Behind the scenes with American spies

REVIEW: THE SISTERHOOD: THE SECRET HISTORY OF WOMEN AT THE CIA by Liza Mundy

One of the most difficult feats as a journalist is to get a source to tell you their secrets. But that endeavor — convincing someone to part with information — is the benchmark for being a good spy — and one of the reasons why the two professions are fascinated with each other.

Liza Mundy’s book The Sisterhood: The Secret Women of the CIA reveals the secrets of some of America’s overlooked intelligence heroes, female officers who worked to keep Americans safe from external threats like terrorism and Communism while battling the pernicious enemy in their own ranks: sexism. The well-written history provides remarkable insights into the Central Intelligence Agency’s agencies successes and failures as well as pertinent advice about how to keep American institutions strong.

Mundy comes to the subject with experience and skill, having written a previous volume about American women who worked in the intelligence services before World War II. She offers new insights and information to the published history about the CIA by placing the spotlight on key intelligence officers who had been marginalized and overlooked by the Agency itself.

For readers who didn’t grow up in the 20th Century, Mundy provides a concise history of the sexism older women faced across America. At the CIA female recruits wooed in the 1950s and 1960s with the promise of international exploits were instead steered to “a female channel:” the euphemism for the agency’s glass ceiling where mid-range jobs were less well paid and less valued.

As one woman who joined the Agency in the 1970s put it: “You could come with a Master’s degree in French … and still be put in the typing pool.” A woman could be a mathematical or engineering genius, but still be told to make coffee. These patriots often ended up, instead, in Langley’s basement, archiving the case files, notes and intelligence that male colleagues in the field were pulling together. 

Those archivists, it turns out, added enormous value to American intelligence victories of the 20th and 21st Century.

People like Heidi August, who rose from being a clerk to one of the CIA’s first female station chiefs and brought down a Libyan terrorist cell responsible for killing Americans. The trio of women archival experts who uncovered the Soviet mole Ardrich Ames and thus saved countless lives. 

Those women in the basement, it turns out, refined intelligence work as the world entered the digital age. They created the discipline now known as targeting, where persons of interest can be profiled and captured. Women analysts and researcher comprised the bulk of staff of what came to be known as Alec Station, the team of analysts and researchers who focused on Osama bin Laden, the rise of Al Qaeda, and both of their demise. 

The fact that this legendary CIA team was in fact derided for years as “a bunch of chicks” is the cautionary tale for all Americans. These women pieced together the intel that led them to conclude, just before Sept. 11, 2001, that a catastrophic attack on American soil was imminent. The CIA leadership, however, ignored the warnings. 

The horror hits home as Mundy writes about Barbara Sude, who, a month before 9/11, wrote the famous memo “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S..” Sude tells Mundy where she was as she watched the twin towers fall and the guilt that she and the other women from Alec Station internalized for failing to convince their superiors to pay more attention to their warnings. For some, that sparked a deep depression. The toxic messaging they had faced throughout their careers — women were not good enough or cut out to be real spies — had taken root in their psyches. A spy who can’t be convincing is by definition a failure, after all, regardless of institutional sexism or a glass ceiling.

Mundy tells these stories with narrative skill, rather than with an ideology. She does not imply that women are inherently better or more moral than men, that the mistakes and crimes committed by the CIA would not have happened if women had been in charge. In fact, some of these female career CIA officers tell Mundy that they fully supported controversial aspects of America’s past: spying on student groups in the 1960s, for example, or relying on “enhanced interrogation” in the 2000s. 

The women featured in this book offer persuasive evidence to the recirculating argument about the role diversity should play in workplace culture. Whether a sprawling agency like the CIA or at a company churning out consumer goods, diversity is not a weakness, and it’s not a partisan talking point. It’s a national security issue.