The Sisterhood

Introduction: Women in American Intelligence

For much of its history, the Central Intelligence Agency was publicly defined by a specific image of the heroic, heterosexual, white man. Memoirs and histories of the agency frequently reinforced the idea that American spycraft was a strictly masculine endeavor. In reality, women have been essential to American intelligence since its inception, though they operated within a system that frequently sought to suppress their voices or relegate them to the sidelines.

Liza Mundy identifies a distinct sisterhood that functioned as a corrective force within the agency across three generations. This network began with the code breakers of World War II and the women of the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA. Figures like Julia Child and Mary Bancroft proved that women possessed unique skills in eliciting information and managing complex operations. However, after the war, many of these women were pushed out of the workforce, forcing a slow and difficult rebuilding of female expertise that only began to regain momentum during the Eisenhower years.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, women worked in the shadows, navigating a workplace culture dominated by male networks and cigar-smoking sessions. These women often found that being underestimated was a tactical advantage in the field, allowing them to move unremarked in foreign environments. However, this same bias was a liability within the agency headquarters, where women struggled to gain institutional support for their intelligence discoveries. This friction became dangerously apparent leading up to the September 11 attacks, when a small group of women identified the threat of al-Qaeda early on but had their warnings ignored by a leadership structure that viewed women as ancillary.

The transformation of the CIA from a male-dominated institution to one where women hold top leadership positions was not a natural progression. It was a hard-fought battle against outright misogyny and unconscious bias. Women had to force every step of their advancement, often running operations against their own organization prejudices while simultaneously running operations against foreign adversaries. By leveraging their unique perspectives and building their own internal support systems, these women moved from being viewed as typists to becoming the architects of some of the most significant successes in the agency.

This shift became highly visible in November 1985, when CIA station chief Heidi August stood in a Maltese morgue staring at the body of an American civilian killed during a violent airplane hijacking. Heidi felt a haunting kinship with the victim, realizing they shared the same resilient spirit dedicated to serving their country abroad. Shaken by the sight of dozens of victims on the tarmac, Heidi committed herself to hunting down the networks that funded and trained such killers. This resolve signaled the birth of a new era for women in the CIA, who were stepping out of the shadows to lead the fight against a new kind of decentralized global enemy.