Jo Freeman Reviews The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA by Liza Mundy
The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA
by Liza Mundy
New York: Crown Publishing Group, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House
xxii + 422 pages with color photo insert
Hardcover: $32.50
Women have worked at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from its origins in World War II through the present. Books have been written about the U.S.’s main foreign spy agency, but not from the perspective of women. Expected to serve men, frequently shunted aside, given the tedious tasks that men did not want to do, Liza Mundy tells their story through career biographies of more than a dozen women who worked in the CIA over more than seventy years.
In order to uncover this largely unknown history Liza Mundy did dozens of interviews, as well as read oral histories, government documents and numerous publications to ferret out the facts. The result is a fascinating story that reads much like a novel.
Initially, the story is depressingly familiar. Young women interested in foreign affairs, often with excellent language skills, were recruited like men to serve their country with the expectation of doing exciting things. Once hired, they were sent down the women’s path of lesser training, lower salaries and fewer opportunities.
Instead of going abroad as intelligence agents, women often worked in the windowless vaults of CIA headquarters in McLean VA, pulling records and reports from file cabinets to synthesize information. These “vault women” as they were known, often saw connections the men did not see. The trick was to persuade the men who made the decisions to understand things “out of the box.” The men who saw those conclusions took the credit as though they had seen it all themselves.
Most women joined expecting to work outside the USA as field operatives. Some managed to work their way out over time, especially those with superior language skills. But the best way to go abroad was to marry another CIA agent who was already a field operative. Ironically, as wives, they were quite successful at doing the things field operatives did without being noticed by the wrong parties. They were just women doing what women always did – shopping and taking care of household matters.
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