992 election, which media outlets dubbed the ‘Year of the Woman’ after women won a record number of seats in the Senate.

In 1992, the CIA also launched the ‘Glass Ceiling Study’, which revealed that men had reached much higher positions in the agency than women. Women filled 40 percent of the agency’s professional ranks but only 10 percent of the jobs in the Senior Intelligence Service, which comprised the agency’s top officials.

Mundy writes that female CIA employees expressed relief at the study. Perhaps they thought the agency’s culture would eventually change. The men seemed disturbed by this.

Then-CIA officer Jeanine Bruckner filed a federal sex discrimination lawsuit against the agency in 1994, after she was falsely accused of professional misconduct and threatened with demotion and criminal sanctions. The case ended with a cash settlement and Bruckner’s resignation.

Bruckner attended law school and used his degree to specialize in federal discrimination cases. Around the same time, female case officers filed a class-action lawsuit, claiming gender discrimination at the CIA.

Mundy points out that in a 1995 settlement, the CIA admitted that it had ‘systematically discriminated against its female secret agents for years,’ as the Los Angeles Times reported at the time.

Mundy is at her best when she writes about the women at Elk Station, a CIA unit that pursues al-Qaeda. At the time, few people in Washington believed that al-Qaeda was a threat.

The unit’s lead analyst, Mike Shaver, filled his neglected and underfunded team with women. Shaver did not hesitate to hire women. As he told Mindy, women are ‘specialists at the little things, at integrating information’ that men might overlook.

As the hunt for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden intensified, the women who tracked him diligently gathered intelligence, but the George W. Bush administration dismissed their increasingly dire predictions.

On August 6, 2001, CIA analyst Barbara Sood wrote a memo titled ‘Osama Bin Laden Determined to Strike America’. The Bush Cabinet did not hold a meeting to discuss the threat until September 4, 2001. A week later, 9/11 happened.

The grief and guilt of the women who warned the U.S. government for years about a possible attack is palpable in Mundy’s book. As one undercover officer told Mundy: ‘I spent two years of my life trying to do the right thing and people died and you felt it was your fault. And it really affected us a lot.’

This anger was used in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, which eventually led to his capture.

Mundy’s book both inspired and disappointed me. Many of the women in her book are now retired or dead. At great personal cost he gave everything to his intelligence career. As I read it, I empathized with their struggles and memories.

On the first day of my initial overseas assignment, I was asked to meet with the station chief, a highly respected CIA officer. As I nervously entered his office, he was slumped in his chair, his feet on the big wooden table and an unlit cigar in his mouth. They didn’t say anything to me.

Confused, I looked at him questioningly. He smiled and said: ‘Oh, you will.’ I felt that they were evaluating how I looked. It was too bad.

Thankfully, as Mandy says, a lot has changed since then. Today, female CIA officers are better off, but they still face discrimination and barriers to success, as do almost all professional women.

Mundy mentions the 2018 confirmation hearing of Gina Haspel, the CIA’s first female director, who played a key role in one of the agency’s darkest hours after 9/11 and the ‘extreme range of investigations’, which Also called violence, used.

The same can be said of former CIA analyst Frieda Bikowski, known as the ‘Queen of Violence’. He helped capture Osama bin Laden. I’d like to see if Mindy admits that female officers in key positions have done just as much harm as their male counterparts, made terrible decisions and failed to mentor other women.

Although Mundy’s book is an inspiring and good read, Sisterhood is perhaps misnamed. It is true that female CIA officers find comfort with their female colleagues and can support each other as they advocate for equal rights in a male-dominated environment.

But years of fighting for scraps, not only against their male counterparts, but also against each other—they’ve had to pay for it. A climate of suspicion and unhealthy competition persists and, ultimately, undermines US national security.

Note: This article has been published in Foreign Policy magazine.

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